Clashes between drug gangs on Thursday claimed at least 17 lives in the second deadly riot in an Ecuadoran prison in days, with rampaging inmates beheading and maiming rivals, officials in the violence-wracked country said.

Bloody fighting broke out in a prison in the troubled coastal city of Esmeraldas, near the Colombian border, where police said they found 10 dead prisoners in two cell blocks — adding to about 500 inmates massacred in the country since 2021.

Images shared on social media and verified by Agence France-Presse showed dead men sprawled on the ground with bare, blood-stained torsos, at least two of them decapitated.

Dozens of worried family members gathered outside the prison for news of their loved ones Thursday as the SNAI prison authority raised the official toll from 10 in the morning to 17 by lunchtime.

“There are women here who have been asking after their relatives since 5:30am,” an anguished woman, who asked not to be named, told AFP.

She herself rushed to the prison after receiving a call from people who live nearby and told her “they heard the shooting, they heard the screams.”

When she arrived, she said, soldiers told her to go to the morgue to check if her loved one was dead or alive.

On Monday, 13 prisoners and a guard were reported killed in southwest Ecuador, whose overcrowded and violent prisons have become operational centers for organized crime groups. Officials said the dead inmates belonged to the rival Los Choneros and Los Lobos gangs, two of the biggest drug trafficking groups in Ecuador. Earlier this month, the U.S. designated both gangs as foreign terrorist organizations.

Nestled between the globe’s top two cocaine exporters — Colombia and Peru — the country of some 17 million people has seen violence spiral in recent years as rival gangs with ties to Mexican and Colombian cartels vie for control.

More than 70% of all cocaine produced in the world now passes through Ecuador’s ports, according to government data.

Since February 2021, gang wars have largely played out inside the country’s prisons, where inmates have often been killed in gruesome fashion — their bodies dismembered and burnt.

Prison parties, live broadcasts

Ecuador’s prisons are among the most dangerous in the world. The penitentiaries have been under military control since January 2024, when President Daniel Noboa declared a state of “internal armed conflict” after a brutal wave of gang violence.

Prison officials have also been targeted. Last September, the director of Ecuador’s biggest prison, Maria Daniela Icazawas killed in an armed attack while driving. Her death came just days after the head of a different prison, Alex Guevara, was killed, also in an attack while traveling by car.

Ecuador’s biggest prison massacre happened in 2021, when more than 100 inmates were killed in the port city of Guayaquil in the southwest.

Inmates have on more than one occasion gone live on social media to broadcast their violent campaigns, showing off the decapitated and charred bodies of their enemies.

Last year, gang members took scores of prison guards hostage after the jailbreak of narco boss Jose Adolfo Macias, aka “Fito,” while allies on the outside detonated bombs and held a television presenter at gunpoint live on air.

Fito, the boss of the Los Choneros gang, was recaptured in June this year, more than a year after his escape.

He had been serving a 34-year sentence since 2011 for involvement in organized crime, drug trafficking and murder, but continued pulling the strings of the criminal underworld from behind bars.

Videos emerged of Fito holding wild parties before he escaped from prison, some with fireworks, illustrating the lawlessness of such facilities.

In July, the Ecuadoran government extradited Fito to the U.S., where he pleaded not guilty to chargesincluding international cocaine distribution and smuggling firearms.