Ecuador’s prisoners are going hungry. The company that fed 11,000 inmates in 20 prisons has abandoned the prison kitchens due to a debt owed by the Government of Daniel Noboa of 30 million dollars that has not yet been paid. That amount also includes school meals for one and a half million children. The first alert that the prisoners were not receiving food was on April 26. The Service for Persons Deprived of Liberty, SNAI, denied through a bulletin on social networks that the feeding had been suspended and assured that they had “guaranteed the service normally,” as reported in a brief statement. After the issuance of that document they remained silent. A week later, President Noboa wrote on the social network The crisis, however, has not been stopped and the relatives of the prisoners are crowding at the door of the Litoral Penitentiary, located in Guayaquil, for fear that theirs will die of hunger.
The situation of the inmates is worsened by the continuous complaints of mistreatment that human rights organizations are documenting since Noboa decreed the state of internal commotion and allowed the military to enter the prisons. The uncles, sisters, mothers, grandmothers came this Friday with white balloons with messages like “No to abuse” and photographs on giant posters of the wounded and bloody bodies of the prisoners. Araceli’s relative is held in the Latacunga prison and the story is similar: “There is no food, there is no medicine, they are being mistreated. I do not agree that the military does that, they are already paying for their crimes. The president is doing wrong,” says the woman.
In some prisons, the SNAI has allowed family members to bring food to prisoners. For this, they have organized in the neighborhoods to collect donations from family, neighbors and friends. “We no longer have enough money and we have to rely on people,” says Araceli. The judge ruled in favor of the prisoners and ordered that in 15 days the Ministry of Finance deliver the funds to the SNAI so that it can guarantee food for the prisoners. “The SNAI will have no excuse to solve this problem and will have to manage the food for the prisoners with donations, public and private institutions,” explains Fernando Bastias, from the Permanent Human Rights Committee of Guayaquil (CDH).
This organization has received nearly 105 complaints about torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment since four months ago, when the state of emergency came into force. Most of the accusations come from the Litoral Penitentiary. They all agree that the prisoners are isolated from their families and that they required medical attention as a result of injuries caused by blows or a pre-existing illness. One of the torture practices that the CDH has identified is also through feeding. “The Armed Forces retain the food, let it rot and from there they give it to people deprived of liberty,” adds Bastias. The complaints also detail that “the military gives them food, forces them to eat in one minute, while they spray gas on them,” he adds.
The Government assures that it sent a crime data to the Prosecutor’s Office for a “secret” report from the Strategic Intelligence Center, in which it reveals alleged illegal acts of a criminal nature in which the company Lafattoria SA, the food supplier of the 20 prisons, would be involved. “Previous governments handed Ecuador over to these criminals for years, accustoming them to another type of policy. Today they feel threatened and are determined to hinder the progress of this Government that, finally, calls them for what they are: narcopoliticians,” said Noboa. The legal representative of the company also responded in Furthermore, he said that “insinuation of corruption without evidence constitutes defamation.” He assures that his company has been audited by the State Comptroller’s Office and reports to the Financial Analysis Unit against money laundering.
The Government makes this complaint six months after coming to power and without a solution to the problem. Meanwhile, relatives of the prisoners pressure the State with a protest in the streets to solve the food service in prisons. A group of people went out to demonstrate outside the Judicial Council in Quito, where a hearing was being held to request precautionary measures due to lack of food in the prisons carried out by the CDH.
The atmosphere is rarefied and poisoned. There is an obvious concern. Sandra watches a video that is the last proof of the life of her son imprisoned in the Litoral. In the image the young man is sitting on the floor of his cell with a suffocation crisis. Another prisoner holds his head so he can try to breathe while a third filmes him. She received the video a week ago and it is one of the few evidences she has that her son is still alive. The relatives of the prisoners know little about what is happening inside the prison walls since January, when Daniel Noboa signed an internal armed conflict decree for the military to enter the country’s prisons. Since then, visits have been prohibited. Luis, Sandra’s son, is 21 years old and has been held for three years in that prison where nearly a dozen prison massacres have occurred. But his mother is not sure that he will survive the torture to which he is being subjected. “The day that video was recorded, we had requested a habeas corpus so that he could receive medical attention and the soldiers went to look for him in the cell to torture him with gas,” says the mother, while watching the video in which her son was babbling that he was I was going to die.
Sandra’s body trembles with concern and anger when she sees the images, and she bursts into tears to say that Luis suffers from asthma and that she has seen him much thinner. “He was chubby,” she says, and in the video you can see a thin boy, with a face marked by bones and sunken eyes. “We know that they are not giving them three meals,” says Sandra and along with her other women complain in chorus that they are at the door of the penitentiary with a transparent bag with medicines in an attempt to have information about their children, husbands or brothers. . But at the door the prison managers remain silent.