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

The fighting in the troubled coastal city of Esmeraldas, near the Colombian border, added to a toll of about 500 inmates massacred in Ecuador since 2021.

Images shared on social media show dead men sprawled on the ground with bare, blood-stained torsos. 

At least two of them were decapitated, and many had stab wounds.

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 killed in southwest Ecuador, whose overcrowded and violent prisons have become hubs for organized crime groups.

In that incident, prisoners used guns and explosives and an unknown number escaped. Some were recaptured.

Nestled between the globe’s top two cocaine exporters – Colombia and Peru – Ecuador has seen violence spiral in recent years as rival gangs with ties to international cartels vie for control.

More than 70 percent of all cocaine produced in the world now passes through the ports of Ecuador, a country of around 17 million people, 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.

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 attacks, showing off the maiming of their enemies.

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

President Daniel Noboa has declared a ‘state of internal armed conflict’ and ordered that the military temporarily take control of the prisons.

Macias – 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 he continued pulling the strings of the criminal underworld from behind bars.

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