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QUITO: Clashes between rival drug gangs claimed at least 10 lives in the second deadly riot in an Ecuadoran prison in days, police in the violence-wracked country said Thursday.
Bloody fighting broke out in a prison in the troubled coastal city of Esmeraldas, near the Colombian border, where police said they found 10 dead prisoners in two cell blocks — adding to about 500 inmates massacred in the country since 2021.
Images shared on social media and verified by AFP show dead men sprawled on the ground with bare, blood-stained torsos, at least two of them decapitated.
Worried family members gathered outside the prison for news of their loved ones.
On Monday, 13 prisoners and a guard were reported killed in southwest Ecuador, whose overcrowded and violent prisons have become operational centers for organized crime groups.
Nestled between the globe’s top two cocaine exporters — Colombia and Peru — the country of some 17 million people has seen violence spiral in recent years as rival gangs with ties to Mexican and Colombian cartels vie for control.
More than 70 percent of all cocaine produced in the world now passes through Ecuador’s ports, according to government data.
Since February 2021, gang wars have largely played out inside the country’s prisons, where inmates have often been killed in gruesome fashion — their bodies dismembered and burnt.

- Prison parties, live broadcasts -

Ecuador’s biggest prison massacre happened in 2021, when more than 100 inmates were killed in the port city of Guayaquil in the southwest.
Inmates have on more than one occasion gone live on social media to broadcast their violent campaigns, showing off the decapitated and charred bodies of their enemies.
Last year, gang members took scores of prison guards hostage after the jailbreak of narco boss, Jose Adolfo Macias, aka “Fito,” while allies on the outside detonated bombs and held a television presenter at gunpoint live on air.
President Daniel Noboa declared a “state of internal armed conflict” and ordered that the military temporarily take control of the prisons.
Fito — the boss of the Los Choneros gang — was recaptured in June this year, more than a year after his escape.
He had been serving a 34-year sentence since 2011 for involvement in organized crime, drug trafficking and murder, but continued pulling the strings of the criminal underworld from behind bars.
Videos emerged of Fito holding wild parties before he escaped from prison, some with fireworks, illustrating the lawlessness of such facilities.

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump suggested the US could lift sanctions on Turkiye and allow it to buy US F-35 jets as he kicked off talks with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, but said he wanted Ankara to stop purchases of Russian oil.
Erdogan’s first visit to the White House in about six years comes at a time when Ankara is keen to take advantage of a US administration eager to make deals in return for big-ticket arms and trade agreements.
Seated side by side in the Oval Office, Trump called Erdogan a “very tough man” and said he would like to see Turkiye stop purchases of Russian oil.
Turkiye, Hungary and Slovakia are the main European purchasers of Russian oil and Trump is pressing for them to stop.
“I’d like to have him stop buying any oil from Russia while Russia continues this rampage against Ukraine,” Trump said of Erdogan.
Asked whether he was willing to make a deal to sell F-35s to Turkiye, Trump told reporters: “I think he’ll be successful in buying the things that he wants to buy.”

Trump also said he could lift sanctions against Turkiye “very soon,” and that “if we have a good meeting, almost immediately.”
He said they would discuss the issue in their Oval Office talks followed by lunch.
Former President Joe Biden had kept Turkiye at arm’s length partly over what it saw as the fellow NATO member’s close ties with Russia. Under Trump, who views Moscow more favorably and has closer personal ties with Erdogan, Ankara is hoping for a better relationship.
Trump and Erdogan — both seen as increasingly autocratic by their critics at home — had a checkered relationship during the Republican president’s first term. But since his return to the White House, their interests have aligned on Syria — source of the biggest bilateral strain in the past — where the US and Turkiye now both strongly back the central government.
They remain sharply at odds over US ally Israel’s attacks on Gaza, which Ankara calls a genocide — a potential wild card in what are otherwise expected to be friendly and transactional talks in the Oval Office.

US sanctions block F-35 sales
The mood shift has renewed Turkish hopes that Trump and Erdogan, who have exchanged mutual praise, can find a way around US sanctions imposed by Trump himself in 2020 over Turkiye’s acquisition of Russian S-400 missile defenses.
That, in turn, could pave the way for Ankara to buy Lockheed Martin’s advanced F-35 fighter jets, for which it was both a buyer and manufacturer until it was barred over the S-400s.
Erdogan has said the defense industry, including the topic of F-35s and ongoing negotiations over 40 F-16 jets Ankara also wants, would be a focus of the meeting, along with regional wars, energy and trade.
A US official said Washington had in recent days drafted a statement of intent — a document used to facilitate talks — for several sales to Turkiye, including the new F-16s that would bolster its existing fleet.
Turkiye asked for advanced equipment and modifications on the F-16s in their order, making the jets cost more than a standard F-35, the official said. But F-35s were omitted from the draft statement because the US cannot legally sell them while Turkiye has the S-400s, the person added.
Turkish government officials did not immediately comment on the F-16 costs.
Turkiye, NATO’s second-largest army, wants to ramp up air power to counter what it sees as growing threats in the Middle East, Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, where it neighbors Russia and Ukraine.