At least 4 people were killed and 34 others were injured on Sunday (9) in a clash with firearms and explosives inside a prison in southwestern Ecuador.
Ecuadorian prisons have become operating centers for drug trafficking gangs that compete for business and illegal goods routes into the country and lead to clashes. Since 2021, about 600 inmates have died as a result of these conflicts.
At around 3 a.m. (local time) on Sunday, residents of the city of Machala, in El Oro department, recorded sounds of gunshots, explosions and cries for help coming from inside the detention center.
The country’s Prison Service (SNAI) confirmed in a statement that four people died due to the clashes, without specifying whether they were all inmates.
In the morning, the agency announced that 44 people had been infected, but later corrected the information and said that the rest were one police officer and 33 infected inmates.
The Indonesian National Army said that special police teams immediately entered the prison, arrested seven people who will be tried and regained control of them after the riots.
At the end of September, another armed clash in the same prison led to the death of 14 people, including a prison employee.
According to the prison authority, the new clashes occurred due to the planned reorganization of some inmates in the new high-security prison built by the government of President Daniel Noboa in the coastal province of Santa Elena (southwest), which is expected to open this month.
The president, who was re-elected in April 2025, bet on militarizing the country to try to contain the violence, amid criticism from experts and opponents, who see few results and a threat to democracy in the country.
Noboa has also reached out to the United States, whose anti-drug trafficking rhetoric is being used by Donald Trump’s government as justification for attacks on boats allegedly belonging to drug traffickers in Latin American waters.
The Ecuadorian President recently received US Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, and explained that Washington wants to establish military bases in the country. Residents of the Andean country will go to the polls on the 16th of this month to decide whether to allow such facilities again, something the constitution has objected to since 2008.
In 2024, the military took control of the country’s prisons on the orders of Noboa, who declared the country in an internal armed conflict against drug trafficking factions. However, in August this year, control of eight of them, including Machala, was transferred to the police.
The largest prison massacre in Ecuador occurred in 2021, when more than a hundred prisoners were killed in a correctional facility in Guayaquil (southwest). Prisoners even broadcast the clashes live and on social media, as bodies were beheaded and burned.
Violence between gangs, which exploit a strategic position in the global drug export trade, has increased Ecuador’s homicide rate from 6 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2018 to 38 per 100,000 in 2024. The previous year, there was a historic peak of 47 per 100,000 inhabitants.
It is estimated that 73% of global cocaine production passes through Ecuadorian ports, and in 2024, the country confiscated a record 294 tons of the drug, an increase of 33% compared to 2023, when 221 tons were seized.
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