Overwhelmed by the violence of narco bands, Ecuadorians will go to the polls this Sunday, April 13 to choose president in a close ballot between Noboa and his leftist rival Luisa González.
The president focused the campaign on the continuity of his hard hand policy against the crime that included the promise of expanding the prison system.
But only one of the two prisons that ordered to build in 2024 advances, at a slow pace. Prison barges did not speak again.
The bases of the “Encuentro prison” are in the impoverished town of the Pacific, in the coast of Santa Elena (southwest). Its inhabitants live without drinking water, Internet connection or a health center, the AFP found.
The Noboa emblematic project is reached through a cobbled, narrow and destroyed by rains.
“Record” time
In October 2024, authorities reported that the work had an advance of 30%. The then director of the agency that manages the prisons (SNAI), Luis Zaldumbide, launched a promise: the prison for 800 people would be ready in the “record” of 300 days. The deadline expires in May.
About thirty hooded men attacked the work with explosives and killed a worker in December.
“Following the explosion, everything stopped, but since February we see four or five cars come and go with material and military every day,” says Welcome Salinas, a local farmer.
The peasants do not dare to go to the site. “It’s full of military and if they see us, they take us out,” he says.
A day before the authorities put the symbolic first stone, government officials gathered the settlers. “They informed us of the prison. The decision had already made it without us,” says Omar Laines, community leader of the town of 4 thousand inhabitants.
The lands “are ours by ancestral right and we have a title of property” to be descendants of a pre -Columbian people, he adds.
Bukele style
Consulted by the AFP, the prison authority He alleged “security” reasons not to provide information on the progress of the work.
The prison plans to occupy 16.2 hectares. The plans include six surveillance towers of 9.5 meters high and a nine -meter wall. In addition, telephony and internet signal blockers and a closed television circuit will be installed.
The prison project was inspired by the design of the megaprision built by Bukele, with capacity for 40 thousand people and white of criticism for abuse against human rights.
“We were painted by little birds, which were going to build many works. They have only given us a field,” says Mercedes Laines, who rejects the project.
In principle Noboa said that the company that built the prison of El Salvador would be in charge of doing so in Ecuador.
However, the US $ 52 million contract was awarded to the Spanish bridges and roads infrastructure, a subsidiary of a Chinese firm without relation to that of El Salvador.
“The country is not there to continue making prisons. We could avoid this expense and strengthen the current prison system,” says Mario Pazmiño, security expert and former intelligence chief of the Ecuadorian army.
“It has been in pause”
The largest penitentiary complex in Ecuador is in the port of Guayaquil (southwest) and has been the scene of brutal massacres between prisoners that since 2021 leave about 500 dead.
“Ecuador always looks in the mirror of El Salvador, but everything is part of a political discourse, not prison rehabilitation,” adds Pazmiño.
Noboa offered a second maximum security prison to isolate mafia leaders. In principle it was going to be in the Amazon Archidona, but protests of indigenous and mestizos forced to relocate the project.
“There is no such work, nor planes, nothing,” says Priscila del Pezo, councilor of Coastal Salinas, whose mayor offered a land in the small port of Anconcito.
The plan “has been pause for the electoral contest, but better because we do not want it,” he adds of the Pezo.
If the first prison looks little, there is nothing of the second. The land destined is full of weeds, the AFP found.