SHOCKING bodycam footage from inside Ecuador's most infamous prison shows helmeted police charging through barred gates and smoke-filled corridors as another bout of inmate violence tears through the compound.
The clip, circulating widely after being posted late on Saturday, appears to capture officers moving block by block through the Penitenciaría del Litoral in Guayaquil, the vast, overcrowded complex that has become a byword for cartel bloodshed.
In the footage, tactical officers in black kit and 'POLICIA' vests push past smashed chairs and open steel doors. Some carry riot shields. Others have pistols raised as they sweep underwalks marked Bloque II and Bloque A. Inmates in prison colours can be glimpsed behind the bars as bursts of gas and gunfire echo off the concrete.
The original post sharing the video said the riot had begun that morning and warned that 'bean bags and CS pepper balls aren't enough' — a blunt assessment of how quickly less-lethal crowd-control rounds can fail when gangs inside the jail are already armed and organised.
Ecuador's prison service, SNAI, said the latest clashes involved inmates in pavilions 3, 5, 8 and 9. Officials put the confirmed toll from the newest fighting at at least 12 prisoners dead and three wounded, while stressing the centre was 'under control' even as security units continued sweeping the blocks.
Gunfire was heard from outside the walls from the afternoon into the night. AFP correspondents reported aerial images showing bodies on the ground inside the compound.
Social media accounts have attached far higher death figures, some claiming 68 dead, to the same video. That number matches a previous massacre at the same jail in November 2021, and authorities have not confirmed a toll on that scale for this weekend's unrest.
The Litoral prison, officially the Centro de Rehabilitación Social de Varones No. 1 of Guayaquil, is Ecuador's largest. It has been the stage for some of Latin America's worst jail massacres, including the September 2021 slaughter in which more than 100 inmates were killed as rival factions fought for control of the wings.
Those wars have never really ended. Gangs linked to cocaine trafficking, among them Los Choneros, Los Lobos, Los Lagartos and allied street groups, treat the pavilions as territory. Weapons, phones and cash continue to find their way inside. Relatives and rights groups say the jail is also in the grip of a separate catastrophe: overcrowding, tuberculosis and malnutrition that killed hundreds of inmates in 2025 alone.
The video itself is raw and claustrophobic. Officers file through a waiting area of cracked tiles and plastic chairs, then out into a covered yard. One officer points a compact launcher skyward. Another covers a barred doorway while colleagues stack up behind shields. Smoke drifts across the walkway as they approach a black steel gate with prisoners visible in the gloom beyond.
It is the kind of footage that rarely leaves Ecuador's prison system: not a press-managed raid, but a frantic, close-quarters push through a facility that has repeatedly slipped beyond the state's grip.
SNAI said prosecutors would take over the body counts and crime-scene work in the coming hours. Police and military units remained inside and around the complex on Sunday as investigators tried to establish which factions opened fire first, and how many more bodies may still be inside the blocks.
For a country that has spent years militarising its jails and declaring states of emergency, the pictures are grimly familiar. The officers on camera are doing what Ecuadorian security forces have been asked to do again and again: retake a prison that the gangs never fully surrendered.
Whether Saturday's operation holds is another question. At Litoral, control has a habit of lasting only until the next fight for the next pavilion.
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