The mayor of Ecuador's violence-ravaged city of Guayaquil is facing "inhumane" treatment and "cruelty" in the mega-security jail where he is being held in a corruption probe, his lawyer said Wednesday.
Aquiles Alvarez and his two businessman brothers were arrested last month on allegations of money laundering and tax fraud in a scandal estimated to have cost the state $61.5 million.
A fierce critic of President Daniel Noboa, 41-year-old Alvarez was detained in a dawn raid, and photos released by prosecutors showed bags with bundles of cash found.
Lawyer Ramiro Garcia told AFP on Wednesday that he believes Alvarez was transferred on Sunday to the so-called Encuentro penitentiary because the facility "allows the government to torture inmates psychologically and socially."
Encuentro is a new prison dedicated to leaders of criminal organizations and politicians convicted of corruption.
Alvarez is suffering "total isolation" in a single-person cell and is not allowed to "go out to the yard or have five minutes of sunlight a day," Garcia said after visiting him on Tuesday.
The prison has shaved his head, a policy that Interior Minister John Reimberg told reporters is "mandatory, no matter what" in the facility.
Garcia said that, along with taking away his Bible and lack of contact with the outside world, the prison's treatment of his client was "inhumane".
"This is what, under international standards, is called inhumane or degrading treatment," he said.
These are "acts of cruelty" and are "highly symptomatic of a regime with clear shades of authoritarianism," he added.
Alvarez won the mayor's office in Guayaquil in alliance with the Citizen Revolution Movement party of opposition socialist ex-president Rafael Correa.
Noboa "wants to remove his main rival from the political chessboard," Garcia said.
On Tuesday, the Citizen Revolution Movement party was suspended for nine months -- a move party leaders called "unprecedented."
Guayaquil, a city of nearly three million people, is the nexus of Ecuador's ballooning drug trade.
Its port has become a major transit point for drug smugglers trafficking cocaine from neighboring Colombia and Peru en route to the United States and Europe.
Murder rates have soared in the city, while car bombings, murders and prison massacres have become routine.
