In Latin America, guards don't control prisons, but gangs do

Ecuador's military was sent last month to take control of the country's prisons after two major gang leaders escaped and criminal groups quickly sparked a nationwide uprising that paralyzed the country.

In Brazil, two prisoners with ties to a major gang were caught last week the first to escape From one of the nation's five maximum-security federal prisons, officials said.

Officials in Colombia declared a state of emergency in prisons after two guards were killed and several others targeted in what the government said was retaliation for a crackdown on major criminal groups.

In prisons across Latin America, criminal groups exercise unchallenged authority over inmates and extract money from them to purchase protection or basic necessities such as food.

The prisons also act as a kind of safe haven for incarcerated criminal leaders to run their criminal enterprises from a distance, ordering assassinations, orchestrating the smuggling of drugs into the United States and Europe, and directing kidnappings and extortion of local businesses.

When officials try to limit the power criminal groups wield behind bars, their leaders often deploy outside members to push back.

“The main center of gravity, the hub of control of organized crime, is within the prison complexes,” said Mario Pazmiño, a retired colonel and former director of Ecuadorian military intelligence, and a security analyst.

“That's where, let's say, the management positions are, the command positions,” he added. “It's where they give orders and dispensations to gangs to terrorize the country.”

Latin America's prison population has exploded over the past two decades, driven by tougher crime measures such as pretrial detention, but governments across the region have not spent enough to deal with the surge and have instead often left control to inmates, say experts in the field of criminal justice systems.

Those sent to prison often have only one choice: join a gang or face their wrath.

As a result, prisons have become crucial recruitment centers for Latin America's largest and most violent cartels and gangs, strengthening rather than weakening their hold on society.

Prison officials, who are underfunded, outnumbered, overwhelmed and often paid off, have largely caved to gang leaders in many prisons in exchange for a fragile peace.

Criminal groups fully or partially control more than half of Mexico's 285 prisons, according to experts, while in Brazil the government often divides penitentiaries based on gang ties in an effort to prevent unrest. In Ecuador, experts say most of the country's 36 prisons are under some degree of gang control.

“The gang solves a problem for the government,” said Benjamin Lessing, a political science professor at the University of Chicago who studies Latin American gangs and prisons. “This gives the gang a kind of power that is very difficult to measure, but also difficult to overestimate.”

The prison population in Latin America grew rapidly 76 percent between 2010 and 2020According to the Inter-American Development Bank, this is far greater than the region's 10 percent population growth over the same period.

Many countries have imposed stricter public order policies, among others longer sentences And more convictions for low-level drug crimescausing most prisons in the region to exceed their maximum capacity.

At the same time, governments have prioritized investing in their security forces as a way to tackle crime and reach out to the public, rather than spending money on prisons, which are less visible.

Brazil and Mexico, Latin America's largest countries with the largest prisoner populations in the region, invest little in prisons: the Brazilian government spends about $14 per prisoner per day, while Mexico spends about $20. The United States spent approx $117 per inmate per day in 2022. Prison guards in Latin America also earn meager salaries, making them susceptible to bribes from gangs to smuggle in contraband or help high-profile prisoners escape.

Federal officials in Brazil and Ecuador did not respond to requests for comment, while federal officials in Mexico declined. In general, federal prisons in Mexico and Brazil have better funding and better conditions than their state prison counterparts.

The state of Rio de Janeiro, which runs some of Brazil's most notorious prisons, said in a statement that it has been separating prisoners based on their gang membership for decades “to ensure their physical safety,” and that this practice, according to the Brazilian law is allowed.

Underscoring the power of prison gangs, some leaders of criminal groups live in relative comfort behind bars, running supermarkets, cockfights and nightclubs, sometimes smuggling their families in to live with them.

Ecuador's prisons, experts say, are a textbook example of the problems facing Latin America's penal systems and how difficult they can be to address.

The January riots broke out after Ecuador's recently elected president took steps to tighten security in prisons after an investigation by the attorney general revealed how an imprisoned gang leader, enriched through cocaine trafficking, controlled judges, police officers, prison guards and had corrupted even the former. head of the prison system.

The president, Daniel Noboa, planned to transfer several gang leaders to a high-security facility, which would make it more difficult for them to carry out their illegal activities.

But those plans leaked to gang leaders and one of them went missing from a sprawling prison complex.

A search for the leader in prison sparked riots in the country's prisons, with dozens of inmates escaping, including the head of another powerful gang.

Gangs also ordered members to attack from outside, experts said. They kidnapped police officers, burned cars, detonated explosives and briefly seized a major television station.

Mr. Noboa responded by declaring an internal armed conflict and allowing the military to attack gangs in the streets and storm prisons. According to the military and videos on social media, prisoners in at least one prison were stripped to their underwear and had their belongings confiscated and burned.

The scenes were reminiscent of those in El Salvador, where President Nayib Bukele declared a state of emergency in 2022 to tackle gang violence. About 75,000 people have been jailed, many without fair trials, according to human rights groups.

Two percent of Salvadorans are incarcerated, the highest rate of any country in the world, the newspaper said World Prison Letter, a database compiled by Birkbeck, University of London.

Mr. Bukele's tactics decimated the Central American country's street gangs, undoing years of horrific violence and helping him to a second term.

But experts say thousands of innocent people have been locked up.

“What consequences does this have?” said Carlos Ponce, an expert on El Salvador and assistant professor at the University of the Fraser Valley in Canada. “This will scar them and their families for life.”

The extensive use of pre-trial detention across the region to fight crime has left many people in jail for months or even years awaiting trial, human rights groups say. This practice has hit particularly hard the poorest, who cannot afford lawyers and face a tortoise-like legal system with cases that have been backed for years.

In the first seven months of the state of emergency in El Salvador 84 percent of all those arrested were present pre-trial detention and almost half of Mexico's prison population is still awaiting trial.

“Prisons can be defined as centers of exploitation for poor people,” said Elena Azaola, a Mexican scholar who has studied the country's prison system for 30 years.

“Some have spent ten or twenty years in prison without trial,” she added. “Many leave worse than when they came in.”

In some Latin American countries, prisons are to some extent a revolving door.

About 40 percent of the prisoners in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and Chile are released only to be imprisoned again. Although the recidivism rate is much higher in the United States, in Latin America many people locked up for minor, sometimes non-violent crimes go on to commit more serious crimes, experts say, largely because petty criminals share prison with more serious ones. perpetrators.

Both of Brazil's largest gangs – the Red Commando and the First Capital Commando – actually started in prisons, which remain their centers of power.

Jefferson Quirino, a former gang member who completed five separate detentions in Rio prisons, says gangs controlled every prison he was in. In some cases, inmates often focused on running gang businesses outside the prison using the numerous cellphones they sneaked in, often with the help of guards who were bribed.

The gangs have such influence in Brazil's prisons, where authorities themselves often divide prisons based on gang membership, that officials force new inmates to choose a side to limit violence.

“The first question they ask you is, 'What gang do you belong to?'” said Mr. Quirino, who runs a program that helps keep poor children out of gangs. “In other words, they have to understand where to place you within the system, or you will die.”

That has helped criminal groups grow their ranks.

“The prison functions as a space for labor recruitment,” said Jacqueline Muniz, Rio de Janeiro's former security chief.

“And for building loyalty among your criminal workforce.”

Reporting was contributed by Emiliano Rodríguez Mega of Mexico City; José María León Cabrera from Quito, Ecuador; Thalíe Ponce from Guayaquil, Ecuador; Genevieve Glatsky from Bogotá, Colombia; and Laurence Blair from Asuncion, Paraguay.