Some 1,000 detainees were moved to other cells in Guayas 1 prison, which has a capacity of 5,200, under the surveillance of uniformed officers with shields and helmets, posted on the roofs.
“We have dealt a big blow to organized crime,” President Guillermo Lasso said after the operation.
Officers “deployed all necessary actions to deal with organized crime, drug trafficking and its links to politics,” the president added in a radio and television address.
The public body in charge of prisons, the SNAI, broadcast images of prisoners in shorts, their hands behind their heads, led by guards with their faces covered.
“There was no incident or resistance of any kind during the strategic relocation process,” the president noted earlier on Twitter.
This week, about 20 attacks with guns and explosives were carried out against police stations, petrol stations and a health center in retaliation for the transfer to other prisons of some 1,400 detainees de Guayas 1, the most populated Ecuadorian prison.
The violence left eight dead (five police officers, one civilian and two detainees) and 23 injured, mostly police and military. Fifteen police and soldiers were notably injured Thursday during a new mutiny in Guayas 1.
– Three provinces in a state of emergency –
Mr. Lasso declared a state of emergency on Tuesday in two provinces, Guayas and Esmeraldas. The curfew was extended Friday to the province of Santo Domingo de los Tsáchilas (west). Together, the three provinces have a population of some six million, or one third of Ecuador’s population.
The army has been deployed there and a curfew will be in force there every evening from 9:00 p.m. and for eight hours. Constitutional guarantees will be restricted there for 45 days.
The transfers of detainees are aimed at “humanizing, dignifying and transforming the country’s penitentiary system, reducing levels of violence and hostility”, SNAI director Guillermo Rodríguez said outside Guayas 1 prison, where he is arrived wearing a helmet and a bulletproof vest.
Drug traffickers, some of whom are linked to Mexican cartels, are waging war on the streets and in prisons in Ecuador, where massacres have claimed nearly 400 lives since February 2021.
Located between Colombia and Peru, the world’s largest producers of cocaine, this state has gone from being a drug transit country to that of a major distribution center to Europe and the United States.
In 2021, authorities seized a record 210 tons of drugs, mostly cocaine. Since the beginning of the year, seizures have totaled 160 tons.
