Guatemala declares siege after gangsters seize prisons, take hostages

Guatemalan authorities declared a state of siege Sunday in response to three coordinated prison-gang uprisings and the related killing of nine local police officers, according to multiple outlets.

Inmates briefly seized three prisons and took 46 guards hostage Saturday, according to various reports. The new declared state of siege will last for 30 days and is intended to aid law enforcement in combating organized crime groups, The New York Times (NYT) reported Sunday.

The siege was in response to authorities revoking some privileges from gang leaders and demanding that leaders be moved to lower security facilities, multiple outlets reported. Authorities regained control of the prisons on Sunday, spurring a further wave of “simultaneous attacks” in the country’s capital, which saw nine officers killed, ten officers injured, and one gang member killed as of mid-Monday.

“They rioted in the prisons and took hostages with the intention of making the state accept their demands, which for decades were granted,” Guatemalan President Bernardo Arévalo said at a news conference on Sunday afternoon, according to the NYT. Arévalo called the Sunday unrest in the capital “an attempt to terrorize security forces and the population so that the government relents in its head-on fight against the gangs.”

The head of the notorious Barrio 18 gang, Aldo Duppie, known as El Lobo — who is currently serving a collective 2,000 years in prison — was apprehended in one of the rioting prisons on Sunday, Reuters reported.

The U.S. State Department classified Barrio 18 as a Foreign Terrorist Organization in September 2025, labelling the group as “one of the largest gangs in our hemisphere,” and citing “attacks against security personnel, public officials, and civilians in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.”

Guatemala soon followed suit, designating Barrio 18 as a terrorist group in October 2025 in response to a jailbreak that month of twenty members of the organization.

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