The last time Verónica saw her son was on December 16, 2025. She was tending the small food stand that supports her family—a makeshift stove, some plastic tables and chairs by the side of the road that connects Quinindé with Esmeraldas, on Ecuador’s northern coast. From early morning, she watched for the military convoy that was taking her son to the Encuentro maximum-security prison, built in the middle of a forest, about 450 kilometers from her home. “It was as if God wanted us to see each other, because the car stopped for a moment,” she recalls.
For a few seconds, Verónica managed to make out the face of her 38-year-old son, pressed against the window. “He looked at me and gestured for me to bless him. He couldn’t raise his hands because he was in chains. I blessed him, and then my daughter and I started to cry.” That scene is etched in her memory as the worst day of her life. She never heard from him again.
For the inmates’ families, the name of the Encuentro prison has become synonymous with fear. Inaugurated by the Daniel Noboa administration as an emblem of its war against organized crime, the prison was designed following the maximum-security model that President Nayib Bukele made a symbol of his prison policy in El Salvador; it even benefited from the advice of some of the team that worked on the construction of the Cecot prison.
The Ecuadorian prison is plagued by reports of hunger, mistreatment, a tuberculosis outbreak, and a lack of medical care. Adding to this fear is the secrecy with which the authorities handle information about the inmates. Families go weeks or months without news of their relatives and, sometimes, only learn of their situation when they are transferred to another prison or when they receive news of their death.
Three prisoners died in May at that penitentiary. Two of the deaths were attributed to tuberculosis and the last to pancreatitis. “No one dies from pancreatitis overnight,” says Ana Morales, spokesperson for the Committee of Families for a Dignified Life Inside and Outside Prisons (Cofavid). “If someone dies from that cause, it was due to a lack of timely medical attention.”
The lack of information about who is sent to Encuentro has also raised questions. The latest death in the prison was a trans woman who had not received a final sentence, according to the Silueta X Association. “The UN Bangkok Rules are binding on Ecuador. A trans woman held in maximum security, without a final sentence and without a documented gender protocol, was not invisible; it was the State’s responsibility,” stated Zackary Elías, deputy director of the organization, which is demanding an investigation under Inter-American standards.
Much of what is known about the conditions inside Encuentro prison has come from testimonies of prisoners transferred to other prisons or from information leaked by prison officials. One of these leaks was a photograph showing the transfer of 11 of 35 inmates diagnosed with tuberculosis to the Guayaquil Regional Prison, as documented by Cofavid.
The photograph was taken during a nighttime transfer. Under the glare of spotlights, a line of prisoners slowly advances in the darkness. They are men reduced to extreme emaciation. Skin and bones. Some can barely stand on their own two feet and seek support from the equally frail bodies of those walking beside them. One of them needs to be held by both arms to stay upright. Another seems unable to lift his head.
The government remained silent. After a few days, the Minister of the Interior, Nataly Morillo, confirmed the transfers in an interview with the media outlet Visionarias. “Each person deprived of their liberty within the Encuentro prison is in their own space, in their own environment; they have the areas they need. There is no epidemic within the prison system,” she said.
