Explosion Outside Guayaquil Prison Follows Deadly Week of Riots in Ecuador

TDT | Guayaquil

Email : editor@newsofbahrain.com

An explosion occurred outside a prison in Ecuador’s port city of Guayaquil on Friday, authorities confirmed, coming after a week of deadly violence that left around 30 inmates dead.

AFP journalists reported seeing burnt tires and the twisted remains of a vehicle at the blast site. The fire was extinguished while police and military personnel secured the area.

“Specialized personnel have been deployed following an alert about the explosion of a device outside the Guayas prison,” local police said.

The national prison authority, SNAI, stated that the explosion took place in the Guayas 1 area, also known as the Litoral Penitentiary—the largest facility in Guayaquil’s prison system. Security measures have been reinforced around the prison, and authorities are investigating the incident.

The blast follows a week of escalating violence in Ecuadorian prisons. On Monday, clashes between rival drug gangs in Machala killed 13 inmates and one prison guard. The violence intensified on Tuesday in Esmeraldas, where 17 inmates were killed, with reports of beheadings and maiming during the clashes.

An armed attack also targeted the head of Ecuador’s largest maximum-security prison in Guayaquil that day, though he escaped unharmed.

President Daniel Noboa said Friday that the government is maintaining control in military-run prisons, noting that recent clashes were “neutralized in less than three hours.” He added that a new maximum-security prison under construction in Santa Elena province will be ready in four to five weeks as part of efforts to curb organized crime.

Ecuador, located between Colombia and Peru—two of the world’s largest cocaine producers—has seen prison violence rise sharply in recent years. Homicides in the country have increased more than 600 percent over the past six years, with more than 500 people killed inside prisons since 2021 during gang-related conflicts.