Nearly 200 casualties in Ecuador prison riot

At least 116 inmates have died and another 80 were injured during a prison riot in Ecuador, the latest in a series of violent incidents in the country’s penitentiary system, leading President Guillermo Lasso to declare a 60-day state of emergency across all of Ecuador’s jails.

The riot, which included multiple decapitations and mutilations, was attributed by the local press to confrontations between criminal gangs, possibly tied to international drug cartels. This follows similar incidents earlier this year, when 79 were killed during a series of simultaneous riots in February and another 22 murdered in July during two coordinated uprisings.

Authorities in Ecuador have tied those events to rival gangs linked to the international narcotics trade, part of a wave of violence that some trace back to 2019, when Mr. Lasso’s predecessor, Lenín Moreno, declared a state of emergency for the first time.

Violent prison deaths in Ecuador have skyrocketed since then, from a steady rate of around ten per year during the 2010s to at least 234 in 2021, according to data based on police and press reports from Kaleidos’ EthnoData project.

Data from 2019 showed there were 39,946 inmates in Ecuador’s penitentiary system, more than 12,000 above the total capacity of 27,742, meaning overcrowding could...