The mayor of Ecuador’s Guayaquil faces ‘inhumane’ treatment in a high-security prison, his lawyer alleges, citing isolation and psychological pressure.
QUITO: The mayor of Ecuador’s violence-plagued city of Guayaquil is facing “inhumane” treatment and “cruelty” in the high-security prison where he is being held as part of a corruption investigation, his lawyer stated on Wednesday.
Aquiles Alvarez, a 41-year-old fierce critic of President Daniel Noboa, was arrested last month alongside his two businessman brothers on allegations of money laundering and tax fraud in a scandal estimated to have cost the state USD 61.5 million.
His lawyer, Ramiro Garcia, told AFP that he believes Alvarez was transferred on Sunday to the new Encuentro penitentiary, a facility dedicated to leaders of criminal organisations and politicians convicted of corruption, because it “allows the government to torture inmates psychologically and socially.”
Garcia, who visited his client on Tuesday, said Alvarez is suffering “total isolation” in a single-person cell and is not allowed to “go out to the yard or have five minutes of sunlight a day.”
The prison has also shaved his head, a policy that Interior Minister John Reimberg told reporters is “mandatory, no matter what” in the facility.
Along with taking away his Bible and the lack of contact with the outside world, Garcia described the prison’s treatment of his client as “inhumane” and “degrading treatment” under international standards.
He added that these are “acts of cruelty” and are “highly symptomatic of a regime with clear shades of authoritarianism.”
Alvarez won the mayor’s office in Guayaquil in alliance with the Citizen Revolution Movement party of opposition socialist ex-president Rafael Correa, a party that was itself suspended for nine months on Tuesday in a move its leaders called “unprecedented.”
Garcia asserted that President Noboa “wants to remove his main rival from the political chessboard.”
Guayaquil, a city of nearly three million people and the nexus of Ecuador’s ballooning drug trade, has seen murder rates soar alongside routine car bombings and prison massacres, with its port becoming a major transit point for cocaine smuggled from neighbouring Colombia and Peru.
