Ecuador’s government said on Tuesday it was still trying to identify the dismembered “human parts” of an estimated 12 inmates killed during a prison riot in Santo Domingo city that day, Reuters reported.
The prison riot occurred on July 19 at the Tsáchilas penitentiary in Santo Domingo, which is a city located roughly 90 miles west of Quito, Ecuador’s national capital.
“Crime scene investigation teams have collected 45 human parts in the Santo Domingo penitentiary, which are 12 bodies and not 13,” Ecuador Interior Minister Patricio Carrillo wrote in a Twitter statement on July 19.
“Forensic anthropologists and forensic doctors are moving to conduct autopsies of the dismembered bodies. The process will take days,” he added.
Security forces are seen outside the Bellavista prison, in the town of Santo Domingo de los Colorados, about 80 km from Quito, a day after 13 inmates were killed and two injured in a bloody fight between prisoners, on July 19, 2022. (JUAN CARLOS PEREZ/AFP via Getty Images)
Ecuador prison officials had earlier stated that the human parts found after the riot corresponded to 13 bodies.
Authorities seized dozens of weapons from inmates involved in the riot at Tsáchilas penitentiary, including “several machetes and butcher knives […] a hammer, a screwdriver and several scissors blades,” according to the Latin American news website Infobae. Officials additionally confiscated an automatic assault rifle and a pistol.
Relatives of inmates at Bellavista prison speak with a morgue worker after a deadly jail riot the previous day, as they wait outside the morgue to learn the status of their jailed relatives in Santo Domingo de los Tsachilas, Ecuador, early Tuesday, July 19, 2022. (AP Photo)
Infobae reported on July 20 that some of the prisoners involved in the riot filmed themselves midway through the bloodbath on contraband cell phones. One such video clip surfaced online Tuesday, appearing to capture a person “firing a firearm several times at a decapitated head, in the middle of a pile of dismembered bodies.”
Other images from inside the penitentiary appeared to show that “the prisoners themselves […] exhibited the corpses of the murdered inmates after having been stripped, dismembered and decapitated,” Infobae detailed.
Ecuador Interior Minister Carrillo said Tuesday’s riot at Tsáchilas penitentiary began after “the criminal gang that controls the Santo Domingo prison [retaliated] against an apparently dissident group that had recently formed in the same prison,” Infobae relayed.
Tsáchilas penitentiary last experienced a riot on May 9 that resulted in 44 deaths. The incident was caused by violence between rival criminal gangs, according to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
The U.N. office reported the following on May 10:
According to the authorities, at least 44 people died and more than a dozen were injured after riots broke out in a prison in the northern city of Santo Domingo. According to the police, the riots were provoked by the transfer of a prisoner known as ‘Anchundia’, linked to the R7 gang, from La Roca prison in the south-west to the Santo Domingo prison.
Monday’s violence is the latest to erupt in the country’s prisons. Clashes between prisoners from different gangs left 15 people injured in El Inca prison in Quito on 25 April. Three days earlier, on 22 April, disturbances at the Esmeraldas No.2 prison, on the northern coast, left 12 inmates injured.
Ecuador’s federal government has repeatedly attributed violence within the nation’s prison system to disputes between criminal gangs, specifically over the control of territory and drug trafficking routes. At least 316 inmates died as a result of prison violence across Ecuador’s penitentiary system in 2021, Reuters reported July 19.
“The country’s prisons house about 33,900 people and are 12.5% beyond maximum capacity, according to official figures,” the news agency observed.
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