Ecuadorian prisons would have corruption networks made up of officials, military and police, as confirmed on Tuesday by the Commission for Penitentiary Dialogue and Pacification.
It was an open secret and a scenario that the members of said group made public in their report of the first three months of work. There they also exposed information related to acts of corruption, as part of six points that they observed and that they hope the Government will solve.
The SNAI, a questioned entity whose restructuring would be under analysis by the Government
They spoke of the lack of an effective system, which has created a culture of survival that operates by selling favors, extorting money, selling protection in prisons; It is a whole apparatus of corruption that includes officials of the National Service for Prisoners of Liberty (SNAI), persons deprived of liberty, police and military, indicated the commissioners.
In addition, they argued that the Government already knows this and they expect it to act accordingly.
Despite which they did not give names; They said they do not have evidence (photos or videos) to make particular accusations. However, they calculate that at least 10% of the officials who work in the prison system would be corrupt and would even receive monthly payments from the gangs.
The Commission is currently made up of seven members. He worked from December 16, 2021 and issued this week a report of his work until March 11, 2022.
The report tries to go beyond a diagnosis and be an action strategy to rescue human rights inside Ecuador’s prisons, said Nelsa Curbelo, who heads the Commission, which still has three months to go.
She, among the first observations, mentioned that prisons are not rehabilitation centers, but rather warehouses of punishment. “On the one hand, they are punishment centers; and, on the other, they are schools of criminal tactics”, she expressed.
The report, in one of its first pages, says: “Basic human rights guarantees – such as eating nutritiously, access to medical and educational services, family reunification, rehabilitation, empowerment, social reintegration, among others – were annulled. To this is added what for us is one of the axes of greatest production of personal and interpersonal violence: overcrowding.”
Commissioners also noted that prisons have become juvenile detention centers. “We have carried out a socio-visual census, and the majority – more or less 75% – of this prison population are young people, between 18 and 35 years old,” said Father Luis Barrios, a Puerto Rican priest who is a criminology professor in New York.
Barrios highlighted that the majority of persons deprived of liberty (PPL) are young and come from poor homes. “Because, if you are rich, it turns out that you get sick and they take you to a clinic; The problem is that everyone inside is sick. So, here we all dance or we break the radios”, commented the priest, alluding to the discrimination that exists in prisons.
The priest also mentioned that they have found prisoners who are already 60% of their sentence served and who have not been able to access their pre-release, as former Vice President Jorge Glas did in record time.
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“In the El Inca prison, this happened to a 90-year-old German citizen, who did not speak Spanish, he had already served his full sentence three months ago, but his folder had been lost in the Quito SNAI and nobody cared. We denounced him and in three days he was released,” said Barrios, who mentioned that older adults and women are victims of the system.
The Commission even discovered that the women in the Guayaquil prison who do not have families would be sold by the caporales, as stated by Nelsa Curbelo, who took the opportunity to denounce the inhumane conditions in which they keep older adults and GLBT groups in prisons. . “There are six or eight in 2m x 2m rooms,” she maintained. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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