A total of 27 prisoners died after being hanged this Sunday afternoon in a prison in Machala, in the Ecuadorian province of El Oro, bordering Peru, confirmed the government’s National Service for Comprehensive Attention to Adults Deprived of Liberty and Adolescent Offenders (Snai) of Ecuador.
In a statement he noted that “among them (the prisoners) they committed asphyxiationwhich caused immediate death due to suspension.”
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In the early morning, in that same prison four other inmates died and 33 were injured, as well as a police officer, reported the Snai that, without further details, He attributed this fact to the “reorganization of those deprived of liberty in the new maximum security prison.”
The entity in charge of the prisons had reported in the morning that five inmates had died in the early morning event, but later rectified it.
Violence crisis
On November 1, twelve people were found dead in three prisons in Ecuadoras confirmed then by Snai.
Six men were found in the Litoral Penitentiarythe most populated and dangerous prison in Ecuadorlocated in the coastal city of Guayaquil; four others in prison Turifrom the Andean Basinand two others in the prison of Emeraldsin the north of the country.
In the case of the Penitentiary prisoners, the SNAI indicated that they were “natural deaths.”
The prisoners would have died from tuberculosisaccording to the Ministry of the Interior.
Regarding the deaths in the other two centers, local media indicated that, according to police reports, Some of the bodies had wounds caused by firearms, others by knives, and others had bruises.
Prisons are one of the epicenters of the unprecedented criminal violence crisis that Ecuador is going through, with some 600 inmates having been murdered inside since 2021.most of them in a series of massacres due to clashes between rival gangs.
Some prisons are militarized and others under the control of the National Police, within the framework of the “internal armed conflict” that the president Daniel Noboa declared in 2024 to fight against criminal gangs, who are blamed for the escalation of violence that has led the country to be at the top of the homicide rate in Latin America.
A situation that has worsened in 2025, since in the first half of this year Ecuador recorded 4,619 homicides, 47% more than in the same period in 2024, when 3,143 were recorded.
