The cheekbones are now visible on his face. Aquiles Álvarez, the mayor of Guayaquil who remains in office despite being arrested in February, has lost about 50 pounds in the three months he has been in the El Encuentro maximum security prison. The penitentiary center, built by Nayib Bukele’s prisons, was presented as the symbol of the war against the criminal gangs that are bleeding Ecuador dry. Today it also houses political figures such as .
“The mayor is not sentenced and yet he receives the same treatment as a convicted prisoner: and they took away his Bible,” says César Poveda, one of his lawyers. The defense and the family denounce severe restrictions on visits and conditions of extreme isolation. His wife, Fiorella Ycaza, says that the last time she was able to see him physically was on March 27. Since then, after legal insistence, they have barely managed a weekly one-hour video call. In the last communication, his relatives say, the physical deterioration was evident.
Álvarez was sent to preventive detention for an investigation into organized crime. Months later, a provincial court concluded that there were insufficient elements to support this crime or justify the precautionary measure initially imposed by the judge. The prison order was revoked for him and his brothers. But by then the prosecutor’s office had already launched another process, in which it also requested preventive detention, alleging that, during a raid, the authorities detected that the mayor was not wearing the electronic shackle that had been imposed on him in another case. That file, known as case Triple Awas born from complaints of illicit fuel trafficking related to Álvarez’s family businesses.
In total, the mayor faces three investigations but none have led to a ruling. Even so, he remains held in the Encuentro, in a small cell, with a light on permanently, according to his defense. “It is not normal for a human being to sleep with the light on 24 hours a day,” says Poveda. “There is no facility to go out to the patio, there is no access to natural light. He is locked up day and night. The mayor does not have minimum conditions of dignity.”
The family’s concern increased after being in that same prison in the last month. The most recent case was known on May 15: Michael Bautista Angulo died of malnutrition and tuberculosis, according to the autopsy report released by the Committee of Relatives for a Dignified Life.
“They want to give us back our mayor in a coffin,” says Poveda. The lawyer maintains that accelerated weight loss and confinement conditions have weakened Álvarez’s immune system and exposed him to contagion.
The Minister of the Interior, John Reimberg, has rejected these questions. “There are no commissaries, there is no food income, there is nothing,” he stated in an interview with Teleamazonas. According to the official, both Álvarez and former vice president Jorge Glas, also held in El Encuentro, receive three meals a day and have “certain privileges,” including the weekly video call with their families.
In a video released by the mayor’s defense, Álvarez appears escorted by police during one of these communications and is interrupted several times by a prison official while he tries to describe the conditions inside the prison.
Since 2024, in the midst of the prison and security crisis that Ecuador is going through, the Noboa Government handed over control of the prisons to the Armed Forces. But militarization within penitentiary centers and complaints of abuse, torture and lack of food increased. With collapsed health systems and overcrowding, tuberculosis spread rapidly in prisons. According to figures from the Ministry of Public Health, 2,650 people deprived of liberty were diagnosed with the disease in 2025 and 609 died. Most of the cases were registered in the Litoral Penitentiary, in Guayaquil. The Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights has demanded urgent measures from the State, but the official response has been the creation of a technical table to discuss solutions. Meanwhile, the deaths continue.
