A clash between inmates armed with guns and knives inside the Latacunga prison in central Ecuador on Monday left at least 15 people dead and 20 injured, authorities said.
Officials attributed the fighting to national and international drug trafficking groups which have turned the Andean nation's prisons into the scene of repeated massacres as the groups fight for power and drug distribution rights.
Ecuador's national penitentiary service confirmed the death toll in the Latacunga prison, located 80 kilometres south of the capital of Quito. Agents are still searching the prison's pavilions for bodies.
Videos in which gunfire and the screams of inmates can be heard were posted on social media. More than 400 inmates have died in prison violence since February 2021, which the government of conservative President Guillermo Lasso has attributed to gang warfare over control of territory and drug trafficking routes.
Authorities are working on identifying the bodies, officials said, while Oswaldo Coronel, governor of Cotopaxi province, which includes Latacunga, told reporters security had been restored.
Coronel said 14 of the injured had been taken to hospital.
Latacunga lies about 80km (50 miles) south of the Ecuadorean capital Quito.In July, 12 prisoners were killed at a prison in Santa Domingo, just two months after violence at the same institution killed 43 in May.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has said Ecuador has no comprehensive policy for its prison system, and inmates endure crowded and dangerous conditions.
Families believe the number of those who have died in prison unrest is far higher and have been calling for the system’s reform. Together they have established the Committee of Families for Justice in Prisons to demand that the state be held accountable for decades of negligence.
There are about 33,500 people in Ecuador’s prisons, which are 11.3 percent beyond maximum capacity, according to official figures.