Ecuador prison death toll rises to 20, authorities warn of Mexican cartel involvement

Ecuadorian security forces have retaken control of a prison in the highland city of Cuenca where at least 20 people were killed during a gang confrontation on Sunday.

Violence broke out at El Turi prison’s maximum security cell block after members of the same gang battled for control of the wing. Drug trafficking related violence has plagued Ecuadorian prisons in recent years and at least 316 inmates were killed last year, Reuters reported.

"At this time the El Turi center is under control, but it's relative because the institution remains definitively weak," Interior Minister Patricio Carrillo told reporters on Monday.

"I don't think this is just about bad relations and interior rancor, there are huge economic interests."

According to the minister, six people were found “suspended” in cells and one inmate showed signs of apparent poisoning. Five bodies were also found mutilated and their remains are expected to be returned to their families in the coming hours, he added.

Some 1,000 members of the security forces were deployed to retake control of the prison and prisoners were reportedly moved to different blocks within the facility to try to mitigate further disputes between the gang members.

Violence has skyrocketed across the Ecuadorian prison system over the past year but experts have warned that it might not be homegrown but rather the product of a bitter power struggle between rival Mexican cartels to control cocaine trafficking routes in the tiny Andean nation, The Guardian reported.

In September of last year, Ecuadorian Col. Mario Pazmiño, Ecuador’s former military intelligence chief, said the violence was driven by growing tensions between The Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels and their local affiliates, which include Los Choneros, Los Lobos as well as Los Tigretones and Los Lagartos.

“This kind of depraved violence has grown as gangs fight for control of the prisons,” Pazmiño told the Guardian. “The violence; the dismemberment, the decapitation, is a strategy to sow terror among the prisoners to gain territorial control – not just inside the prison but outside.”

Ecuadorian President Guillermo Lasso echoed the point, saying, “Regrettably, the prisons have become terrain for disputes for power between gangs.”

According to Itania Villarreal, a former director of the state institution that works to rehabilitate inmates, “There have been the most atrocious and inhumane murders, with decapitations, burnings, even using chainsaws to carry out these acts.”

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has said the system is blighted by state abandonment and the absence of a comprehensive policy, as well as poor conditions for inmates. The country's prisons are about 15% overcrowded and house some 35,000 people.