Ecuador will carry out a prison census starting next week, after the wave of violent clashes in prisons that since last year has left some 400 inmates dead, the body that administers the prisons reported on Friday.
The “execution phase” of the census will be carried out from Monday “in the 36 Centers for Deprivation of Liberty nationwide,” the National Service for Comprehensive Care for Persons Deprived of Liberty (SNAI) said in a statement.
The registry will make it possible to update the information on inmates to “improve their living conditions and for better administration” of the detention centers.
According to official estimates, the country’s overcrowded prisons house some 35,000 people.
Since February 2021, there have been seven prison massacres in Ecuador, considered among the worst in Latin America.
A pacification committee created by President Guillermo Lasso said in a report last April that Ecuadorian prisons “are considered warehouses for human beings and torture centers.”
The SNAI pointed out that “it is essential” to have statistical information on prisons for “the creation of public policies and the execution of strategies that generate better and greater opportunities for the rehabilitation and social reintegration” of prisoners.
The government attributes the massacres, with dismembered and incinerated bodies, to the dispute between gangs linked to drug trafficking who seek control of territories for the sale of drugs inside and outside the prisons.
Located between Colombia and Peru, the largest producers of cocaine in the world, Ecuador faces an increase in drug trafficking and crime.
In 2021, the nation of 18 million people seized a record 210 tons of drugs. That same year, the murder rate almost doubled, closing with 14 murders per 100,000 people.
