“Alborque Robles Juan Gabriel, Ochoa Zuquilanda Luis Alfonso, Soto Hinostroza Luis Jordi, Sánchez Alava Victor Manuel…” a police officer shouted outside the gate of the Machala Correctional Center, a coastal city in southern Ecuador turned into a cemetery. Each name was the name of one of the 27 prisoners killed on the afternoon of Sunday, November 9, in a new massacre at the prison. “Gomez Romero Abel Eduardo…” The agent continued reading, until he was interrupted by a woman’s heartbreaking scream.
“Let me hear!” He demanded amidst the commotion, shouting the names of his relatives. The police officer read out 27 names that corresponded to the inmates killed in the prison, who were added to the five dead who were killed hours earlier, early Sunday morning, in a shootout between inmates, which also left about thirty people injured.
The death of the 27th is surrounded by many unknowns and government silence. There were no riots and no signs of violence on the bodies. “Among them committed cases of suffocation, which led to immediate death due to arrest.” The National Authority for Comprehensive Care of Persons Deprived of Liberty, the body responsible for prisons, limited itself to publishing a confusing bulletin. The prisoners were found hanging in minimum, medium and maximum security cells at around 6pm.
The Interior Minister attributed the massacre to the Los Lobos and Sao Box criminal gangs, for their attempt to regain control of the prison. Until last August, the prison was under military guard for 19 months. In January 2024, President Daniel Noboa signed the Internal Armed Conflict Decree, which handed over management of the prison system to the armed forces. According to the Ecuadorian Conflict Observatory, 395 people deprived of liberty died in the coastal prison of Guayaquil alone between January and August 2025. This represents 81% of the total victims of the 15 prison massacres that occurred between 2021 and 2024.
As this news shook the country, the government began transferring prisoners to the new prison complex built in Santa Elena Province, officially named Encuentro Prison. The transfers were made by air and under custody.
The prison was designed by Noboa as part of his project to build a prison modeled on the Terrorism Detention Center (SECOT) built by Nayib Bukele in El Salvador and after abandoning his campaign proposal to create floating prisons in the Pacific Ocean. The prison center includes five wings with a capacity of 800 people. The comprehensive care service for persons deprived of liberty, SNAI, announced that all information regarding the construction of the new high-security prison is confidential. The award process did not even go through the competition of many companies to compete to build the project.
The government has also not confirmed whether the prison has been fully completed or when it will begin operating at full capacity. Everything is happening a few days before Ecuadorians return to the polls, on Sunday, November 16, to vote in the popular consultation and referendum called by Noboa, an appointment by which the president seeks to repeal the ban on the presence of foreign military bases and create a constituent assembly to write a new constitution.
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