by Camila Hidalgo
An increase in deadly riots within the most dangerous prisons in Ecuador has exposed a corrupt penal system and has revealed some of the dark reality of organized crime in the country. José, an inmate at El Regional and former inmate of El Litoral, recalled in online conversations with me how it all began. In December of 2020, Jorge Luis Zambrano (Alias: “Rasquiña”), the leader of one of the biggest gangs in Ecuador, Los Choneros, was murdered in the coastal city of Manta. Los Choneros has been working as an extension of the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel in Ecuador for over a decade, inching slowly towards market domination. Jose reminisces about a time of relative peace when Rasquiña was still alive; no one was fighting for his position as the head. Back then, he says, prisons were relatively safe.
The Cocaine Highway
I remember the first time I genuinely felt afraid in Ecuador. It was a little over a year ago, around summertime. I had travelled to the American Embassy in Guayaquil to apply for my visa to enter the USA as a student. The day I was standing in line for my interview, a popular TV presenter named Efraín Ruales was shot in the head as he was driving home by a hitman on a motorcycle. It was in broad daylight and not too far from where I awaited a verdict on my future and visa status. The call on the hit allegedly came from inside one of the most dangerous jails in Ecuador: El Litoral.
There is still much speculation about why Efraín Ruales was murdered, but I will always struggle to find any of them justifiable as the violent way he died has endured within me. Surely Ecuador did not decay overnight.
According to a report released by the National Police Agency in Ecuador, violent deaths have increased by 108% between January and July of 2021. Yet violence was not exclusive to criminals on the streets; Daniel Pontón, Dean of the School of Security and Defense at the Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales (IAEN), wrote in a report for El Comercio that narco-trafficking has taken the lives of over 256 people within the prisons in this year alone. According to Pontón, narco-trafficking is also responsible for a large percentage of the 1.800 homicides registered in 2021.
Ecuador has always been known as the Cocaine Highway. It is a transfer point for primary cocaine production in Peru and Colombia, the logistics of which are controlled by the large Mexican and Colombian cartels associated with local bands. According to a report by Claudia Navas, a consultant for Control Risks, the effects of being a significant transfer zone for some of the largest drug operations in the West were heightened during the pandemic. November of 2020 saw an increase in narco-trafficking efforts, as small criminal groups usually dedicated to petty crime saw their range of operations reduced due to the virus. They began to see narcotics as an opportunity for income, and thus the country has slowly become a collection center and a small-scale producer. According to Navas, large cartels began recruiting the smaller criminal groups during the pandemic and welcomed them into a system of organized crime.
The hit on Efraín Ruales sounded warning alarms throughout the country, and it would eventually become known as a sign of the decay of the penitentiary system in Ecuador. The prisons had been rotting from the inside for some time now, and the residual effects were starting to spill over the prison walls. As a country known mainly as a drug highway for significant narco-trafficking efforts abroad, an increase of organized violence on the streets of Guayaquil spurred further investigation as to where the crime was stemming from. All fingers pointed back to the inmates of El Litoral and La Regional.
A Crack in the System
As stories like the hit on Efraín Ruales started to gain more momentum, so did police reports about criminal activity within the prisons that were linked to violence on the streets. According to one report, of the 40.000 inmates in the country, 64,3% of them are part of the ten local bands identified by the police as working with large cartels. Los Choneros is the leading coast group as 12.000 members have been placed in different prisons, while Los Lobos holds 8.000 members in prisons mainly across the highlands. Intelligence reports from the Anti-narcotics branch of the Government indicated that Los Choneros is an armed extension of the Sinaloa cartel. At the same time, Los Lobos functions as a security force for the Jalisco Nueva Generación. This Mexican cartel has been contesting Sinaloa for control over routes and cocaine exportation in Ecuador since 2016.
On September 28, 2021, tensions boiled over, and one of the deadliest riots in South American history erupted in El Regional in Guayaquil between Los Choneros and Los Lobos members. No one has pinpointed the reason behind the escalation of violence. Yet, the heinous crimes were evidence of years of corruption as dozens of prisoners stormed the competing pavilions with guns, grenades, machetes and homemade weapons.
Evidence of the riot’s deadly aftermath started to emerge on Whatsapp as people shared gruesome images of the murders. Around 118 prisoners died on that day in brutal ways, and the pain only extended as families were called to identify body parts and severed heads at the morgue. As the riots continued in a chain effect across the country, other inmates without affiliation to the bands began to fear for their lives.
Guns and Notebooks
José, 65, is one of these inmates. A prisoner for nine years now, José, or Pepe as he likes to be called, was sentenced for a crime of misappropriation of public funds against the public administration of Guayaquil. As an elder charged on what he calls “a misunderstanding,” José is an unlikely character amongst murderers, rapists, drug lords and scam artists. He, too, is scared.
