Latin America’s prisons are overcrowded and violent

Berta García looks, in her fleece, like a hiker passing through Latacunga, an Andean town 90km (55 miles) south of Quito, the capital of Ecuador. But Ms García is not here for the country’s spectacular volcanoes. Latacunga is also home to a prison where 27 inmates died in riots in 2021. It was here, in a jail run by drug gangs, that her 74-year-old husband was sent after being convicted in absentia of embezzlement. He has cancer, but had to sleep on the floor in an overcrowded cell. He was beaten up. After three months Ms García got him transferred to a lower-security prison. But by then incarceration had already taken its toll. “He’s very skinny, he’s aged a lot,” she says, as she visits the jail to pick up his medical files.