President Daniel Noboa anticipated that he has already identified three barges that he would bring to Ecuador while he builds the new prisons.
President Daniel Noboa and the Minister of Government, Mónica Palencia, on November 24, 2023.
President Daniel Noboa anticipated details of his plan to intervene in the prison system, which includes the construction of maximum-security prisons to isolate the most dangerous prisoners. That is one of the critical points in terms of security that the president faces.
And, while the construction of the prisons is being carried out, the idea is to transfer the inmates to barge prisons, the president detailed in the interview “A look at Quito”, broadcast this December 6.
The president announced that the maximum-security prison project will be carried out with “the same people, the same companies” with which Nayib Bukele worked in El Salvador for his megaprison.
The megaprison in El Salvador, called the Terrorism Confinement Center, was built to house 40,000 convicted gang members or detained under an emergency regime.
The center has been cataloged by the Government of President Nayib Bukele as the “largest prison in Latin America” and was inaugurated in February 2023.
Noboa explained that this project requires Israeli cooperation in the design of maximum-security prisons, known as “supermax”, and the segmentation of minor crimes and contraventions.
“It’s a system, it‘s not that Bukele invented it… it came from Mexico, they achieved it in Thailand, they achieved it in Singapore… and now it would come to Ecuador,” the president explained.
Prison Barges
The president assured that the implementation of barges “was always a complementary and provisional measure ” to segment and isolate highly dangerous prisoners until the Government builds maximum security prisons.
And the Executive is already working to obtain the barges. According to Noboa, they have already identified three options to bring to the country: one is in Australia, another in the United Kingdom and the third in the United States.
The president explained that a barge can arrive in the country “in seven, eight months,” depending on where they are located.
Noboa expressed that it is necessary to intervene mainly in the Litoral Penitentiary, which is where the central problem of the prison crisis is.
He explained that we should start with the basics, such as removing plugs from the cells, so that the gang leaders have nowhere to charge their cell phones, for example. “That is more than the technology, it is the administrative body of the prison,” she explained.
