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In January 2024, Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa ordered a military takeover of the prison system in response to a series of coordinated criminal attacks. The announcement followed the lead of previous Ecuadorian administrations that had announced similar temporary police and military interventions into the increasingly overcrowded, violent, and anarchic prison system since 2019. However, Noboa’s 2024 decree turned the military into an occupation force, effectively supplanting civilian control over the prison system.
Reports of homophobic abuse against trans women, water restrictions, intentional starvation, blatant torture, rampant untreated tuberculosis, and daily beatings and abuse quickly surfaced and continue today.
Noboa’s crackdown sought to dismantle criminal control behind bars, reduce inmate violence and deaths, and establish official bureaucratic control over the prison system. However, after more than two years, the policy has failed on all counts. Deaths behind bars have reached record highs, most prisons remain largely out of bureaucratic state control, and a growing number of reports show the military has been corrupted by prison gangs.
A Quick, Popular Fix
Similar militarized prison interventions have occurred across Latin America in Honduras, Brazil, and, most notoriously, El Salvador. Countries around the region, like Ecuador, have promised to build institutions like El Salvador’s massive high-security prison, CECOT, in order to confront organized crime. In November 2025, the Ecuadorian government announced it was constructing a new high-security center inspired by El Salvador in an attempt to limit illicit control over the prison system.
These aggressive security policies help President Noboa claim he is delivering on promises for tough-on-crime policies in response to rising rates of violence across Ecuador. The political benefits for the visible and dramatic military takeovers and the highly-publicized construction of his new high-security prison were immediately apparent, with his popularity rating surging to 80 percent the month after. But the long-term success of these policies is far from certain. At the same time, the costs in lives and human rights abuses continue to mount. As part of my Ph.D. investigation into Ecuador’s prison system over the past three years, I have compiled data from a variety of sources that show a clear increase in deaths behind bars since militarization in 2024:
2025 saw a record number of deaths behind bars, with at least 732 lives lost in a system with almost 37,000. In other words, nearly 2 percent of all inmates died behind bars last year. 2025 was the deadliest year for the prison system in Ecuador’s recent history—worse even than 2021, when the collapse of the Choneros criminal group led to repeated prison massacres.
This new peak in deaths is largely driven by tuberculosis, but these deaths from illness are not unforeseeable nor unpreventable. With proper treatment, tuberculosis is usually not fatal. Deficient sanitary conditions, a lack of access to basic medicines, and, more than anything, insufficient food, have killed hundreds. The Ecuadorian prison system failed to provide these basic and constitutionally guaranteed rights for the imprisoned people under its care. Ecuadorian courts have repeatedly placed culpability on the prison system and demanded change without achieving significant improvement. In Noboa’s tough-on-crime Ecuador, inmate deaths either do not matter or are actively the point. “The conditions could be so much worse,” the president bluntly told New Yorker journalist Jon Lee Anderson in 2024.
“Killing Them Little By Little”
Dozens of mothers of currently or formerly incarcerated individuals—some of whom died while in prison—spoke to me with the pseudonyms used below to avoid harassment or reprisal by state officials.
“They want to end them all. They’re killing them little by little,” said Rosa Vera, whose son suffers from tuberculosis and extortion in the horribly overcrowded Litoral prison. “[By] not giving them proper food, by taking away their benefits, like the money their families send them for the [commissary] Sol Market… That’s what the current government wants: to kill all the people behind bars.”
But the long-term success of these policies is far from certain. At the same time, the costs in lives and human rights abuses continue to mount.
The quality and quantity of food is horrific. State inaction causes systemic malnutrition, which, in some cases, leads to death from tuberculosis. “They treat them like animals. They give them bread that’s already molding and yogurts that have gone bad,” said María Zabrano, the mother of two incarcerated brothers. In 2024, one of her sons died from malnutrition and tuberculosis. Prior to his death, he was “so skinny, so delicate, that my son couldn’t walk.” She now fears that her only living child will similarly die.
Rosa Vera shares this fear, as she has seen first-hand the consequences of malnutrition. Speaking about her son, she said, “When he first arrived [in prison], he weighed 130 pounds. Today he barely weighs 92 pounds.” Medical attention has been lacking: “After 5 months, he received medical attention at the prison clinic… His symptoms are now: vomiting, clots, diarrhea, fever, and chills.”
Ana Morales, leader of the Committee of Families for a Dignified Life Inside and Outside of Prisons, (Comité de Familiares por una vida Digna dentro y fuera de Cárceles) explained that recent transfers of ill inmates to facilities with better health clinics and less overcrowding have helped in the fight against tuberculosis. However, these changes have been slow, and she is clear that this happened only after years of sustained pressure from family members. “It’s not that they’ve actually opened a direct dialogue with the Committee of Families for a Dignified Life. We’ve tried to speak with them directly to establish a direct channel of communication. But they haven’t listened to us. We had to resort to legal action against the state,” she said.
Militarization Breeds Violence
In addition to deaths from illness, the Ecuadorian prison system is still incredibly violent.
