Abel Carrera, sentenced to 20 months in prison for robbery, died in the September 28 massacre at the Litoral Penitentiary.
Two months. Abel Carrera lacked two months to regain his freedom. On November 24, he would serve his sentence of two and a half years in prison for the theft of a cell phone, on May 24, 2019. That day he left home, from the Guayaquil suburb, with a portable speaker that played his tropical melodies. On the corner, some friends were waiting for him to “fuck around” aboard a tricimoto, which hours later was used for the escape.
“Abelito did not steal, one of his friends did, but they accused him of being with them,” laments his mother, Carlota Luna, about that night in which – she recalls – she hugged her 32-year-old son for the last time. I didn’t know it would be the last. He never imagined it, despite the conflicts and confrontations that took place in the Litoral Penitentiary, where he was being held. She said to herself “my Abelito doesn’t let himself be killed, he’s clever, agile, jumps the wall, hides.”
But he could not escape. On September 28, during the largest massacre recorded in this Guayaquil jail, he was hit by a bullet in the back as he attempted to flee from pavilion 5 to 6. The details of that moment were learned by Carlota, a week later, by one of the survivors. The leader of pavilion 5, named Alan, he says, alerted them on the eve of what would happen and gave them weapons to defend themselves.
“The shooting broke out” and hours later – he continues – the prisoners burst in, but “disguised as policemen”, simulating a search. “They turned them upside down,” the man tells me, “and they started pum, pum.” Seeing this, the prisoners got up and started running. “My son jumped the wall, he was on the 6th when he was shot,” says this mother, with the consolation that her son “left with Christ in his heart.”
The death toll in the prison massacre increased to 119, 100 have been identified
They took away her only son, who rubbed her legs when she returned from work and who offered her, as soon as she regained her freedom, to walk along the boardwalk with her and the three children she left behind as an orphan.
About two months after this massacre, Carlota reproaches that the State did not guarantee her son’s right to life. “Why do they mix all the people? That is the terrible problem,” criticizes this woman. and he remembers that his son wanted to go free to work. “I told him that when he left, he could start carrying greens (in the market), and he answered ‘yes, mom’, because that was living hell,” laments this mother who received the state donation of the coffin and the vault to bury his son.
“It hurts me, because it is not a son, there are three children,” says Esmeraldeña, who has lost two children murdered in prison, one on the street and the other in prison.
In the 28 months he was detained, he was unable to visit him. He asked her to come, but she said “better not, daddy.” Not because he did not want to, he explains, but because the money he would spend on a COVID-19 test he preferred to send “to feed him.” They charged him for everything, he assures: “$ 7 for a toilet, $ 13 for a cabin, $ 13 for a piece of cheese and $ 26 for the medicines that the LEA – as the late Alfredo Valenzuela was previously known – gave for free.”
Abel had tuberculosis, an infection that affected his lungs and was treated with the drugs that were given to him for free in jail. But since June, he says, he had to deposit in different bank accounts to get them delivered.
What he earned by selling juices he gathered for his Abelito, whom he could not hug again. He only managed to kiss her cold forehead, wet with her tears, before saying goodbye, in the cemetery of the Guayaquil suburb. (I)
Mario Twitchell is an accomplished author and journalist, known for his insightful and thought-provoking writing on a wide range of topics including general and opinion. He currently works as a writer at 247 news agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
