Tragic Deaths in Ecuador Prisons Highlight Growing Crisis: Authorities Fail to Provide Answers

Over 500 deaths in Ecuador’s largest prison in 2025 reveal a crisis that demands urgent attention from the public and policymakers, as families describe a slow catastrophe of hunger, disease, and silence inside a space where survival depends on money or luck.

When Violence Fades, Neglect Takes Over

The bloodiest images of Ecuador’s prison crisis once came from massacres: mutilated bodies, burned cellblocks, headlines counting dozens of dead after gang clashes. In 2025, those scenes have largely receded within the Penitenciaría del Litoral, the country’s largest and most feared prison in Guayaquil. But for the families waiting outside its concrete walls, the quieter numbers are more alarming.

More than five hundred inmates died in the prison this year from causes officially described as “natural” or “under determination,” many linked by relatives to tuberculosis and severe malnutrition. Families like Ana Morales’s describe a living hell, emphasizing their deep concern and the urgent need for attention.

Morales joined dozens of relatives outside the provincial government delegation in Guayaquil, demanding explanations delayed for months. Their warnings about sick inmates, nonexistent medical care, and unsafe food highlight systemic neglect that should alarm policymakers and the public alike.

Inside the prison, which holds around 7,200 detainees, violence did not vanish. It changed shape. The gunshots stopped, but bodies kept leaving.

Death Certificates Without Answers

As deaths increased, families appealed to courts and international bodies. On January 5, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights issued precautionary measures, warning of ‘gravity and urgency’ and risking ‘irreparable harm’ to inmates’ rights, underscoring the need for immediate action.

State figures show the scale of the problem. Between January and September, 564 deaths were recorded in the prison: 288 labeled as “natural,” 262 as “undetermined,” and 14 classified as violent. Authorities insist inmates are receiving medical attention. Families say the paperwork hides the truth.

“They don’t put tuberculosis on the death certificate so they won’t get into trouble,” said Benigna Domínguez, whose son died in July, months after contracting the disease inside the prison, she told EFE. She had no contact with him for six months. When she finally saw him, he was emaciated, covered in rashes, barely recognizable. “He told me they were killing them with hunger. He also had scabies,” she said. The food he received, she added, sometimes contained “rat and bat feces.”

Tuberculosis thrives in overcrowded, poorly ventilated spaces. Medical journals such as The Lancet Infectious Diseases have long warned that prisons in Latin America function as reservoirs for the disease when screening, isolation, and treatment collapse. In Ecuador’s case, families allege those safeguards never existed.

The deaths did not slow. At least twelve inmates have died so far this year, according to the families’ committee, even as the prison remains under heavy military control.

Militarization Without Care

The Penitenciaría del Litoral is one of several prisons militarized after President Daniel Noboa declared Ecuador under an “internal armed conflict” in 2024, granting security forces extraordinary powers to confront criminal groups. For families, the presence of soldiers has not translated into protection.

“Now the soldiers decide who lives and who dies,” Domínguez said. “There is torture and extortion, in complicity with the military,” she told EFE. Her accusation reflects a more profound fear: that militarization, designed to stop gang violence, has created new layers of impunity when abuses involve the state itself.

For Reyna Guerrero, the consequences were devastating. One of her sons died in August from what she says was chronic malnutrition. She fears for another son still imprisoned with the same condition. She learned of the first death not from authorities but from other inmates’ relatives, five days later. Prison officials told her he was alive. She found him in the morgue. “They never let a doctor examine him,” she told EFE.

Rosario Carrillo has not seen her son in over a year. She knows his condition worsens with tuberculosis, and her plea to keep him alive underscores the moral imperative for immediate reform and humane treatment.

Their testimonies converge on a single point: death inside the prison is not an exception but a process—slow, bureaucratic, and largely invisible.

A Crisis Beyond the Walls

Ecuador’s prison emergency did not emerge in isolation. Over the past decade, the country’s incarceration rate rose sharply, driven by punitive security policies, overcrowding, and judicial delays. The Penitenciaría del Litoral became a pressure cooker where poverty, organized crime, and state abandonment collided.

When massacres shocked Ecuador between 2021 and 2023, they exposed gang control inside prisons. But the underlying problems—overcrowding, hunger, contaminated water, and healthcare collapse—are still unaddressed, showing a systemic failure that calls for urgent reform to prevent further tragedies.

Academic research in Revista Panamericana de Salud Pública has documented how carceral neglect in the region disproportionately affects inmates from poor and racialized communities, turning sentences into de facto death risks. Families in Guayaquil describe that transformation precisely: punishment morphing into abandonment.

After the latest protests, government officials committed to installing a kitchen inside the prison and deploying permanent medical brigades. The families’ committee says it will verify those promises during a visit tomorrow, led by the Defensoría del Pueblo.

For now, hope remains fragile. The numbers are too large, the explanations too thin. Ecuador succeeded in reducing spectacular violence inside its most dangerous prison, but at the cost of exposing a quieter horror: people dying not in riots, but in silence.

In the end, the families are asking for something painfully basic. Food that does not poison. Doctors who arrive before the morgue. Death certificates that tell the truth. Until that happens, the Penitenciaría del Litoral will remain, in their words, not a prison—but a waiting room for death.

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