His family questions that he has been confined together with highly dangerous inmates. He was 24 years old and leaves a daughter in the orphanage.
Víctor Barriga moved to Bucay to work as a construction assistant, in a new attempt to leave behind the years he lost immersed in the darkness of drugs. He wanted to change, says his sister, for his little 7-year-old daughter.
He dedicated himself to his job for eight months until he returned to Guayaquil to share the 2020 Christmas parties with his family. He arrived refreshed and, to his family’s surprise, robust. The thinness that he had maintained since adolescence due to his addiction to marijuana had disappeared.
They chatted for hours, played with a children’s mini billiard and laughed a lot “at their jokes” on Christmas Eve. The joy of that family reunion did not last long, it disappeared at dawn on the 29th, after a friend took him “for a walk.” He did not return.
Near his home, in the Popular Bastion sector, he was detained by the Police for showing a “nervous and evasive attitude of control”, according to the judicial process. They found him, details the cause, with 7.2 grams of marijuana and 4.6 grams of heroin, hidden in the waistband of his shorts. “I accept that I committed the offense, because I had the drug for my consumption,” Victor acknowledged at the hearing. Although he confessed to the family, his sister says, that a friend would have asked him to give the drug to someone else.
He was sentenced to 20 months in prison for drug trafficking, but he managed to serve nine in the Litoral Penitentiary, a compound that became the scene of the largest massacre in the country’s prison history, on September 28. That day, 119 people deprived of liberty were killed in the middle of an armed confrontation between drug gangs.
This newspaper had access to a list with the names of 109 of the 119 victims. Of them, 38 were arrested for illicit drug trafficking, the penalties of which ranged from eight months to ten years in prison. Three other defendants were without sentence.
Plan to transform prisons has barely been accomplished in 4%
In the case of Victor, 24, was killed after receiving multiple stab wounds to the neck and chest. His body also had burns on his torso, arms and legs. Her sister recognized him, she assures distressed, by the name of the daughter that was tattooed on one side of her neck, after not distinguishing three other engravings that her brother had on the charred skin of both hands.
That painful image of her brother torments her, it comes to her mind from one moment to the next as “a blow”, but immediately – she assures – blocks it with prayers and memories of that boy who enjoyed playing soccer and bolicha, when the street of the neighborhood was dirt.
“It is unfair …, they did not have to be mixed with dangerous people, murderers”, questions his sister, a month and a half after that massacre., which was not the only one in 2021. In the three clashes this year, until November 12, 335 prisoners were killed. There were beheaded, shot and burned.
From that ‘hell’, where the leaders of each pavilion control, recruit newcomers and extort them, Victor managed to communicate with his relatives almost daily.
More than 300 inmates murdered nationwide during clashes between criminal gangs inside prisons
He wrote to his mother the day before he was murdered, on the 27th, on the social network Facebook: “I love you very much, mother, never forget it.”. He read the message the next day, because that night he came home late from work and went to sleep. He replied in the morning, but “he never answered again.”
The photos and videos of the massacre multiplied in the media and social networks, when the pilgrimage of this family began through the ‘Peni’, Judicial Police, Samanes Park and morgue. The uncertainty of not hearing from him gave them hope that he might be hurt. They clung to that possibility until October 2, when they were notified that there was a body with their characteristics.
The next day, in the Ángel María Canals suburb cemetery they buried Víctor, who behind bars he repeated to his sister that he wanted to regain her freedom to “start over.” But, her family says, she couldn’t do it because the prison system didn’t protect her life.. (I)
Family members demand health and medicine
The last three prison massacres, which filled the families of the 335 people deprived of liberty murdered during 2021 with pain, have exposed a series of shortcomings and violated rights that exist within a prison system bent by the heads of narco-criminal organizations.
It is parents, children, siblings and husbands who complain about a “lousy” food, suspended visits, lack of medicine and “poor health care” inside the prisons. Some of those who get sick have to pay, family members agree, to receive the drugs. Some have written off as much as $ 26 for a box of 30 pills.
Only the “hard” or friends of the “bosses” would have access to health services, says the mother of a prisoner murdered on September 28.
The Ministry of Health pointed out, in a statement, that since 2018 it has a prison care model that includes activities for the promotion of health and programs for the prevention of HIV, Tuberculosis, among others, with free laboratory tests and medicines.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Economic and Social Inclusion (MIES) pointed out that its psychological staff has given support to the bereaved and welcomes children who have lost their parents in the riots and do not have a family reference.
Currently, according to This institution is responsible for 24 children of persons deprived of liberty: 17 are in centers in Quito; 3, in Latacunga; 2, in Tena; one, in Cuenca; and one, in Esmeraldas. In addition, this year there have been –adds MIES– 20 family reintegrations, 3 favorable declarations to be adopted and one emancipation.
In the MIES children’s centers, close to the prisons, they also care for 52 children – from 2 to 36 months – who live with their mothers in prison, from where they are mobilized under the security of the SNAI. (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.
