Venezuelan Prison Death Toll Continues to Rise

• by Humberto Márquez (caracas)
• Wednesday, May 12, 2010
• Inter Press Service

Many prison buildings are badly run down and sanitary conditions are dismal. They are also seriously overcrowded, with inmates still awaiting trial housed alongside those already tried and sentenced.

Prisoners sleep, eat and sit about idly in cell blocks controlled by rival gangs. The same conditions are found in the prisons of many Latin American countries, but few are rocked by such extreme violence as the jails in Venezuela.

The most recent violent deaths took place on May 4 at the Santa Ana prison in Tachira, near the Colombian border, some 800 kilometres southwest of Caracas. A group of eight inmates took three prison workers hostage and demanded to be transferred to another jail. They were overpowered and returned to their cell block, where a riot ensued.

The eight inmates were all killed in the riot: three were shot, three stabbed, and two burned to death. Another three inmates were injured. Three weeks earlier, during another riot, eight prisoners were shot to death in the same jail.

During the first two months of 2010 a total of 61 prisoners were killed in Venezuela. In previous years, the violent death tolls were 366 in 2009, 422 in 2008 and 498 in 2007, according to figures from the non-governmental Venezuelan Prison Observatory.

As the organisation’s director Humberto Prado pointed out to IPS, in Venezuela’s 32 prisons, home to 35,600 inmates, 'there is an average of at least one death per day.'

Journalist Patricia Clarembaux’s book 'A ese infierno no vuelvo' (I’m Not Going Back to That Hell), based on research conducted in 2008 y 2009, describes how the country’s prisons are gripped by ongoing wars between rival gangs, who fight for control of cell blocks or the entire jail, as well as over control of the sale of illegal drugs, food, places to sleep, protection, and above, secret caches of weapons and ammunition.

According to Clarembaux, acquiring a firearm can cost a prisoner hundreds of dollars, depending on whether it is a pistol, revolver, rifle or even grenades.

On Jan. 27, a riot in the Caracas penitentiary La Planta left 10 prisoners dead and 19 injured, most of them victims of firearms. After the riot was quelled, the director of prisons at the Ministry of the Interior and Justice, Consuelo Cerrada, said that 'sometimes the weapons are cleverly smuggled in by the inmates’ own relatives' during visits.

But Prado asked, 'How could a relative hide a double-barrelled pistol or a rifle with a telescopic sight, like the ones we see in the prisons, on their bodies or in their clothes?' The true answer, he said, can be found by looking at the National Guard (militarised police) who patrol outside the prisons and the Ministry of the Interior officials who staff the jails.

There are two keys to understanding this crack in the prison system, Prado added. One is the fact that gang members behind bars continue to commit crimes in complicity with their fellow gang members on the outside. The other is that these gangs frequently include members of the different police forces.

'Around 20 percent of crimes in the country are committed by police,' Minister of the Interior and Justice Tarek El Aissami acknowledged.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reiterated 'its concern over the high rates of violence in Venezuelan penitentiaries and over the fact that in several prisons, criminal organisations are in possession of large-caliber weapons.'

Since 2006, the Commission has repeatedly called on the Venezuelan government to adopt measures in a number of prisons to reduce overcrowding, confiscate weapons, separate prisoners on remand from those who have already been tried and sentenced, provide better medical attention, and bring prison conditions up to international standards.

The government of President Hugo Chávez has launched programmes to 'humanise' conditions in several jails, but overcrowding is still a major problem at most detention centres, at an average rate of 60 percent, said Prado.

'At La Planta, built in 1964 for 350 inmates, there are now 1,500, and at El Marite (in the northwestern Venezuelan city of Maracaibo), a detention centre for 550 people, there are currently 1,200 inmates,' he added.

Criminologist Elio Gómez Grillo notes that although Venezuela has a relatively small prison population, with one prisoner for every 1,000 inhabitants, violent deaths behind bars number in the hundreds.

Examples of degradation abound, such as the case of inmates decapitated by their rivals who then play 'soccer' with their heads or sew them up inside the abdominal cavities of the corpses. At El Rodeo prison, east of Caracas, a message was found written in blood on a wall: 'Welcome to Fantasy Island, where all your nightmares come true.'

Prado praised a number of the government’s efforts to improve conditions in the country’s penal institutions, such as performances by the national orchestra and the missions organised to bring health care and basic education to inmates.

But he criticised the minimal funding allocated to prisons, a mere two dollars a day per inmate -- a far cry from the 20 dollars per inmate in Colombia, 34 dollars in the United States, and up to 80 dollars in European countries.

He also noted that the ratio of guards to prisoners is extremely low, at an average of one per 150 inmates, while international standards recommend one guard for every 10.

Prado concluded by quoting South African leader Nelson Mandela: 'No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.'

© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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