GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador (AFP) — Armed attackers on Thursday killed three women guards outside a jail in southwestern Ecuador, while in a separate attack two people in a small boat were gunned down, authorities said.
The massive prison complex in Ecuador’s biggest city, Guayaquil, is notorious for massacres committed by rival gangs vying for power within the penitentiary.
Police said on Twitter that reinforcements “have been deployed in order to find those responsible for this criminal act.”
The national prison administration authority, SNAI, confirmed the deaths to journalists.
The attacks were the latest mayhem in Ecuador likely linked to gang wars.
In the village of Posorja at the delta of the river leading to Guayaquil, armed attackers fired on a small boat, killing two people and wounding a third, said Edison Rodriguez, the local police chief.
On Tuesday, around 30 armed men killed nine people in a fishing village in the northwest in an attack Interior Minister Juan Zapata blamed on a territorial fight between gangs.
Security forces arrested three men late on Wednesday in connection with the shooting.
At the Guayaquil prison complex, six inmates were found hanged on Wednesday. Authorities did not link the six deaths to gangs but local media said the pavilion where they were all found is controlled by a gang known as Las Aguilas (The Eagles), which extorts other prisoners.
Guayaquil is one of the hardest hit places by a recent surge in violence related to gang and drug trafficking in Ecuador.
The country is located between Colombia and Peru, the world’s two largest producers of cocaine, much of which is sent to the United States and Europe from Ecuadoran ports, principally Guayaquil.
Ecuador’s murder rate almost doubled from 14 per 100,000 citizens in 2021 to 25 a year later.
On March 3, President Guillermo Lasso declared a state of emergency in Guayaquil and the northwestern Esmeraldas province where Tuesday’s attack happened.
Since February 2021, there have been eight prison massacres in which more than 400 inmates have been killed, many dismembered or burned.
© Agence France-Presse