Six months ago, 16-year-old Valentina was watching TV with her cousin and younger brother at her home in Quito, Ecuador’s capital, when she received a call from her mother, Ivonne. She had been arrested again, and was in prison. She wouldn’t be coming home for a while.
The pair had been living together since Ivonne’s last prison sentence ended in 2023, and the thought of being separated again was devastating.
“I had gotten used to being with her,” says Valentina. Over the next few months she regularly burst into tears, at home, with her friends, even during school lessons. “I cried a lot,” she says. “I dreaded going to school.”
Ivonne, 33, was equally heartbroken. She was arrested in the street in the south of Quito in possession of 500 grams of marijuana, and taken to the police station where she was placed in a small holding cell with a concrete bed, and allowed to make a call.
“I felt horrible. I cried and I cried,” she says by phone from Ambato women’s prison, 150km (90 miles) south of Quito. More than 500 women are held here, mostly for drug offences. Many of them also have children on the outside.
According to the Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research (ICPR)’s World Female Imprisonment List, the incarceration of women across Latin America increased by 186% between 2000 and 2024. In Ecuador the number of women in prison stands at around 2,660, a rise of about 290% since 2002. The resultant family separations can have long-term effects on mothers and children, say experts, from struggles with mental health and feeling ostracised from society, to increasing cycles of poverty.
Silvana Tapia Tapia, an Ecuadorian lawyer and professor at Birmingham Law School in the UK, says Ivonne’s situation is typical. Women represent 7.2% of the total prison population in Ecuador, while the majority are there for drug-related offences.
Of this population, 75% have children under the age of 18, according to a 2023 Ecuador state census. Tapia, says very often these women are single mothers and come from marginalised and impoverished backgrounds.
Photo by Johanna Alarcón
Kimberley Michelle Brown 