The authorities blamed the fight on teams of national and foreign drug traffickers who have turned the Andean nation’s prisons into the scene of repeated massacres as teams that fight by force and drug distribution rights.
Ecuador’s National Penitentiary Service showed the death toll at Latacunga prison, 80 kilometers south of the capital Quito. Officers are still searching for bodies in the penal wards.
Videos have circulated on social networks in which shots and screams of detainees can be heard.
Some 316 inmates were killed by Ecuadorian criminals last year, according to the criminal service. So this year there have been 90 deaths. The worst massacre occurred in September of last year in the Penitentiary of the Litoral of Guayaquil, where 125 criminals were killed.
Ecuador’s formula is designed for about 30,000 people, yet some 35,000 inmates were held in 53 states since last month.
(PENNSYLVANIA)