Quito. Unknown assailants murdered María Icaza, the director of Ecuador’s largest prison, as she was on her way to work on September 12. The perpetrators allegedly ambushed Icaza as she was leaving the Penitenciaría del Litoral prison in the port city of Guayaquil, followed her car and shot her on the way. According to press reports, threats had already been made against Icaza.
The crime is part of a series of assassination attempts against Ecuadorian prison officials. Nine days earlier, Álex Guevara, director of a detention center in the Amazon region, had also been assassinated, as well as a few days before, two other prison employees who also worked in Guayaquil.
In the case of Guevara’s assassination, a message was found at the crime scene threatening the Choneros gang and its followers with the same fate. The Choneros are the largest gang in Ecuador and control the prison where Guevara worked. In 2020, their leader at the time was assassinated, sparking a nationwide gang war and contributing to a sevenfold increase in the murder rate between 2019 and 2023. Clashes between rival gangs have also been responsible for more than 400 murders in the country’s prisons since 2021.
The situation worsened further in early January 2024 when riots broke out in several prisons and more than 200 hostages were taken, including police officers and prison guards. As a result of the events, about a hundred inmates escaped and several people died.
President Noboa, representing a policy of law and order, then deployed the army to control the prisons. The soldiers managed to stop the massacres by resorting to brutal methods and torture. However, human rights organizations quickly warned that a humanitarian crisis had emerged in the prisons, with prisoners lacking drinking water, food and adequate medical care. According to information from the Extra news portal, the prisons are still under the control of gangs, some prisoners have access to weapons and have agreements with the police and the army.
Mario Pazmiño, former head of Ecuador’s secret service, says: “Organized crime has hierarchical structures. The ringleaders may be in prison, but outside they have other leaders who run things.
A police source said Icaza’s killing could be retaliation for his refusal to comply with a gang’s demands. “The criminal groups continue to threaten staff. When an inmate they don’t want released is released, the intimidation begins. They kill anyone they deem responsible,” a prison official said of the criminal gangs.
According to Olivier De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, the power of gangs is so great because of poverty and unemployment in Ecuador. Due to the general lack of opportunities, gangs have difficulty recruiting new members, especially among young people. According to De Schutter, this development could be stopped by social policy measures, but the neoliberal governments of Noboa and his two predecessors had taken few steps in this direction.
