The prison crisis represents an issue that the authorities have avoided since 2019, when the Constitutional Court issued rulings that empower the State to act on the issue.
“Let this video record that they were able to do something and did nothing, gentlemen. For God’s sake, help us ”, were the words of one of the inmates of pavilion 2 of the ‘Litoral Penitentiary’, who broadcast live via Facebook the ‘massacre’ of November 12 and 13 in the ‘Litoral Penitentiary’, one of the most populated prisons in the country.
The alert, which was given since Thursday, November 11, was not enough to avoid the balance of 68 dead and 25 wounded left by the new clashes that began at 7:00 p.m. on November 12 and in front of which the authorities they intervened seven hours after, on November 13.
After the statements of the General Commander of the Police, Tanya Varela and the Governor of Guayas, Pablo Arosemena; President Guillermo Lasso, through a tweet, called for attention to the Constitutional court, in which he asked for constitutional tools to fight for security and against the mafias.
Faced with this call, there was a crossing of tweets between the Executive and the Constitutional Court, where no authority assumed responsibility. The Court, on the one hand, rejected the President’s statements, arguing that since 2019 “it has been repeatedly noted that the severe crisis that affects the penitentiary system requires concrete and structural actions, different from those that can be adopted in a Exception status”.
On the other hand, the President Lasso He responded that his legal obligation is to abide by their rulings but that “this does not prevent him from being in disagreement with certain positions and declare it publicly when warranted ”.
Who is responsible?
This exchange of responsibilities made it clear that the prison crisis is the result of a structural problem that has been tried to solve with ‘patch’ measures such as the decrees of Exception status.
The Constitution of the Republic and the Comprehensive Organic Penal Code (COIP) determine that the governing body in matters of Social Rehabilitation is the SNAI; This is how the constitutional lawyer André Benavides explains it, for whom the last murders in the Penitentiary, are the shared responsibility of the government and the authorities that are part of the Directory of the Technical Agency of the National Social Rehabilitation System.
“It is absurd to blame Constitutional court of these killings because the legal tools are there. The Court has done its part through the opinions it has issued to declare the constitutionality of the states of exception due to prison crisis ”, Benavides details.
For example, Opinion 4-20 issued by the Constitutional Court of Ecuador, in August 2020, establishes that the National Police will have the mission of “reinforcing the internal control of the centers in coordination with the SANAI and the perimeter security of the centers. deprivation of liberty, to guarantee the personal integrity, the life and peaceful coexistence of persons deprived of liberty ”.
However, this measure little or nothing helped to restore order and prevent more deaths within the ‘Peni’. “This could be controlled with the support of the Intervention and Rescue Group (GIR) or the Special Operations Group (GOE), but the inefficiency of the State leads them to blame other institutions that have nothing to do with it, ”says Benavides.
Is the entry of the armed forces a solution?
The Constitution establishes, in Art. 158, that the fundamental mission of the Armed Forces is the “defense of sovereignty and territorial integrity” for which, the Constitutional Court decreed “strictly complementary” functions for the control of weapons in the exteriors of the jails and ordered that “in no way does the measure authorize their admission to the detention centers.”
From the academy, Diego Pérez, an expert in Security, emphasizes that there is no legal framework for the armed forces to enter the prisons. “This entity does a job subsidiary to what the Police do, whose exclusive attribution is the guarantee of public order ”, he comments.
For his part, André Benavides mentions that the work of the armed forces is only complementary because its preparation is aimed at “Eliminate the enemy” and the solution of the prison system does not lie in this but in a matter of control. “Putting the military in jail would even go against the standards of the Inter-American Human Rights System,” he concludes.
“There is no legal framework that allows the Armed Forces to enter prisons.” Diego Pérez, IAEN academic expert in Security.
Short-term solutions from the voice of Human Rights
Bianca Gavilánez, coordinator of the Dignidad Foundation that is in charge of defending and promoting the rights of people in confinement contexts, said that after 4 massacres in the country’s prisons, the SNAI has not complied with the different opinions of the Constitutional court.
“The State has a whole structure to do something for the Penitentiary System but it does not act despite all the alerts that were issued this last time,” says Gavilánez and talks about the fact that the Government has unveiled a “Extermination policy” of the poorest people.
The activist proposes that, in the short term, prison transfers that lawyers have filed to several inmates should be granted, that the SNAI deliver in a timely and immediate manner, regime changes with certifications and thus ‘detoxify’ the prisons; and, finally, that the Judiciary hear cases of habeas corpus that “they must be attended to in court in 24 hours and they have attended us in a week,” he explains.
