By Laura Gamba

BOGOTA, Colombia 

At least 13 inmates were killed in a riot at a prison in Ecuador on Monday, the country's prison agency reported.

The incident occurred at the Bellavista prison in Santo Domingo, located 70 kilometers (43 miles) southwest of Ecuador’s capital Quito, the same one in which 44 inmates died in another riot in May.

"Unfortunately, the staff of the center reports at the moment that 13 PPL (people deprived of liberty) died and 2 are wounded," the National Service of Attention to People Deprived of Liberty (SNAI) said on Twitter.

According to the agency, "control was retaken with the support of police and military personnel.”

Ecuador's Interior Minister, Patricio Carrillo, said the police were working "to control the prisons" and expressed his regrets. The Prosecutor's Office has said it initiated investigations into the incident, from which violent videos have emerged on social media.

Ecuador’s President Guillermo Lasso has not issued a statement on the tragic events, but in the past, he has accused judges of restricting the state’s ability to combat the violence by limiting a 60-day state of emergency in the prison system that was declared at the end of last September. The state of emergency was aimed at strengthening controls with military assistance and free funding.

Around 400 inmates have died in Ecuador's prisons since February 2021, according to the government, due to increasing violence between criminal gangs linked to drug trafficking that are waging a war for power inside and outside Ecuador's prisons, which are considered among the most violent in the region, according to human rights organizations.