A man who endured nearly ten years in some of Ecuador’s harshest prisons shared his most harrowing near-death experience. Pieter Tritton’s journey into crime began in his teenage years, leading to imprisonment for smuggling cocaine and amphetamines during his college years. Even after serving time, he found it difficult to abandon his illegal activities, establishing drug routes from Ecuador and concealing cocaine in camping gear.
In 2005, his illicit operations were exposed by UK authorities, resulting in his incarceration in Quito, one of the world’s most perilous prisons. He was later moved to another violent correctional facility in Guayaquil, spending over nine years in total between the two.
Throughout his incarceration, Tritton witnessed extreme violence, disease, and horrific deaths, and he nearly lost his own life. He recounted an incident to LADbible where an assassination attempt was made on his prison wing.
“One particular one that stands out, when a third gang came into the prison, that was it, that de-stabilized everything,” he shared.
“They were called the Choneros and they are now probably Ecuador’s principal gang.”
“They end up on the wing that I’m on… the boss of the Choneros… I got on with him quite well, very well to be honest.”
“I used to cook with them, have food with them, party with them, everything. I was still selling coke for them, you know, they were friends at the end of the day.”
“And then the Cubanos started getting p****d off at the situation, feeling threatened by them, their presence. So the Cubanos sent in a hit team to our wing.”
He described how the rival gang executed the attack one evening, leading to prolonged violence and death.
“We get locked into the wing at 5pm, I’m looking around the wing and I’m like, ‘there’s hardly anybody out in the wing this evening,'” he recalled.
“Normally all the doors are open, there’s people getting high, there’s loads of smoke and there’s music playing.”
“I said, ‘there’s something going on we don’t know about’.”
“Why’s nobody out? What are these people doing that just come on the wing?”
“So this guy that had come in to basically kill as many of the Choneros as he could… He sat up in a hammock by the main gate, with his little group of Comer Muertos, as they call them, who were contract killers.”
Tritton recounted a moment when he was handing a plate to one of the Choneros’ leaders when the chaos erupted.
“… Somebody comes up behind me, so behind my shoulder, and as I turned to walk away… the guy’s fired from behind me over my shoulder,” he explained, as the bullet struck his fellow inmate directly in the face.
“And yeah I just ran. Normally, when people got killed there, it’d be like bang, bang, bang, someone’s dead, and you’d come out and see,” he said.
“This wasn’t that, this was a full on attempt at killing the whole lot. And there’s about 20 or 30 Choneros on the wing.”
“So all hell breaks loose. There’s bullets flying, there’s things hitting my door. I’m thinking, they’re gonna come through the door in a minute.”
“Sometimes they come around with a petrol bomb to smoke you out.”
“If you wouldn’t open the door, they either smash the door down if they could or they’d throw a petrol bomb through that space and smoke you out, burn you out.”
The gunfight continued for two hours, with hand grenades being deployed during the violent confrontation. Following this ordeal, Tritton was relocated to Wandsworth Prison in the UK, which he likened to ‘a holiday camp’.