RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: Prison Riot Highlights Deep-Lying Problems

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Viviana Alonso

BUENOS AIRES, Feb 11 2005 (IPS) - The problems that triggered a violent revolt in which eight were killed in an Argentine prison before it was brought under control Friday are shared by many of the country’s penitentiaries, where inmates are held in "intolerable conditions", according to human rights groups.

The problems that triggered a violent revolt in which eight were killed in an Argentine prison before it was brought under control Friday are shared by many of the country’s penitentiaries, where inmates are held in "intolerable conditions", according to human rights groups.

In the San Martín prison in the capital of the central Argentine province of Córdoba, prisoners took around 70 hostages Thursday, including guards and visiting family members.

Eight were killed in the riot: five prisoners, two guards and one police officer, according to official reports. However, all of the hostages were freed on Friday.

The facility, which was built for less than 1,000 prisoners, holds more than 1,700.

The incident highlighted the darkest side of this South American country’s prison system, which far from rehabilitating inmates with the aim of social reinsertion, holds them in often subhuman conditions, where their rights are systematically violated.

After an overnight stand-off, the rioting inmates gradually released the hostages and handed over their weapons, thanks to the mediation of a priest and several prosecutors, and authorities regained control over the prison.

According to some sources, the revolt broke out Thursday when the prison directors cut visiting hours. Others say the catalyst was a guard’s alleged mistreatment of the wife of one of the prisoners.

But similar incidents can break out at any time in any of Argentina’s penitentiaries, above and beyond the specific trigger.

That is because just like in the prisons of most Latin American countries, inmates live in severely overcrowded conditions and are frequently subjected to physical punishment and other abuses, while suffering inadequate medical attention and receiving poor diets.

In addition, most of the prison population in the region – and Argentina is no exception – is still awaiting trial, due to the slow pace of justice.

"In the past year, the situation faced by inmates has reached intolerable limits, particularly in the province of Buenos Aires," states the latest annual report on human rights by the Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS), a local human rights group.

Nevertheless, the report adds that despite the inadequate training of prison guards and other problems, conditions are not as dire as they are in other countries in the region, like Venezuela, where overcrowding and maltreatment are even worse.

Although one of the demands set forth by a small group of prisoners that initially refused to end the riot was that their sentences be commuted, judicial authorities stated Friday that this option would not be considered.

Córdoba’s chief prosecutor, Gustavo Vidal Lascano, said that in response to the inmates’ demands, the elite riot police ETER were not sent in, visiting hours would be respected in the future, and the rioting prisoners would turn themselves over to the police in the presence of judicial authorities and journalists.

Like many of Argentina’s prison facilities, the one in Córdoba is at least a century old and falling apart, and holds many more inmates than it was designed to house.

Overcrowding is a long-standing problem in this country of 37 million. Ten years ago, the prison population in the province of Buenos Aires amounted to 9,485, two times more than the existing facilities were built for. As a result, an additional 2,500 prisoners were held in police station lockups.

But the situation deteriorated considerably in the past few years of economic crisis. In July 2004, there were 24,352 prisoners in the jails of Buenos Aires, the country’s most populous province, while another 5,441 were packed into police station cells.

CELS said that space for 7,000 prisoners is lacking in Buenos Aires, and authorities try to make up for that deficit by holding detainees in police lockups.

In response, human rights organisations, prisoners’ families and government watchdog agencies called for judicial intervention, and in some cases directly appealed to the authorities to stop the massive violations of the rights of prisoners, whose lives were often endangered.

In early 2004, the press was informed that during the 1990s, when Eduardo Duhalde was governor of the province, the Buenos Aires Provincial Penitentiary Service (SPB) had acquired equipment to administer electric shocks to prisoners.

This was just one of a long string of scandals surrounding the SPB, sparked by reports of grave human rights violations, murders and mistreatment, in addition to threats against judicial authorities attempting to investigate these irregularities.

"The worst corruption is seen among the people who run the jails, the ones who pocket the money that’s supposed to be used to feed and care for the prisoners, the ones who sell drugs to inmates, the ones who torture them so they won’t say anything about what goes on there," Hebe de Bonafini, the president of the Association of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, told IPS.

The Association was originally founded during the 1976-1983 dictatorship by women seeking sons and daughters who had been forcibly "disappeared". The Mothers, who have now divided into two groups, support a range of other human rights causes, including the defence of prisoners’ rights.

"What happens in the prisons today is aberrant," said de Bonafini. "The prisoners take the money that their families give them to buy food and use it to buy drugs from the prison guards."

One of the key indicators of the abysmal conditions in Argentine penitentiaries is the high number of deaths that occur there.

"The majority of these deaths are never cleared up, which serves as an incentive for similar acts to keep occurring," attorney Gustavo Palmieri of CELS told IPS.

Both Palmieri and Bonafini noted that prison guards often delegate the "administration" of the jails to inmates or groups of inmates, who are free to control the other prisoners and commit abuses and crimes with total impunity.

Statistics reveal that 57 inmates died in federal penitentiaries in 2003, including 27 killed in acts of violence. The leading causes of death in Argentina’s prisons are AIDS, which accounts for 38.6 percent of the total, followed by cardiorespiratory arrest at 29.8 percent.

Also in 2003, according to a CELS report, 3,400 inmates were wounded in jails run by the SPB, which translates to an average of nine a day.

Héctor Trattenberg, an attorney with the non-governmental League for the Rights of Man, told IPS about a visit to the extremely over-populated penitentiary in Mendoza, Argentina by a delegation from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The visit was organised in response to reports of the deaths of 11 inmates during the first six months of 2004.

Palmieri warned that "the state policies implemented in the prison system over the last year do not allow for much optimism about the future."

For CELS, "it is obvious that the lack of policies to place limits on the incarceration of individuals not only contributes to making the problems described even more widespread, but also fosters the proliferation of other problems, such as corruption, the deterioration of professional training, and the perpetration of criminal activities by prison officials in league with the inmates. As a result, even more serious situations are highly likely to occur in the future."

Palmieri pointed out that "while the government of Néstor Kirchner has announced a number of penitentiary infrastructure projects, these initiatives have been delayed, and also fail to address such issues as the situation of the female prison population."

"The misuse of preventive detention is in itself a violation of the law," he added, noting that over half of the prisoners in federal facilities (54.44 percent) have been charged, but have yet to be sentenced.

This practice reaches inconceivable extremes in the province of Buenos Aires, where only 11 percent of inmates have actually been sentenced to prison terms.