Star Metro - 14 killed as rival Ecuadoran inmates fight with guns, explosives

The mayhem was the latest in a series of bloodbaths to engulf gang-ridden, overcrowded prisons in a once-peaceful country now at ground zero of the violent Latin American drug trade.

An unknown number of inmates escaped in the clash between rival gangs, during which another 14 people were injured, a masked police officer identified as commander Colonel William Calle told the Ecuavisa channel.

Thirteen inmates have been recaptured.

Calle said gunfire broke out in the early morning hours, alerting prison guards and police who rushed to that part of the prison in the city of Machala, in southwest Ecuador near the Peruvian border.

One guard was killed as he entered, and others were taken hostage, said the officer.

Calle said the confrontation lasted about 40 minutes, during which inmates "fired guns, threw bombs, grenades."

Videos released by the police show heavily armed officers entering the prison to the sound of explosions.

"I'm a police officer," a man can be heard shouting from inside a cell. Another voice can be heard pleading: "Please don't shoot."

The dead inmates belonged to the rival Los Choneros and Los Lobos gangs, two of the biggest drug trafficking groups in Ecuador, which were been designated foreign terrorist organizations by the United States earlier this month.

Police said the violence was the result of "fighting between gangs" in a facility housing double the number of inmates it was designed for.

Organized crime has transformed Ecuador, a country of about 17 million, into one of the most violent nations in the world.

Calle said "control has already been regained" over the prison.

He did not specify the fate of the hostages or how many inmates were on the run.

- 'Internal armed conflict' -

Nestled between the globe's top two cocaine exporters -- Colombia and Peru -- Ecuador has seen violence spiral in recent years as rival gangs with ties to Mexican and Colombian cartels vie for control.

More than 70 percent of all cocaine produced in the world now passes through Ecuador's ports, according to government data.

Gang wars have largely played out inside the country's prisons, where some 500 inmates have been killed since February 2021, often in gruesome fashion -- their bodies dismembered and burnt.

Ecuador's biggest prison massacre happened in 2021, when over 100 inmates died in clashes in the port of Guayaquil in the southwest.

Prisoners went live on social media to broadcast the violence, showing decapitated and charred bodies.

Last year, gang members took scores of prison guards hostage after the jailbreak of narco boss, Jose Adolfo Macias, aka "Fito," while allies on the outside detonated bombs and held a television presenter at gunpoint live on air.

President Daniel Noboa declared a "state of internal armed conflict" and ordered that the military take control of the prisons. Last month, however, eight penitentiaries, including Machala, were returned to police control.

Fito -- the boss of Los Choneros -- was recaptured in June this year, more than a year after his escape.

He had been serving a 34-year sentence since 2011 for involvement in organized crime, drug trafficking and murder, but continued pulling the strings of the criminal underworld from behind bars.

Videos emerged of Fito holding wild parties, some with fireworks, illustrating the lawlessness of Ecuador's prisons.

Los Choneros has ties to Mexico's Sinaloa cartel, Colombia's Gulf Clan -- the world's largest cocaine exporter -- and Balkan mafias, according to the Ecuadorian Organized Crime Observatory.

D.Ch. Nadeau--SMC