14 killed, including a guard, in prison face Ecuador while some inmates escape

The inmates in Ecuador fought with each other with weapons and explosives in a riot that left 13 prisoners and a dead guard, police said.

Chaos was the last of a blood bath series to engulf gang prisons and crowded in a country that was once pending in the zero zone of violent Latin American drug trafficking.

An unknown number of inmates escaped in the clash between rival gangs, during which another 14 people were injured, a masked police officer identified as Commander Colonel William to the Channel of Ecuavisa said.

Thirteen inmates have been recaptured.

Calle said that shots exploded in the early hours of the morning, alerting the prison guards and the police who rushed to that part of the prison in Machala, in southwest Ecuador, near the Peruvian border.

A guard was killed when he entered, and others were taken as hostages, said the officer.

Calle said the confrontation lasted about 40 minutes, during which the inmates “fired weapons, threw bombs, grenades.”

The dead inmates belonged to the rival the choneros and the gangs of the wolves, two of the largest drug trafficking groups in Ecuador. Earlier this month, the Ee. UU. Designated Both gangs as foreign terrorist organizations in the last movement of the Trump administration against the posters.

Police said violence was the result of “fighting between gangs” in an installation that houses twice the inmates for which it was designed.

Calle said that “the control has already recovered” about prison.

He did not specify the fate of the hostages or how many inmates were in the race.

Ecuador prisons They are among the most dangerous in the world, and many have been taken by drug gangs. Penitentiaries have been under military control since January 2024, when President Daniel Novoa declared a State of “internal armed conflict” After a brutal wave of violence, caused by the Jailbreak of a powerful chief of the crime.

In September 2024, the director of the greatest prison in Ecuador, Maria Daniela Icazahe was killed in an armed attack while driving. The death of Icaza occurred a few days after the head of a prison in the Amazon province of Sucumbios, Alex Guevara, was killed, also in an attack while traveling by car.

Ecuador registered more than 4,600 homicides in the first half of the year, an increase of 47% since the same period of 2024, as shown by the Ecuadore Organized Crime Observatory data.

The violence of the gangs continues incessantly after the recapture in June of the country’s largest drug trafficker, Adolfo Macíasaka Fito, after he escaped from a maximum security prison in 2024.

In July, the Ecuadorian Government extradited Macías to the United States and he He declared himself innocent. An accusation of seven charges accused Macías, which leads the Choneros, with multiple positions, including the international distribution of cocaine and contraband firearms in the United States.

• Ecuador