“We have been fighting this militarization for two years,” Estefania Garzon, spokesperson for the Alliance of Relatives of Incarcerated Individuals, told Prensa Latina.

She went to the Legislative Assembly to recount the horrors in the prisons and request supervision.

In her conversation with this news agency, the young woman explained that the presence of uniformed personnel in the penitentiaries, since President Daniel Noboa’s decree of internal armed conflict in January 2024, “has only demonstrated its cruelty toward those deprived of their liberty” and their families.

Garzon explained that the Alliance was born “out of the pain of the families, from the lack of answers from this indifferent state,” and denounced isolation, lack of food, and deaths in prison.

“They shouldn’t have to die from beatings, torture, or starvation, which is what we’re seeing today,” she emphasized.

According to the spokesperson, there was a time when the government didn’t provide food for the inmates, and it was their families who had to feed their loved ones.

“We are a group of working women, mothers, and senior citizens,” she said, stressing that the inmates “are not human waste; they are people.”

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