I first heard of José when I contacted a reporter friend in Ecuador, Arturo Torres. He has been covering the story on narco-trafficking and prisons for some time now and, in my view, has become a compelling advocate for change within the system. When I expressed my interest in the story, he spoke of a man with whom he’d been in contact on the inside, “I know someone you can talk to,” he told me. “It won’t be easy though, with the spike in violence, they’re removing some of the routers inside, and they all share one cellphone they take turns renting.”
I sent José a series of questions through Whatsapp, albeit with a bit of hesitation, and patiently waited for a response. A couple of weeks later, José sent me a series of voice notes. I’m not sure what I expected to hear, but José’s voice caught me by surprise. He spoke with firmness and poise as he talked about his past and how he found himself in prison. “I’m an engineer in computer systems, but during that time, I was working on a business trying to get funding for a small cattle farm in the city of Quevedo. That’s it. That’s all there is to it,” he says, deflecting my question on his incarceration. “I was put in here based on an ID card for someone with my name but a different number. The Judge never verified my identity, and I didn’t get a lawyer because I never got notified of my sentence,” he tells me.
“After Rasquiña’s murder, which was also a hit job, the massacres inside the prisons started to escalate. Now there is this sense of fear that is lurking everywhere. The war on control over turf continues, and it will only get bloodier,” José tells me through Whatsapp.
His tone of indignation quickly shifts to a whisper; his coastal accent turns the whisper into vulnerability as he says, “What’s going to happen here? That’s the question. There’s a group of influence here that is already challenging Los Choneros.”
I listen to all voice notes, each capped at 15-20 seconds, over and over again, trying to imagine him within the prison walls. I can distinguish the sound of plates and other inmates in the background. Where is he standing, who is watching and who is listening? I imagine José looking over his shoulder as he says, “I’m erasing each message after I send it, for my safety.”
During one of the most intense riots in La Regional, José and other inmates in vulnerable groups were used as armour against the military’s gang members. A group of about forty inmates of advanced age, and some with physical deformities, were held at gunpoint by the band leaders to form a barricade in the entrance; the military was meant to storm the pavilions and stop the shootings forcefully. Nonetheless, the military had no choice but to stand down. “If there is another riot, they’re going to keep using us, putting us in front. And we’ll be the first to die.”
According to José, the Government hasn’t followed through on its promise to liberate the elderly and terminally ill. He feels the elderly and the sick never stood a chance; the violence has only added a layer of threat.
With talks about rehabilitation being a solution to the violence, José expresses his anger at a system that has been failing for too long, “They want to talk about rehabilitation, rehabilitation can’t exist when there is one psychologist for every 4,000; when the workshops are closed. You can’t talk about rehabilitation when it’s easier to bring a gun into this prison than it is to bring a notebook.”
The Price to Live
José tells me violence has become the most urgent matter, but not the only challenge. “From the moment you enter the jail, you are charged a ‘toll fee’ for everything,” he says. Prisoners are expected to pay up to $1500 to access the safest wing; a mattress costs $200, and each visit to a polyclinic can cost the inmates $10. The payments are made to guards and band leaders. According to José, who suffers from diabetes and arterial hypertension, prisoners who do not live off illicit behaviour or come from humble backgrounds cannot pay the extortionists. For this reason, many inmates have become “housemaids” as they clean and wash up after the band leaders and members. Poor inmates are expected to ‘pay by trafficking drugs within the jail, smuggling weapons and even committing murders and massacres.
Everything comes at a cost within El Litoral. To communicate with his family outside the jail, Pepe pays anywhere from a $1 to a $5 fee to use a cellphone for a day; this is the only form of communication he has. This interview comes at a cost to Pepe, both financially and as a potential life threat, but he expresses that he does not know how to move forward as the irrational violence escalates, and his sentence hearing escapes his grasp.
At the sight of desperation, lawyers in Ecuador take advantage of vulnerable prisoners, José claims. During the time he has been in prison, José has paid a lawyer more than $13,000 with the help of family and friends on the outside. During this time, his lawyer has assured him that he has been working on his freedom, but the lawyer never processed any paperwork for his appeal. José never spoke to him again. His case is one of many prisoners caught inside a corrupted penitentiary system.
As the prisoners document the violence within the jail to share on Whatsapp, guards have attempted to remove illegal routers, cell phones and other communication devices. For inmates with lesser privileges, the riots both hinder their ability to seek external help and increase the likelihood that they will die within the walls of El Litoral.
For the rest of the country, the consequences are just as deadly. With the major gang leaders imprisoned, the war for control and territory is commanded from the penitentiary but enacted on the streets. For Pontón, Ecuador functions under a unique dynamic. “Trivializing prison violence and normalizing transnational organized crime have many edges,” says Pontón. For him, the violence we see directly reflects narco culture: social media, sadistic violence such as the hit on Efraín Ruales, and the spread of popular TV shows. “Daily life in Ecuador is undergoing a process of ‘narcotization,’ through prison violence, and this. This is extremely dangerous,” the dean says of the implication of the riots. For José, the danger has only begun as the inmates have shown their reach and express no shame in showing the country who is really in control.