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Inter Press Service - October 6, 2004
Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Oct 6 (IPS) - "Chávez, remember you were a prisoner too!" read a sign held up by protester Ana Martínez in a recent demonstration by families of prisoners in the Venezuelan capital.
The demonstrators were demanding that something be done about the appalling conditions in the country's prisons, where 225 inmates have died so far this year, most of them at the hands of fellow prisoners.
Martínez's sign was alluding to the time that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez spent in Yare prison between 1992 and 1994 after leading a failed military uprising as a paratrooper officer, against the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez (1989-1993).
The sign held up in the protest on Sep. 23 -- the day of the Virgin of Mercedes, the patron saint of prisoners -- was a plea to Chávez not to forget the conditions in Venezuela's prisons.
The demonstration was held right after six inmates were killed (several of them beheaded) and 35 were injured in fighting and rioting in Uribana, a prison in central-western Venezuela.
"What prisoners need is not repression, but opportunities to work, study or take part in sports, to not be exploited by the mafias inside the prisons, and to not be punished with transfers (to other prisons) because that just causes more deaths," Martínez, whose son is in the La Planta penitentiary in Caracas, told IPS.
The problems in Venezuela's prisons are not new. A 1997 report by the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch, "Punishment Before Trial: Prison Conditions in Venezuela", stated that "Although known for their overcrowding, physical decay, and corruption, Venezuela's prisons are most notorious for their extreme violence.
"Over the past decade, thousands of prisoners have died violent deaths at the hands of their fellows."
The country's 32 prisons have a capacity to hold 16,000 inmates, but currently house just under 20,000, according to official statistics. And of that total, only 47 percent have been convicted and sentenced. The rest are still awaiting sentencing.
Delays in prosecutions and trials are a problem shared by many countries in Latin America, but Venezuela's prisons stand out for their high level of violence.
Local non-governmental organisations say that so far this year, 225 prisoners have died in Venezuela's jails, most of them in fights between rival gangs. In 2002, the last year for which complete statistics are available, 317 deaths were reported, while 250 were registered in the first half of 2003, according to the human rights group Provea.
"Riots, hunger strikes and self-inflicted cuts, fights and feuds, the internal mafias, and even torture by guards are the main factors in deaths of people serving sentences or awaiting trial in the prisons," Humberto Prado, with the Venezuelan Prison Observatory, told IPS.
"The problem in the prisons is structural, and our hope is to achieve results in the medium-term," said Minister of Interior and Justice Jesse Chacón, who also spent time behind bars for his role in the 1992 attempted coup led by Chávez.
"I doubt there is any judge who even knows if any of the six Venezuelans who died in Uribana (prison) were being tried in his or her court," said Chacón, who announced meetings among authorities to discuss the excessive delays in dispensing justice and the huge backlog of cases faced by judges in Venezuela.
The new minister recently pledged reforms aimed at reducing prison violence, as well as more efficient rehabilitation programmes for prisoners.
He said he would focus on the construction of new prisons to replace dilapidated facilities, and on speeding up the painfully slow pace of justice, improving the process of selection and hiring of guards, and "humanising" the action of the militarised National Guard, which is posted outside the prisons but is sometimes called in to quell riots.
Carlos Nieto, with the human rights group A Window on Freedom, told IPS that "it is unacceptable for a prison like La Planta, which holds 1,100 inmates, to have just seven or eight guards, and for the Interior Ministry's director of prisons to have been changed 12 times since Chávez took power six years ago."
To illustrate the severity of the problem of prison violence, Nieto pointed out that "While the press was focusing on the riot in Uribana, three prisoners were killed in El Dorado in southeastern Venezuela, two were killed in El Rodeo and one in Tocorón in central Venezuela, and in the southwestern city of Mérida a woman was hit by a bullet as she was visiting a relative in the local prison."
Prado agreed that violence, idleness and overcrowding are severe problems in the country's prisons, but he also pointed to "factors like food and health care. The budget for feeding each prisoner is less than 60 cents of a dollar a day," the activist noted, "and that amount is reduced even further by the action of the mafias."
He also observed that inmates with HIV/AIDS do not receive the necessary treatment and drugs.
Catholic chaplains in the prisons complained in a statement that "the institutional neglect of the situation in the prisons feeds the radicalisation of conflicts and violent situations."
The state of the prisons was the biggest stain on Venezuela's human rights record in the 1990s. But the problem has been overshadowed by the political crisis that has raged since the left-leaning Chávez became president in 1999 and began to carry out his peaceful "social revolution" of political and social initiatives in favour of the poor.
Since then, the country has been highly polarised, largely along class lines, between the pro- and anti-Chávez factions.
In one of the highest-profile mass killings of prisoners in Latin America, dozens of inmates were slain by guards in the notorious Retén de Catia, a prison on the west side of Caracas, in 1992.
In 1996, when Pope John Paul II made his second visit to Venezuela, he stopped outside of Catia to bless prisoners and call for decent treatment of inmates. The jail was demolished the following year on the orders of then president Rafael Caldera (1994-1999).
In 1994, 100 inmates, mainly Wayúu Indians, died in a riot and fire in Maracaibo prison in western Venezuela.
And in 1996, members of the National Guard shot tear gas canisters into inmate's cells in the La Planta prison. At least 25 prisoners were killed in a fire that subsequently broke out.
Under a new penal code, thousands of detainees who had served time but had never been sentenced began to be released from prison in 1999 in an attempt to ease the overcrowding. But the police complain that crime rates went up as a result.
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