There were at least 119 documented violent deaths in 2025. Both 2024 and 2025 saw more intentional killings behind bars than 2023. Massacres in prisons controlled by the military continued, and repeated riots and killings in a prison run by the police since 2024 forced authorities to close it down in mid March 2026.
Militarizing the prison system did not stop violence. Instead, soldiers have replaced criminal gangs and become the main perpetrators of torture, abuse, and extortion within prisons.
“The prisons that are not militarized don’t have that [violent abuse] problem. But in those that are, [prisoners] are tortured, with cruel and inhuman treatment at the hands of the military,” explained Liz, the wife of one formerly incarcerated individual. “It hurts because he is a human and he doesn’t deserve that. Nothing justifies what has happened to him,” she said.
In another prison, El Rodeo in the Manabí province, families gathered outside when the military first went in. “The soldiers took them out [of their cells] early in the morning. We could hear them screaming.” Maria recounted the death of another inmate at the hands of state forces. “He died because the soldiers kept climbing on his back and stomach and jumping on his chest,” she said. “[He was] coughing up blood. They thought it was tuberculosis, but it wasn’t… They had burst the boy’s lungs.”
“It’s Hell From the Moment You Walk In”
Violence between inmates stemming from gang rivalries or debt-related killings continue under the military’s watch. In November 2025, Noboa announced the opening of a new high-security prison, “El Encuentro” in the Santa Elena province. The move was spurred by the failure of his security policy to curb violence in the country.
State officials theorized that by centralizing prison gang leadership without communication in the new center, they would improve conditions inside other prisons. In reality, the absence of effective state control to replace criminal governance after removing gang leaders to the new prison resulted in new, less-experienced leadership vying for positions of power throughout the country, both inside and outside of the prison system. In other words, targeting criminal leadership destabilized and fragmented criminal networks, creating violent power vacuums that have only worsened homicide rates over the past years of Ecuador’s mano dura crackdown.
In other words, targeting criminal leadership destabilized and fragmented criminal networks, creating violent power vacuums that have only worsened homicide rates over the past years of Ecuador’s mano dura crackdown.
Authorities also expected that the threat of being transferred to this new, harsher prison would cause prison gangs to behave better. However, a month after inaugurating El Encuentro, there was a massacre in a prison in southern Ecuador that left 13 dead. The state’s plan to dismantle gangs by targeting leadership and psychologically terrorize inmates into compliance under the threat of transfer does not seem to be working. Meanwhile, the conditions in El Encuentro run rife with human rights abuses.
Since the start of 2025, Ecuador’s prison authority has transferred hundreds of inmates to the new prison. Inside, they are brutally controlled. The prison does not allow family visits nor any real communication with the outside world. People are locked up nearly all day. They have their meals, exercise, and even use the toilet within their shared 4-person cells.
“It’s hell from the moment you walk in,” said a human rights defender specializing in the El Encuentro prison. She described the lack of ventilation and sunlight, the meager portions of food given to inmates, and the prohibition against personal items as basic as toothbrushes and pillows. “What kills them is the emotional and physical torture they endure every day. There isn’t a day without that kind of torture,” she added.
The abuse is a complex mix of psychological and bodily abuse. The expert explained how guards threaten to sexually abuse inmates. “They grab them, undress them, and stroke their backsides with their baton… They don’t penetrate them. It’s just to scare them. And then they beat them up.”
Corrupt Soldiers
The conditions inside El Encuentro remain brutal, and the Ecuadorian state has little to show for it. The prison gangs which used to run the whole system remain influential behind bars, bribing guards and extorting non-affiliated individuals. Worse still, it has exposed another state institution to a new form of organized criminal corruption. Over time, the military members assigned to guard against extortion and corruption have turned into the ones extorting prisoners and smuggling in goods.
“Extortion exists [within the prison]. And it doesn’t come from organized crime now, as the state often claims,” Liz observed. “It comes from the military, the prison guards, and the police themselves.” She went on to explain that this is an inevitable outcome for any guards without sufficient oversight: “Illicit smuggling will always exist, because no matter how much one [guard] wants to be honest, the temptation will always be there for them. Money will always attract and dazzle them… As long as there is money and ambition from them, and a system that is not a system of rehabilitation, these [illicit payments] will always exist.”
Investigative reporting echoes this sentiment. Even though soldiers are assigned to each prison for a maximum of 3 months to prevent corruption, many individuals manage to stay at these unpopular posts far longer. In one infamous incident, military officials helped the leader of one of the deadliest gangs to escape through the front door dressed in military fatigues.
Noboa used the military to intervene inside the prison system because they were seen as trustworthy, disciplined, and less corrupt than other forces. Now soldiers are involved in the very criminal networks they were sent in to confront. Militarizing Ecuador’s prisons has failed, and the state should quickly transition to more productive policies based on reducing overpopulation and improving actual rehabilitation behind bars.
John Henry Murdy is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the University of Chicago who has studied the Ecuadorian prison system through extensive fieldwork, in-depth interviews from people on all sides of the prison system, and statistical analysis.