On the night of this Friday, January 12, at least six prisoners escaped from the Litoral Penitentiary, the largest and most populated prison in Ecuadorin the midst of a prison crisis where riots are reported in six other prisons with more than 150 officials taken hostage.
Two of the six escaped inmates were recaptured in the surroundings of the prison, located in the port city of Guayaquil, as reported by the National Police through its official channels.
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According to police reports, the escape occurred at the back of the prison, the main prison complex in the coastal province of Guayas, made up of five prisons where around 12,000 people are held.
After the alert registered around 10:00 p.m. local time, the Police activated a search and capture operation, focused mainly on the areas surrounding the Guayas River.
This escape occurs within the framework of a series of simultaneous riots recorded in at least seven prisons in Ecuador, in which dozens of prisoners managed to escape, the majority from the Riobamba prison.
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The escape that started the crisis in Ecuador
Among the escaped prisoners from Riobamba is Fabricio Colón Pico, alleged leader of the ‘Los Lobos’ criminal gang and accused of being part of a plan to attack the attorney general, Diana Salazar.
Days before, the leader of the criminal gang ‘Los Choneros’, José Adolfo Macías ‘Fito’, did the same from the Guayaquil Regional Prison, in an escape that caused a great stir.
Both the escapes and the riots were accompanied by a wave of violent actions attributed to organized crime gangs that included car explosions and fires, kidnapping and murder of police officers, and the assault by a group of armed men on a television station in Guayaquil. .
The events occurred when the Government of President Daniel Noboa was preparing to implement its plan to regain control of Ecuadorian prisons, many of them internally dominated by these criminal groups, whose rivalries have left more than 450 prisoners murdered since 2020 in a series of prison massacres.
The Executive’s intention is to isolate the leaders of these criminal groups until two modern prisons are built under the ‘Bukele’ model with which Noboa seeks to imitate the strict prison policy of the president of El Salvador.
