Authorities try to end prison standoff
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QUITO, Ecuador (AP) -- Ecuador's top police authority planned to meet with inmate leaders Wednesday in search of a solution to a prison standoff in which more than 300 visitors have been held captive since the weekend, officials said.
Interior Minister Raul Baca invited inmate protest leaders to his office to discuss demands that include a new law to reduce sentences and modern facilities to relieve overcrowding, prison official Fernando Cassis told Channel 4 television.
"The prison system is at the bottom of an abyss. We are also knocking on doors ... to help the prisons," Cassis said.
Quito's Garcia Moreno prison was designed to hold 400 prisoners but houses about 1,100 and lacks running water.
Inmates say some 380 friends and family members voluntarily stayed after visiting hours on Sunday to join the peaceful protest. Authorities say prisoners welded doors shut and are holding the guests against their will.
Since the sit-in began, the Red Cross has evacuated dozens of sick visitors or those in need of daily medication by using pulley systems to lower them over prison walls.
"My son-in-law doesn't have a cell," an unidentified woman told reporters upon her evacuation. "My grandson and I had to sleep on a corridor floor."
Prison officials said food is still being provided to inmates and visitors and that riot police have not been deployed in an attempt to avoid bloodshed.
Ecuador's government declared a state of emergency in the prison system January 15 after a series of protests. Some 1,500 inmates were released because they had been held for more than a year without trial.
The move caused a public backlash after it became known that the freed prisoners included accused murderers, drug traffickers and rapists, some of them re-arrested for new crimes.
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