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VENEZUELA: Prison Homicides Still Routine

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Sep 11 2007 (IPS) - In Venezuela’s prisons, “every human right is violated every single day,” said a Latin American ambassador in a private conversation a decade ago, rationalising the actions of some of his fellow-countrymen who had fled from justice in this country.

On his second visit to Venezuela on Feb. 9, 1996, the late pope John Paul II prayed for several minutes outside the Retén de Catia, a notorious Caracas prison which was demolished a year later. The press reported that the pontiff had visited “the gates of hell.”

“Those words continue to describe current prison conditions in Venezuela,” Humberto Prado, of the non-governmental Venezuelan Prison Observatory (OVP), told IPS. “Minimum standards of treatment for persons held in detention are not met, and even the most basic rights are violated.”

Venezuela, with a population of 27.5 million, has 20,200 people incarcerated in 30 jails, of whom only 7,440 have been convicted and sentenced and 12,660 (62.6 percent) are being held on remand.

Between January and July 2007, “292 people died in prison, and 634 were injured, a 55 percent increase in fatalities compared to the equivalent period in 2006. In the whole of 2006 there were 412 deaths and 728 injuries,” Prado said.

In short, Venezuela’s prisons are among the most violent and dangerous in the world.

Judge Miguel Vidal was under a palm branch roof outside the Barinas prison, in the southwest of the country, on the afternoon of Aug. 31, when he was shot in the arm by a prisoner atop one of the walls.

“In the past, prisoners in Venezuelan jails armed themselves mainly with ‘chuzos’ (crude homemade knives), but now they have pistols, revolvers, shotguns, and fragmentation grenades. Once an Uzi submachine gun was found during a search,” said Prado.

To catch those responsible for smuggling weapons and drugs into the jails, “scrutiny must focus on the people who are not subjected to searches; that is, the members of the National Guard, who keep watch outside the prisons, and agents who answer to the Interior and Justice Ministries, who keep guard on the inside,” said Prado.

But many cellblocks, and occasionally entire prisons, are controlled by inmates themselves and their organised gangs. Weapons are commonly hidden in latrine drains.

Gang fights and turf wars often spark bloody conflicts. Uribana prison in west-central Venezuela opened in 2000 and was billed as a model jail, the most modern in the country. But in January, 18 prisoners were killed in a single day.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights found last year that in La Pica prison in eastern Venezuela, which is regarded as one of the most violent in the country, there were only 16 guards for over 500 prisoners. The warders worked in two shifts, making an average ratio of one warder to every 63 inmates.

Violence is also fuelled by overcrowding, which officially stands at one-third, since the country’s jails have a total combined capacity for 15,000 inmates.

“But the truth is that up to 80 percent of the infrastructure and services in many prisons are run-down or have been wrecked,” Miguel Padrón, departmental coordinator in prison psychology at the Central University of Venezuela (UCV), told IPS.

The state of prisons in Venezuela is mirrored in other countries in the region. A study of 26 countries carried out by the United Nations Latin American Institute for the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders (ILANUD) found that in 25 of the countries, prisons were overcrowded, and in 19 of them the situation was critical.

Overcrowding in prisons is regarded as a cruel, inhumane and degrading form of punishment, which leads to the violation of other basic rights, such as the right to life and health. It precludes the fulfilment of all proper prison functions, such as security, exercise periods, visiting arrangements, education and work, the ILANUD study says.

The Inter-American Court observed that conditions in La Pica included cells that were utterly demolished, communal cells designed for seven inmates that were occupied by more than 15 people who slept on the floor without any bedding or blankets, and individual cells that had been appropriated by gang leaders in possession of firearms.

Prado pointed out that the interdisciplinary commissions entrusted with classifying detainees seldom meet, “and a single official will take just half an hour to classify a prisoner and determine where he or she is to be held. A place with a middling degree of safety in a dangerous jail can cost thousands of dollars.”

In mid-2007, UCV’s Padrón conducted a study for the OVP on the state of human rights in prisons, based on questionnaires issued to 87 people who met in focus groups in nine of the country’s regions.

The focus group participants were human rights activists, prison chaplains and volunteers working in jails, lawyers, prison officials, former inmates and prisoners’ relatives.

In the survey, 68 percent of interviewees said that “hygiene standards are not met,” but the group discussions showed that this phrase hardly does justice to the reality. “In prison, teeth are extracted using pliers,” and “pasta for the meals is mixed with sauce on the floor and then goes on to the prisoners’ plates.”

Not only is “the right to food not respected,” but it was said that “when food arrives at a prison, first the National Guards eat, then the warders, and by the time it is the prisoners’ turn, what started out as 30 chickens have dwindled to three.”

Prisoners depend mainly on the food and water brought by their families. Many of the cellblocks are without drinking water. Availability of lockers for personal belongings is a question that only raises wry smiles.

An improvised wing in La Pica, consisting of three rooms unfit for human habitation, houses between 22 and 24 women inmates, according to the Inter-American Court. They sleep on the floor or on layers of cardboard, and the single small latrine is almost constantly overflowing with foul drainwater.

In 2006 the Court ordered the Venezuelan state to take urgent precautionary measures at La Pica, and to report the actions taken. But according to Prado, Caracas has not yet submitted its report.

Above and beyond the harsh conditions and the continuous risk to life, “what prisoners resent most are the procedural delays that keep them warehoused without justice having been served in their case,” Marianela Sánchez, a lawyer at OVP, told IPS.

According to Venezuelan law, no one may be detained for more than two years without being sentenced. “But the justice system gets around this by deferment of procedures, a legal ruse that brings back the bad old days. Deprivation of freedom has again become the rule rather than the exception in our justice system,” Sánchez said.

Prado said that one underlying problem is the lack of political will. “In the present administration, since Hugo Chávez became president in 1999, we have had nine justice ministers and 15 prison directors, and every one has come in with their own new plan,” the activist said.

The government has not commented on the OVP report.

Padrón emphasised that poverty is still the underlying problem. “Nearly the entire prison population is made up of poor people. I can’t remember a single jail I’ve visited where I haven’t seen a wall with the graffiti ‘This isn’t where you pay for crime, it’s where you pay for poverty’.”