Poor health conditions, including hunger and even starvation, at Guayaquil prison are ‘unacceptable’

“People are dying of malnutrition, even starvation, at Litoral,” a member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) said following a visit to the Guayaquil prison last week. Alicia Diaz also said that inmates suffering from tuberculosis are receiving inadequate treatment and are often not isolated from other inmates.

An inmate who claims he does not get enough to eat shows off his physical condition at the Litoral prison in Guayaquil.

Diaz added that the death rate from non-violent causes at Litoral is 2,000% above the international rate for prisoners. “Something is terribly wrong,” she says. 

Although Ecuador’s national prison authority has not released final numbers, it is known that more than 600 prisoners died of non-violent causes at Litoral in 2025 out of a population of 7,000. Many of the deaths, according to IACHR, have been listed by officials as simply “a result of illness” or “cause unknown.”

In its official statement IACHR claimed that “the rights to life, personal integrity, and health of the inmates face a risk of irreparable harm” at Litoral. “Prisoners at the facility are being exposed to conditions incompatible with international standards.”

Among the conditions reported by the commission were “overcrowding, insufficient access to medical care, spread of infectious and contagious diseases, especially tuberculosis.” Structural defects at the prison were also cited, including leaking roofs and broken plumbing that requires inmates to use sinks and toilets outside of their cells.

A focus of the IACHR report was “serious limitations in access to adequate and healthy food and clean drinking water.” The commission said it observed a large number of cases of malnutrition at Litoral, a problem it said prison management seemed unconcerned about. It added it believed that many of the deaths at the prison are due to lack of food.

In its conclusions, IACHR said poor government control of prison is a “major factor” in the high death rate. “Officials have ceded internal control of parts of the prison to criminal gangs who oversee the food supply and there is no attempt to reassert control for the benefit of the general prison population,” the report said.