QUITO, Ecuador: Ecuador officials on Thursday said that gangsters were holding 178 prison guards and staff hostage, as a standoff between security forces and organized crime continues.
According to the SNAI prison authority during riots in several jails, inmates have shot at members of the Ecuadoran armed forces.
The small South American nation has been plunged into crisis after years of growing control by transnational cartels. The drug cartels use Ecuadorian ports to ship cocaine to the United States and Europe.
The violence started in the country after one of the country’s most powerful Narco bosses, Jose Adolfo Macias, alias “Fito,” had escaped from prison.
President Daniel Noboa on Monday, imposed a state of emergency and nighttime curfew in the country, but the gangs hit back with a declaration of war, kidnapping police, setting off explosions, and threatening executions.
Fito was shifted to a maximum-security prison in August last year, in a highly sensitive operation involving thousands of security forces, after the assassination of presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio.
At least 16 people have been killed in the violence so far.
On Tuesday, masked gunmen stormed a public TV studio during a live broadcast in the city of Guayaquil and bombs were detonated across the country.
In recent years, the country’s prisons have been plagued by violent feuds between jailed members of rival gangs, often resulting in massacres of inmates.
