It is a comprehensive and at the same time detailed report, they say, that accurately collects the issues and complaints that national human rights organizations have been exposing and claiming, especially, the Ecuadorian Government in recent years due to the prison crisis in the country.
This is how representatives and defenders of human rights describe the report of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) on the prison situation in Ecuador, which was published on Thursday 17, in Washington, United States, after the visit of a delegation from this agency to the country, from December 1 to 3, 2021.
In that report (of more than 102 pages), entitled Situation of persons deprived of liberty in Ecuador, The collapse that the Ecuadorian prison system currently has is exposed, marked by corruption, by the high levels of violence inside the prisons, by the shortcomings, by the state abandonment, by the absence of a comprehensive criminal policy and others, it is said .
There is also talk of the challenges that “the State faces in the face of this serious structural prison crisis” and the imminent risk against the life and integrity of the inmates; recommendations are given to the State, among other details.
Absence of effective control by the State of prisons, self-government systems, corruption, and insufficient security personnel, among the shortcomings detected by the IACHR
Zaida Rovira, former Ombudsman (s) and current president of the Alianza Radar Social organization, says that the complaints that were made in advance, “unfortunately, were not taken into account at the time.”
In the months of 2021 in which he was in charge of the Ombudsman’s Office, he says, they made several unsuccessful calls to the Presidency of the Republic to “take action on the matter about what was happening” in the system penitentiary. It coincides, like others interviewed by this newspaper, that there were many citizen voices that alerted and denounced the events.
“The prison issue is not a conjunctural issue, it is not that one day the prisoners got up and said: ‘We are going to hit ourselves, we are going to massacre them and we are going to kill them’… It is a structural issue. Many years ago the State lost control of the prisons. It is not that it is only from this Government, it is from a long time ago, ”he exposes.
The pacification plans and more personnel have not yet been able to stop the entry of weapons into the Penitentiary
For her, as for other DD advocates. H H. consulted in this regard, the big problem is the lack of public policies with a rights approach. As long as that doesn’t happen, there will be no structural changes, she maintains. “Prisons in our country have become execution centers and not rehabilitation centers, unfortunately that is the way it is,” she says.
And he agrees with the report that in Ecuador there is an extreme abuse of preventive detention that has led to prison overcrowding and overcrowding.
Francisco Zambrano Campuzano, president of the Ecuadorian Committee for Human and Trade Union Rights (Cedhus), agrees that there is no rehabilitation policy in the country.
“A person who is detained for a food problem is put in a pavilion where there are people detained for other very serious violations of the law. Those deprived of liberty, on the one hand, must be classified according to the crime they have committed. And on the other hand, we have the problem of corruption inside the prisons, which is a problem that has been going on for many years and this does not end”, he exposes.
Of the latter, he says that it is evident only with the number of directors or department heads of the different prisons in Ecuador that are changed from time to time and from one moment to another. “There have even been directors of these rehabilitation centers that have not even lasted 24 hours. There have been directors who have had to leave their posts because they were caught libeling with prisoners,” recalls Zambrano.
Billy Navarrete, executive director of the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights (CDH), an entity that in December delivered its documents on the situation in prisons in a documented and direct manner to the IACHR delegation, mentions that this report issued by The IACHR is a valuable instrument to not forget what happened in 2021, 2020 and in previous years in the prisons, one of these being the Penitenciaría del Litoral, and to be able to establish responsibilities as in the case of the massacres.
This, because the deceased were in the custody of the State. And that needs to be investigated, he says.
“The clarification of the facts must be unquestionable, there is no room for improvement, worse thinking about pacification if the clarification of what happened is not included, not only last year, but the long history of abandonment, of responsibility of the State Ecuadorian and the Governments, in particular, in relation to people deprived of liberty”, Navarrete details.
Members of the IACHR visit prison complexes in Guayaquil, with the exception of the Penitentiary, and meet with relatives of murdered inmates
“In 2021, a total of 316 people deprived of liberty lost their lives in the custody of the (Ecuadorian) state, and hundreds were injured in a series of attacks carried out by the same detainees. A figure that represents an increase of 587% compared to 2020, when 46 deaths were recorded. Most of the people who died were young people who were in preventive detention accused of minor crimes, and some even had a release ticket”, is described in the presentation of the IACHR report, on March 17.
Another important point that the IACHR report makes clear, adds Navarrete, is the access to weapons and prohibited substances that inmates have with relative ease.
