In response to rising poverty and
growing crime, the Venezuelan
government has been busily
shoving its “undesirables” behind
prison walls. Massive
overcrowding has been the flash
point for unprecedented levels of
prison violence.
In the aftermath of a violent riot in Maracaibo viewi National Prison in western Venezuela in
January, 1994, prison officials nonchalantly told the
press that they had no accurate body count because they
could not identify all the body parts. The violence
erupted after inmates threw fire-bombs into cellblocks
housing rival gangs, triggering clashes in which approx-
imately 150 prisoners were stabbed, shot, drowned,
decapitated and burned to death. Although this riot was
unusually bloody, its causes and consequences were any-
thing but unusual. Packed in a facility built for 800, most
of Maracaibo’s 2,500 inmates were heavily armed and
unpatrolled. Once the dust settled, however, the
Venezuelan government did not investigate the lack of
personnel or even the source of the fire-bombs. Instead,
it blamed a handful of inmates for “engineering” the vio-
lence and duly shipped them off to a penal colony on the
other side of the country.
Unprecedented levels of prison mayhem-including
killings, riots and mass breakouts–have shaken several
Latin American countries in the past few years.
Besieged by rising crime rates, yet unwilling to confront
difficult policy choices, governments throughout Latin
America have been busily shoving their “undesirables”
behind prison walls. As a result, even greater levels of
/ from the courtyard of Retbn de Catia prison in Caracas, 1994.
violence and instability have come bursting back out
through those walls.
Last April, for example, a botched escape at
Argentina’s Sierra Chica prison in Buenos Aires
province sparked a mutiny by 1,000 inmates. Their
revolt against atrocious living conditions and long
delays in the trial process quickly spread to 18 other
prisons across the country. Using large stashes of
weapons, the prisoners took hostages and managed to
gain control over five prisons. When the riots ended
after a negotiated settlement, the worst prison crisis in
Argentine history had left 21 dead and 35 wounded.
Prison escapes have also captured headlines recently
in Brazil, where 130,000 prisoners are squeezed into
facilities meant to hold less than half that number. At the
Aparecida de Goias prison near Brasilia, 40 inmates
took dozens of officials hostage in April and then
escaped. In press interviews before their recapture, the
prisoners complained of inhuman conditions and
unbearable overcrowding. The following month, 53
inmates escaped from Carandiru, the country’s largest
prison, by digging a 100-yard tunnel.
The brutal conditions that have triggered such violent
outbursts and risky escape attempts seem to be a throw-
back to the military regimes of the past. Yet inhumane
prisons survived the region’s transition to democracy
intact. Today, the virtual breakdown of penitentiary sys-
VOL XXX, No 2SEPT/OcT 1996 37
0
C
I
w n Mark Ungar is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at
Columbia University. He has worked extensively with human
rights organizations in Venezuela.
VoL XXX, No 2 SEPTr/OCT 1996 37REPORT ON CRIME AND IMPUNITY
tems throughout the region exposes
the fault lines of democracy in con-
temporary Latin America. The pris-
ons of Venezuela-one of Latin
America’s longest-standing democ-
racies-offer a dramatic example of
how quickly constitutional princi-
ples can buckle under the weight of
bureaucracy, political expediency
and socio-economic insecurity.
Ineffective leaders, a restless mili-
tary, economic instability, growing
poverty and soaring rates of violent
crime have turned Venezuela from a
Extensive overcrowding forces some prisoners to sleep in the courtyard of the infirmary
at Reten de Catia prison in Caracas.
model of stable constitutionalism to a nation on the edge
of collapse. The country’s 32 prisons are both an outlet
and a reflection of this ongoing crisis.
Things weren’t always so bad. Stable governments
flush with oil revenues maintained relatively humane pri-
sons in Venezuela over most of the past 60 years. The
harsh jails that symbolized 27 years of repressive rule
under Juan Vicente G6mez were torn down in 1937 and
new ones were built. A new, more modern prison system
was set up after a new Constitution was ratified in 1961.
For a brief period in the early 1980s, open prisons, which
allowed prisoners to work outside during the day, were in
operation. Today, however, Venezuela’s prisons are the
most overcrowded, inhumane and violent in the region.
