Ecuadoran police and soldiers on Tuesday took complete control of a prison where riots between rival gangs killed 68 over the weekend, the head of the prison system said.
After violence broke out on Friday night and stretched into Saturday, with inmates attacking each other with guns, machetes and explosives, authorities described the Litoral Prison in the city of Guayaquil as quiet on Sunday.
Authorities have said the fighting gangs were tied to drug-trafficking organisations.
On Monday, a 1,000-strong security force started penetrating security perimeters around and inside the prison but had not yet entered the wings with the inmates' living quarters, or blocks.
On Tuesday police and soldiers finally moved into that part of the overcrowded penitentiary and called the situation "under control."
"We are intervening inside the blocks," said the head of the prison system, Fausto Cobo.
Another riot in the same prison in Ecuador's south-west in September left 119 dead, making it the largest such massacre in the country's history, and one of the worst in Latin America.
More than 320 inmates have been killed so far in 2021, and the latest riot happened despite a state of emergency enforced in Ecuador's prison system after the riot in September.
Situated between the world's biggest cocaine producers, Colombia and Peru, Ecuador has had a surge in violence blamed on fighting between rival drug groups.
The country of 17.7 million people is popular with traffickers because of its porous borders, a dollarised economy and major seaports for export.
KILLING OF QASSEM SULEIMANI
WHAT IS A BLACK HOLE?
1. Black holes are objects whose gravity is so strong not even light can escape their pull
2. They can be created when massive stars collapse under their own weight
3. Large black holes can also be formed when smaller ones collide and merge
4. The biggest black holes lurk at the centre of many galaxies, including our own
5. Astronomers believe that when the universe was very young, black holes affected how galaxies formed
PULITZER PRIZE 2020 WINNERS
JOURNALISM
Public Service
Anchorage Daily News in collaboration with ProPublica
Breaking News Reporting
Staff of The Courier-Journal, Louisville, Ky.
Investigative Reporting
Brian M. Rosenthal of The New York Times
Explanatory Reporting
Staff of The Washington Post
Local Reporting
Staff of The Baltimore Sun
National Reporting
T. Christian Miller, Megan Rose and Robert Faturechi of ProPublica
and
Dominic Gates, Steve Miletich, Mike Baker and Lewis Kamb of The Seattle Times
International Reporting
Staff of The New York Times
Feature Writing
Ben Taub of The New Yorker
Commentary
Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times
Criticism
Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times
Editorial Writing
Jeffery Gerritt of the Palestine (Tx.) Herald-Press
Editorial Cartooning
Barry Blitt, contributor, The New Yorker
Breaking News Photography
Photography Staff of Reuters
Feature Photography
Channi Anand, Mukhtar Khan and Dar Yasin of the Associated Press
Audio Reporting
Staff of This American Life with Molly O’Toole of the Los Angeles Times and Emily Green, freelancer, Vice News for “The Out Crowd”
LETTERS AND DRAMA
Fiction
"The Nickel Boys" by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday)
Drama
"A Strange Loop" by Michael R. Jackson
History
"Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America" by W. Caleb McDaniel (Oxford University Press)
Biography
"Sontag: Her Life and Work" by Benjamin Moser (Ecco/HarperCollins)
Poetry
"The Tradition" by Jericho Brown (Copper Canyon Press)
General Nonfiction
"The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care" by Anne Boyer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
and
"The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America" by Greg Grandin (Metropolitan Books)
Music
"The Central Park Five" by Anthony Davis, premiered by Long Beach Opera on June 15, 2019
Special Citation
Ida B. Wells
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela
Edited by Sahm Venter
Published by Liveright
