Inmates escape from Ecuador jail amid search operations
QUITO — Forty-three prisoners remain at large after escaping prison in northern Ecuador, the National Service of Integral Attention to Adults Deprived of Liberty and Adolescent Offenders, or SNAI, said on Monday, as security forces continued operations throughout the country.
President Daniel Noboa declared a 60-day state of emergency last week, including a nighttime curfew, and designated 22 criminal groups as terrorists.
The recent explosion of violence, including the storming by gunmen of a live TV news broadcast, explosions in several cities and the kidnapping of police officers, appears to be a response to Noboa’s plans to address Ecuador’s serious security crisis.
Police and military personnel are present in jails throughout Ecuador after some 200 kidnapped guards and administrative officials were freed from at least seven prisons over the weekend.
The inmates escaped a jail in Esmeraldas, a city close to the border with Colombia, SNAI said in a statement on Monday, after some 2,000 members of Ecuador’s security forces conducted a search operation in the prison on Sunday.
“As a result of this inspection, the escape of 48 people inmates was discovered,” the statement added, noting that five prisoners were recaptured.
Security forces also learned that one prisoner had died in the prison, SNAI said.
Riots erupted on Jan 8 in several prisons after authorities confirmed the escape of a drug trafficking kingpin from a jail in the southwestern coastal city of Guayaquil.
The unrest spread to several cities in the country on Jan 9, when criminal gangs unleashed a series of violent actions, including armed assaults, car bombings and police kidnappings.
As of Monday, security forces have arrested 1,534 people, with 158 of them on charges of “terrorism”, during 15,461 operations carried out since Jan 9, the government said.
Operations will continue throughout Ecuador this week, the government said in a separate statement.
“The stated objective is clear: to be implacable with those who have terrorized and abused citizens,” the government said.
Noboa, elected last year on pledges to restore security, has promised to keep gang leaders imprisoned in new high-security prisons, among other measures.
Ecuador is one of the major cocaine distributors in the world, with most of the drugs originating in neighboring Colombia and Peru, the world’s top producers of cocaine. At Guayaquil, Ecuador’s biggest port and export hub, drug gangs and the coast guard play a cat-and-mouse game.
“Seventy percent of the cocaine that arrives in Europe comes from Ecuador, and 80 percent of this cocaine comes out of Guayaquil,” navy coast guard commander Fernando Alvarez, whose unit is at the forefront of the fight against trafficking, said.