“Now it is no longer possible to continue pointing out the families as those responsible for the trafficking of illicit substances and weapons. It is the Public Force that has to account for that, the enormous amount of weapons with which these groups confront each other inside. And I think that there (the report) puts quite clearly the need to purge the Public Force, in charge of controlling the prisons and restoring security to those deprived of liberty, ”says the executive director of the CDH.
What must be done immediately?
Francisco Zambrano Campuzano, of the Ecuadorian Committee for Human and Trade Union Rights (Cedhus), says that the national government must begin by immediately requesting the resignation of all directors and high-ranking officials who manage the social rehabilitation system in the country. In those positions, he adds, there must be people who have a vision and a humanistic approach in their proposals, who are responsible, who really go to work and who know or have experience in visits and previous work in prisons.
He states that work must be done on the policy of rehabilitation, of inclusion, not on isolating people. It is vital, he adds, to “keep busy” those deprived of liberty, to give them work inside the prisons. And he gives an example of the issue of food, where the company that wins or provides the service hires interns to cook, that there are overseers of the quality of the service and that everything develops normally and safely, among other details.
Almost 50% of the budget of prisons in Ecuador is destined for feeding the inmates
He says that there are currently ongoing complaints from inmates that the food is lousy. This without taking into account the inspection that should be done to the contractor that has been providing the service for several years, since at the time the contractors were questioned.
Remember that about 20 years ago they managed to get the criminal gangs of that time, which were the Cubans and the Russians, as they were called, to sit down to talk and make peace so that the violence did not spill over. In those times, he recalls, there were no hitmen, massacres, cruelty and current violence.
Required debugging and immediate responses
The guidelines of what to do are already given in the IACHR report, exposes Billy Navarrete, of the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights (CDH). What he needs now “is the political will of the government, in particular, to apply them,” he says.
He says that although there is a plan to return the meaning of rehabilitation centers to prisons in Ecuador, that continues to this day in print, on paper, since nothing has been done yet.
“Total absence and this is still a promise, on paper. Families continue to come to human rights organizations to claim for the health of their relatives who are suffering without access to medical services; they continue to approach because they are victims of extortion; because they have no information about the situation of their relatives in prison, especially here in Guayaquil, in the Litoral Penitentiary. Lots of people are in urgent need of information about the living conditions of their relatives in prison, because they mainly find themselves with serious health and safety problems in this”, explains Navarrete.
In the report, this activist points out, there is an important element that they call ‘self-government’ in prisons. And that refers to the fact that the Ecuadorian government no longer controls the prisons and lost that power, making this one of the main problems of the prison crisis.
“This ‘self-government’ is basically restricted to the management of criminal organizations that hold the rest of the prison population in a state of kidnapping. And… this is linked to the relationship that criminal organizations have with (members of) Public Forces (or law enforcement) institutions,” he explains.
Regain control in prisons
It is urgent that the State regain control of the prisons, since orders are being given from the prisons to act outside, such as the cases of hired assassins and other criminal and violent acts that have been seen in recent months, explains Zaida Rovira, of the Social Radar Alliance and DD activist. H H. Failure to do so would make the situation worse, she says.
Rovira recalls that Ecuador is part of the international system for the protection of human rights and that it is a signatory “to a large number of international instruments, and as part of this international machinery it is obliged to comply with the duties of the State, which are to guarantee, promote and protect human rights.
He adds that when international organizations visit us and make reviews, as in the case of the prison situation, the State has the obligation to review and abide by these recommendations.
As long as the structural issue is not seen with a human rights approach, nothing will happen, because a comprehensive policy is proposed in the human rights approach, that is, from prevention to rehabilitation mechanisms.
Zaida Rovira, DD activist. H H. and president Alianza Radar Social
The term of self-government by force is the one that fits, because what there is is a condition of kidnapping that the prison population has because others, who belong to criminal organizations and have powers and privileges, are the ones who control coexistence inside each pavilion and extort their families outside.
Billy Navarrete, of the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights (CDH)
We agree with what the IACHR says (report), because what they say is not an issue that is unknown in Ecuador, it has always been stated. There is no rehabilitation policy… We have requested a hearing in writing four times and the President of the Republic does not answer, but in the campaign (all the candidates and governments) talk about human rights.
Francisco Zambrano, from the Ecuadorian Committee for Human and Trade Union Rights (Cedhus) (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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