At least nine inmates died in a prison from the Ecuadorian town of Machala, where 31 other detainees were murdered last month during clashes between rival gangs, the local press reported this Sunday, without the agency in charge of prisons having commented on this new event.
Preliminary information posted on social networks shows images of dozens of relatives stationed in front of the prison in the capital of El Oro province, which borders Peru.
Despite the insistence of the press, the National Service for Comprehensive Assistance to Adults Deprived of Liberty and Adolescent Delinquents (SNAI), responsible for prison control, limited itself to indicating that it “verified all the information with the competent authorities”.
Citing police sources, the Primicias portal indicated that The prisoners died of asphyxiation and that eight of them have already been identified.
The riot reportedly took place afterwards, around 4 p.m. local time (10:00 p.m. in mainland Spain) an explosive device explodedprobably a drone, near the penitentiary establishment.
This equipment, whose detonation was heard several blocks away, would have been used to distract the control officers while the riot took place inside the prison, he added.
Uniformed officers came to conduct noise checks and, upon returning to the prison, found the bodies of the murdered inmates, according to local media.
Prisoners hanged
November 9 27 prisoners died after being hanged in Machala prison, a few hours later, four other people were murdered and 33 others were injured, as well as a police officer, during a clash between rival gangs.
On November 1, twelve people were found dead in three Ecuadorian prisons, as confirmed by the SNAI at the time.
Six men were discovered in Litoral Penitentiary, Ecuador’s most crowded and dangerous prison, located in the coastal city of Guayaquil; four others in the Turi prison, in the Andean Cuenca, and two others in the Esmeraldas prison, in the north of the country.
In the case of penitentiary inmates, The SNAI indicated that these were “natural deaths”.. The prisoners reportedly died of tuberculosis, a disease that claimed the lives of twelve other prisoners this month.
Prisons are one of the epicenters of Ecuador’s unprecedented criminal violence crisis, with some 600 inmates having been murdered there since 2021, the majority in a series of massacres due to clashes between rival gangs.
A few prisons are militarized and others under the control of the National Police, as part of the “internal armed conflict” that President Daniel Noboa declared in 2024 to fight criminal gangs, which are attributed with the escalation of violence that has led the country to lead the homicide rate in Latin America.
A situation that worsened in 2025, since in the first half of this year Ecuador recorded 4,619 homicides, 47% more than in the same period of 2024, when 3,143 were recorded.
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