Far beyond the Venezuelan government’s reach is
a massive, not-so-underground prison economy
based on a lucrative trade in cocaine, heroin, mari-
juana and other drugs.’ In smaller prisons, this
trade is worth between $353,000 and $470,865 a
year. In prisons with more than 2,000 inmates, it has
reached annual levels of $3.5 million.
About 14 prisons form part of a complex organi-
zational pyramid, coordinating the flow of drugs
and drug money within and without the prisons. At
the base of the pyramid are the drug runners, nick-
named chiguires after the world’s largest species of
rodent, which is native to Venezuela. The chiguires
are usually prisoners or excons forced into the job
for protection. At the next level are distribution
centers, directed by “internal cartels,” which supply
the chiguires with drugs funneled in by “infiltra-
tors.” The “infiltrators” are linked to an “external
cartel” outside the prisons. At the top of the
scheme are inmates, guards and other prison offi-
cials responsible for money laundering and bank
accounts. The lawyers and families who visit
inmates also lend a hand, stuffing narcotics into the
tails of kites and using other smuggling methods
about as subtle as baking a saw into a cake.
Drug trafficking inside Venezuela’s prisons is
closely connected to a surge in drug abuse and
drug trafficking across the country. With many tra-
ditional routes cut off, more and more traffickers
are using Venezuela’s huge border with Colombia
and its long Caribbean coastline as their preferred
route to North America and Europe. The number of
arrests for narcotics violations almost doubled
between 1989 and 1993, from 8,603 to 15,970.2
Yet, even government officials admit that these
numbers represent only a fraction of those
uncontrolled bloodshed. The violence reached such
heights in 1994 that at the end of that year, the Minister
of Justice ordered the national guard to take over the
administration of seven of the most violent prisons.
Also fueling the violence is the institutionalized abuse
of inmates by prison officials. Media criticism has
focused on the heavy-handed tactics of the national
guard when it has intervened to reassert control over the
prisons. Yet abuse against inmates at the hands of regu-
lar prison officials is a daily occurrence in Venezuela’s
jails. Inmates who denounce the inhumane conditions or
who demand improvements frequently face harsh retri-
bution. In an attempt to break up a hunger strike of hun-
dreds of inmates protesting conditions in Maracaibo
prison in 1990, the national guard packed off a group of
239 prisoners to El Dorado, beating them en route. Once
there, prison officials severely limited their contacts
with families and lawyers.
involved in the trade. Most of the profits are chan- neled into international money-laundering net- works headed by influential Venezuelan business- men.
A growing number of police officers and prison officials participate directly in the drug trade, form- ing a tight circle of complicity and corruption. But the “Colombianization” of Venezuela is most
apparent in the judicial system. Judges are fre- quently bought by drug traffickers. Evidence “dis- appears” from their chambers and the traffickers go free. A criminal judge in the state of Miranda once released several suspects who had been cap- tured by the judicial police (PTJ), the federal agency in charge of narcotics investigations. 3 After the sus- pects were rearrested, the judge ordered the arrest of the PTJ’s anti-drug division in retaliation. Violence against judges involved in sensitive drug cases is also on the rise. Since 1992, dozens of judges have been killed, while many others have received death threats and letter bombs. For now, at least, the prison drug economy and the regional drug trade seem more capable of controlling the Venezuelan government than the other way around.
1.Author’s interviews with prison officials at Reten de Catia
and the Penitentiary University Institute, May 2, 1995 and
June 8, 1995. See also El Nacional (Caracas) September 2,
1988, p. D2; El Diario de Caracas (Caracas) March 10, 1995, p.
7; and El Universal (Caracas) March 21, 1995, pp. 2-9.
2.Central Office of Statistics and Information, Anuario Esta-
distico de Venezuela, 1993 (Caracas: Presidency of the
Republic, 1993).
3.Author’s interviews with criminal court judges in Caracas
and Miranda, March and April, 1995. See also William Ojeda,
i Cuanto vale un juez? (Caracas: Vadell Hermanos, 1995), pp.
43-46.
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