Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso has fired the police and prison chiefs after seven suspects in the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio died behind bars in mysterious circumstances earlier this week.
The six inmates were killed at the Litoral Penitentiary on Friday, while another died in a Quito prison on Saturday. A Spanish newspaper cited a National Service of Integral Attention to Persons Deprived of Liberty (SNAI) report as saying that the victims did “not present signs of torture or wounds resulting from a struggle.”
Members of the army leave the premises after an operation at the Guayas 1 prison in Guayaquil, Ecuador, on October 6, 2023.
© AFP 2023 / GERARDO MENOSCAL
Also on Saturday, Lasso removed the prisons' director and the head of the police investigations unit, also replacing the head of the national police with Cesar Augusto Zapata Correa, a veteran member of the force.
The president also ordered the transfer of six surviving suspects implicated in Villavicencio’s murder for security reasons. The move came after Lasso canceled his trip to South Korea to chair an emergency government meeting and "address the crisis” in Ecuador’s penitentiary system, amid reports that at least 400 people have died in riots in Ecuador’s prisons since 2020.
The security shakeup comes days ahead of the October 15 presidential runoff between businessman Daniel Noboa and socialist candidate Luisa Gonzalez. Their election campaigns were dominated by debates over how to tackle growing drug violence. Incumbent president Lasso, who was impeached by the National Assembly in May, is not running.
In a statement on the prison murders, Noboa said, “How could we permit the empowering of violence that has the whole country submerged in terror and uncertainty.” Gonzalez, for her part, claimed that “Those who could have spoken and said who killed Fernando Villavicencio are dead, and they died under the ‘control’ of the state.”
Over the past several years, Ecuador has been hit by a drastic rise in crime, which was fuelled by the growing presence of Colombian and Mexican drug cartels which managed to infiltrate local criminal gangs.