El Comité: La Toma del Penal García Moreno

MARCH 19
​5PM

PUBLIC TRUST 
4017 WALNUT STREET

On March 19th, anthropologist and filmmaker Jorge Nuñéz will screen his documentary El Comité: La Toma del Penal García Moreno at 5 pm at The Public Trust (4017 Walnut Street)
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Following the film, we will engage in a conversation with Jorge about Ecuador’s current prison crisis: How did Ecuadorian prisons evolve into spaces of extreme violence and dehumanization? How can we understand the spiral of organized crime violence? How did Ecuador go from being one of the safest countries in Latin America to being one the most violent in the region?

EL COMITÉ: LA TOMA DEL PENAL GARCÍA MORENO

Director: Mateo Herrera. Producer: Jorge Núñez

This ethnographic film follows a group of inmates that take over Ecuador's oldest maximum-security penitentiary, a late 19th-century panopticon in Quito. This is a story of prison revolt against corruption and institutional abuses experienced by people living behind bars.

Through El Comité, viewers are offered a window into the long-term history of Ecuador's current prison crisis. This film serves as an ethnographic critique of the state's role in exacerbating cycles of violence, pushes against policies favoring militarization and criminalization, and offers an insider view to inmates’ daily life and organizing struggles.

Jorge Núñez

Jorge Núñez is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. He is the cofounder of Kaleidos at the University of Cuenca, and codirector of the Ecuadorian Prison Observatory 593. He is also the lead designer of the digital platform EthnoData. Among other things, Jorge studies cocaine markets and state violence. He has conducted collaborative ethnography with prisoners and their families for twenty years.

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