President Jose Maria Velasco Ibarra approved the project in 1954, funded by a three-million-dollar credit and a budget of seventeen million sucres drawn from export tax revenues. Pettinato arrived in Ecuador on 23 May 1954, delivered a series of conferences on penitentiary reform, and began working with the Guayas Provincial Council on the plans. He pushed for a location sixteen kilometers from Guayaquil, far enough from the city to matter, close enough to the Daule River to provide water and access. The fertile surrounding land would let prisoners work in agriculture. When Litoral opened, Latin American penitentiary observers called it the most modern prison on the continent. Its founding philosophy was that incarcerated people were still people, and that imprisonment should prepare them for return to society, not simply hold them away from it.

By December 2013, the original building had outlived its vision. Overcrowding, deteriorating infrastructure, and organizational drift had turned the rehabilitation model into a distant memory. President Rafael Correa began a process of partial demolition and reconstruction, with ten new pavilions inaugurated in 2015 to join two pavilions that were preserved. Inmates from the demolished sections were transferred to the newly built Guayas Regional Rehabilitation Center a short distance away. The rebuild expanded capacity to around five thousand men. The idea was a modern facility aligned with twenty-first-century correctional standards. What emerged instead was a complex increasingly fragmented along gang lines, with twelve pavilions that would soon answer to different powers.

On 28 September 2021, the prison exploded into violence. By the time the fighting between rival gang factions ended, at least 123 inmates were dead. Men killed other men with firearms, blades, and improvised weapons. The violence moved through the pavilions faster than guards could respond. It was the bloodiest prison riot in the history of Ecuador, and it should not be reduced to a statistic. The dead were human beings. They had families who learned about their sons, brothers, fathers, and partners through news broadcasts and emergency hospital lists. Some were serving long sentences for violent crimes. Others were held pretrial, not yet convicted of anything. Inside a system meant to hold them safely, they were killed because the state no longer controlled the space where they lived. Two months later, on 13 November 2021, violence erupted again at Litoral, killing at least 68 more prisoners.

The violence did not stop. In April 2023, at least twelve inmates were killed. In July 2023, at least eighteen more died. On 12 September 2024, Maria Daniela Icaza, the director of Litoral Penitentiary, was shot and killed in a targeted attack, the second prison chief assassinated in Ecuador that month. Two months after that, on 12 November 2024, another riot killed seventeen and injured fifteen. By October 2021, according to Ecuador's National Police, the twelve pavilions of the prison were effectively under gang control: Los Choneros held five pavilions (3, 5, 6, 7, and 12), the Latin Kings held three (1, 4, and 11), Los Chone Killers held pavilion 2, Los Tiguerones held pavilion 8, and Los Lobos held pavilion 9. The structure Pettinato designed for rehabilitation had become a fortress of rival territories where the state's role was residual.

Litoral Penitentiary today is the largest prison in Ecuador and part of a larger Guayas Penitentiary Complex that includes the Regional Rehabilitation Center, La Roca Prison, and a Provisional Detention Center. The buildings still stand where Pettinato chose them, sixteen and a half kilometers out along the Via a Daule on the outskirts of Guayaquil. The Daule River still flows past land that was once meant for prisoner agriculture. But the distance between the founding idea and current reality is now measured in hundreds of dead men. Ecuador's leaders have responded with states of emergency, military deployments, and repeated reconstruction plans. The underlying crisis, where criminal organizations can operate inside and outside prison walls with near-impunity, has proven resistant to every remedy. The men who live behind those walls, many of them young, many of them poor, many of them caught in the machinery of a drug economy larger than any single country, are the ones who pay when control breaks down.