Why are the massacres in Ecuador's prisons still uncontrollable?
Daniel Noboa's government has militarized the prisons and despite this, deaths in prisons continue. Among the factors that influence this is that the Ecuadorian military and police are apparently not immune to corruption, or that criminals are more adept at introducing weapons into prisons than the public forces have discovered so far.
But another factor is that the capture of numerous criminals by the government has saturated the prisons and has made it more difficult to control the prisoners.
Among the factors that are pointed out as having caused the new massacre is the lack of food for all the prisoners and the hoarding of this food by one of the gangs that are in certain pavilions.
The government has faced the food problem in prisons since the first day of its mandate. The food problem is also the main problem in poor neighborhoods, especially on the coast and especially in Guayaquil and Durán, where there are people who do not know what they will eat tomorrow, which forces them to steal, as happened at the beginning of the century in New York, London, and even worse in the mid-nineteenth century in Ireland where the potato plague caused millions of deaths and very violent settlers who emigrated to the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, and who became cowboys, which in the United States is how cattle and horse thieves were called who even ventured into Mexico to commit misdeeds. It was precisely the cattle plague, today known as foot and mouth disease in the mid-seventeenth century, which produced the great migratory wave of whites from northern Europe to the United States, and which turned the settlers of the United States into murderers of indigenous people, buffalo, gunmen and thugs who roamed the plains owned by the indigenous people of that country. Ecuador has experienced, more or less every 40 years, very severe climate crises, or global economic and war crises, which have produced hordes of violent people, which led to revolutions, massacres, and uncontrollable violence, which repeatedly facilitated the invasion of the country by Peru, to reduce the country to the small state that it is now.
Today, Latin America in general has become one of the most violent regions in the world, although there are no wars between countries in the region. However, the IMF and the World Bank point out that violence in Latin America affects the income of the inhabitants and produces between 3 and 4 percent less GDP. This violence has occurred as a result of the Covid pandemic, rampant poverty, unemployment, low wages, and low prices for raw materials except gold, copper, lithium, and oil, which is in the hands of transnationals, while what the population produces with very low wages has a low price, precisely because of the low wages. This forces governments to equate Latin American wages with wages, especially in the United States, and to involve the inhabitants more in production, instead of being replaced by machines, which are the origin of the Latin American migration problem.
In Ecuador's prisons, people experience the same thing as in the poor neighborhoods of Guayaquil and Durán, that is, desperation for their daily bread. Today, this particularity that the city where there are the most millionaires and the poorest in the country, that is to say, the most unequal city in the country called Guayaquil, is experiencing, has become the main factory of delinquents and criminals in the American continent and one of the main ones in the world.
This internal armed conflict in Ecuador can now be described as a defeat for the current president, who after 15 months in government has not been able to change the situation or the state of the prisons, especially in the cities of the Coast and especially in the Gulf of Guayaquil, which has become a refuge for drug traffickers and pirates who move millions and millions of dollars, to the point that they have turned Durán, the city opposite Guayaquil, into the most violent city in the world and the Port of Guayaquil into the main exporter of cocaine to Europe.
Another element to take into account is that despite the war declared by the Noboa government against drug traffickers, they still retain a great capacity for intimidation that allows them to introduce weapons into prisons.
But the most disturbing thing is that 12 of the 15 presidential candidates in Ecuador are from Guayaquil, and this has already happened before when the presidential candidates in Ecuador were mostly from the coast, when the region was full of money, like during the cocoa, banana, or shrimp boom. Today, the boom on the coast is a cocaine boom, and cocaine is what, just like the export products from the coast were the main financiers of the electoral campaigns, today, without a doubt, behind the electoral campaigns, there are narco dollars, even more so when, since the country's dollarization, the drug traffickers' dollars are laundered in Ecuador, with fewer problems than in other South American countries.
