Jordy had been waiting for freedom for 2 months, he was imprisoned for breaking the curfew, a misdemeanor for which 69% of those killed in prison were serving a sentence.
His body was shot, burned and macheted in a temporary prison when Jordy Macas Guamán was due to be free. He was sentenced to four months in prison for breaking the curfew, for the coronavirus, on May 9, 2021. The night of the massacre at the Litoral Penitentiary, on Friday, November 12, Jordy had been waiting for his release ballot for two months.
Never arrived. He didn’t even have a lawyer request it. She was hardly assigned a public defender to represent him during the trial. She, Dolores Vera Ramírez, asked the Naranjal Prosecutor’s Office to apply the “abbreviated procedure” to Jordy, in which the accused accepts the guilt and receives a reduction of the sentence.
“Yes, I understood the formulation of charges,” Jordy replied when by videoconference the multicompetent criminal judge of Naranjal, Wilmer Tapia, asked him if he agreed.
Jordy was 28 years old and addicted to marijuana who made him leave his home at 9:00 p.m. on Sunday, May 9, an hour after the curfew took effect. The police report notes that the residents complained of an unknown person who was prowling in an aggressive attitude in the La Olla sector, El Batán citadel, in Naranjal.
“My mouth itched and there the police caught me, vice is vice, my mother told me not to go out. I am a marijuana user, I went out to buy marijuana, my mother told me not to go out, ”said Jordy.
When the policemen arrived at La Olla, Jordy offended them, the report says, threw punches and kicks at them. “That nobody touches him, that he is the owner of the neighborhood,” said the uniformed men at the hearing.
On Monday afternoon this week, Jordy was buried after his relatives officiated a mass of the present body.
On Friday night the 12th he said goodbye and until then I could hear his voice. ‘Mommy, I love you very much,’ he told me, and then, ‘they’re getting in, they’re getting in,’ and the call was cut off, “says his mother, Elva Guamán, through tears. Every day she lights a candle in her bedroom. “I bend my knees and pray for all mothers. I still can’t believe it, it seems like he’s going to call me
Elva Guamán, Jordy’s mother
Jordy Guamán had been sentenced for “failure to comply with legitimate decisions of the competent authority”, a misdemeanor offense, of those punishable by penalties of up to three or five years in prison.
Like him, most of those slaughtered in prisons – between 20 and 40 years old – had been admitted for minor crimes: possession of drugs, assault and resistance to authority, abuse of firearms, robbery, illicit association, illegal possession of weapons, intimidation, small and medium-scale drug trafficking, and so on.
In total, 152 deprived of liberty. This is equivalent to 69% of a sample of 221 names reviewed by this Journal and that correspond to the period 2018-2021, a period in which the prison crisis in Ecuador worsened.
EL UNIVERSO searched for the data manually and also accessed the lists of the victims of the massacres of September 28 and November 12, the most horrendous that the country has experienced this year.
But that sample of 221 names – say human rights activists – is not all the lives that have been lost to the ‘negligence of a State’ that has failed to stop the bleeding in prisons. From 2018 to 2021, until November, data from the National Service for Comprehensive Attention to Adults Deprived of Liberty and Adolescent Offenders (SNAI) reported 430 deaths from intra-prison violence, 64% in prisons in Guayaquil. In this city, the SNAI has classified 66 deaths as suicides.
The SNAI did not provide the total lists with the names of the deceased, as requested by this newspaper last September. The entity stated in a statement that “as it is the custody of persons deprived of liberty, it is responsible for safeguarding their data.”
These lists, says the president of the Human Rights Committee (HRC), Billy Navarrete, “are gold in dust.” They were also denied the names of the victims, as well as the Ombudsman’s Office (DPE), which last Sunday published its request to the SNAI on its Twitter account.
“The DPE requested the list of the allegedly deceased #ppl to start the guardianship process, but Margarita M., a SNAI social worker, indicates that she cannot do so because she does not have authorization,” wrote the DPE.
In the absence of listings, on social networks The HRC is summoning relatives of the deceased to collect their testimonies and document lawsuits against the State for violation of human rights.
So far there are six cases that we have registered, cases where it is shown that there was judicial negligence and the families are willing to give us their testimony, ”Navarrete announced and explained that they are in a documentation phase. They do it, he emphasizes, so that “families do not take this tragedy as something natural that happens to them because they are poor.
Billy Navarrete, president of the Human Rights Committee in Ecuador
That is what the fathers, mothers or wives of nine prison victims of the September and November massacres think, who told their story to EL UNIVERSO and which this newspaper will reproduce in several installments starting today.
There they will include, for example, the emblematic case of Leonardo González, who had been waiting four months for his freedom ticket; the story of Carlos Valencia, imprisoned for attack and resistance against two policemen who were dressed in civilian clothes; the case of Manuel Torres and Mario León, two friends from the same neighborhood who entered prison for theft of cell phones; and the story of John Campuzano, the accountant of a company investigated for fraud and whose executives fled the country.
Jordy’s mother did not have a lawyer, nor did she understand hearings and procedures. He barely receives the solidarity bonus and earns something with the food he sells in tubs when he goes out to walk the streets of Naranjal. “We have debts, we haven’t been able to pay for the funeral,” says Elva Guamán, a believing Catholic who prays for the killings to end, because “it’s hard to lose a family member in this way.”
In prisons, Jordy’s mom says, not everyone is guilty. There are many who do not even have a sentence.
In the lists of 221 names reviewed by this Journal, 52% of those murdered (116) had a sentence, 5% (12) were called to trial and 14% (32) were on trial. The rest (61) were not located in the records of the Judicial Branch.
The serious thing, says the ombudsman (e), César Córdova, is that among those killed in the massacres there were people who had not been proven guilty. “They enjoyed the principle of innocence,” he lamented. (I)
Commission criticism for ‘Soft measures’
The Assembly’s Sovereignty, Integration and Comprehensive Security Commission prepared, since October, a report on the actions of the different members in charge of the prison system. The document, according to Assemblywoman Geraldine Weber, contains 52 conclusions and 72 recommendations that must be approved this week by the commission for review in the full legislature.
Weber, a member of the commission, believes that there was a breach of functions by the directors of the SNAI, an organization that has two signal inhibitors, cameras that cover 58% of the centers and 1,489 guides to control the prison population. The deficit, he added, is 3,153 servers.
These deficiencies, the lack of resources and “soft measures”, would have influenced – he affirms – in the confrontations registered in the prisons this year. And although he believes that there was “ineffectiveness” of the authorities, he assures that they will support the Executive’s proposal to expand and apply the legal figure of ‘authorship by domain of organization’ to punish the heads of criminal gangs. (I)
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
