The President of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso has announced that about 5,000 prisoners would be pardoned in the coming days to reduce overcrowding in the country’s prisons, which were hit with riots that left more than 320 inmates dead in 2021.
“I hope that at least 5,000 people deprived of their freedom will be released,” the president told reporters.
He said he aimed ‘to end overcrowding by the end of the year and thus have a much more favorable environment for security and for social rehabilitation inside the prisons.’
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Ecuador’s 65 prisons have the capacity for 30,000 inmates but house some 39,000, equivalent to 30 percent overcrowding.
Some 15,000 of the prisoners have not been sentenced.
More than 320 inmates were killed in 2021 in a surge of violence blamed on fighting between rival drug groups in Ecuador, nestled between the world’s biggest cocaine producers, Colombia and Peru.
Lasso signed a decree Monday to establish the conditions and system for pardons.
The effort will target prisoners charged with theft, fraud or breach of trust, local media reported.
Africa Daily News, New York had last November reported that Ferocious clashes have left 68 inmates dead in an Ecuador prison, police said Saturday, in the latest unrest at a Guayaquil jail that was the scene of a September riot which killed 119 prisoners.
‘According to preliminary information, some 68 prisoners were killed and another 25 were wounded,’ the Ecuador Prosecutor’s Office wrote on Twitter.
The riot began around 7:00 pm Friday (0000 GMT) when prisoners tried to enter a section of the jail, firing gunshots and using explosives, and police moved in to contain the unrest.
AFRICA DAILY NEWS, NEW YORK