As elsewhere in Latin America, crime rates in
Venezuela have skyrocketed in tandem with growing
poverty, which has nearly doubled over the past decade.
Currently, 62% of Venezuelans live below the poverty
line, while prices for basic foodstuffs have risen beyond
the reach of 75% of the population.’ Crime has risen just
as dramatically. Since 1990, the murder rate has
increased by 73%. Assaults are up 16%, and robberies
have jumped 26%.2 The Venezuelan government, how-
ever, has failed to devise a coherent, viable policy to deal
with this crime wave. Unable to stem the rise in murder,
drug trafficking and other violent crimes, the govern-
ment has instead focused on misdemeanors such as loi-
tering and lacking proper identification. A profile of the
prison population, overwhelmingly poor and young,
also reflects the linkage between growing crime and
poverty. About 70% of prisoners are between 18 and 25
years old, and 20% are between 26 and 29.3 Nearly 70%
have not finished elementary school, and most are man-
ual workers and agricultural laborers. At the same time,
the greatest percentage of crimes involve property
crimes, not acts against persons. Almost 60% of prison-
ers were charged with crimes against persons in the
1960s. By the late 1970s, however, that percentage had
dropped by half, while the percentage of those charged
with property crimes jumped from 21% to 45%, and has
stayed that way ever since.
ut even arresting the most violent criminals will
not make a dent in the prison crisis without a sus-
tained attack on the problems that underlie it. The
most evident of those problems is the insufficient amount
of spending on both prisons and prisoners. In comparison
with other countries, Venezuela spends only a tiny
amount for prisoners’ basic needs. While neighboring
Colombia budgets about $319 a month per prisoner,
Venezuela forks out a scant $56. As a result, health con-
ditions are abysmal in many prisons. Typhus, cholera,
tuberculosis, scabies and numerous other viruses run
rampant. Mentally ill prisoners receive no special treat-
ment. Though no official statistics are available, the rate
of HIV infection is probably as high as that in Brazil,
where 35% of female prisoners and 20% of males have
the AIDS virus. 4 At El Dorado prison in the Amazonian
state of Bolivar, spending amounts to about 18 cents per
prisoner per day. It shows: there is one bed for every four
inmates, prison cells are infested with vermin, and
prisoners go without shoes, adequate clothing, eating
utensils or clean bathing water. Throughout the entire
Venezuelan system, prison buildings are in dire need of
attention. “Things fall apart and stay that way,” says Luis
A. Lara Roche, warden of Ret6n de la Planta prison.
As a result of inadequate resources and rising crime
rates, overcrowding has become a permanent feature of
Venezuela’s prisons. A penitentiary system originally
built to hold 15,426 inmates actually holds anywhere
between 24,000 and 27,000.5 Some facilities have oper-
ated at three to four times their capacity. 6 The General
Penitentiary of Venezuela prison in the western state of
Guhrico, for example, was built for 750 but holds up to
2,100. Tocuyito, a prison facility in Valencia designed
for 1,500, has held between 1,700 and 4,500 inmates.
Space is at such a premium at Caracas’ massive Ret6n de
Catia prison that anyone lucky enough to string a ham-
mock from the ceiling, or to find a stair to sit on, will not
budge for days for fear of losing the coveted spot.
As a result of this overcrowing, basic protections are
routinely ignored. Prisoners who are awaiting trial often
share cells with those already tried and sentenced, and
38NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 38REPORT ON CRIME AND IMPUNITY
those convicted of minor offenses, like petty theft, with
prisoners convicted of murder. Minors are often held in
the same cells as adults, despite laws mandating that they
be jailed separately. 7
Such massive overcrowding has been the flash point
for a spiraling rise in prison violence. While under 100
prison deaths were reported each year during the late
1980s, over 200 deaths were registered in 1990; in 1994,
at least 354 inmates were killed in the jails, and over 700
were seriously injured.
Due to the combination of corruption and an insuffi-
cient number of prison authorities, whole areas of many
prisons go unpatrolled. Visiting lawyers and families eas-
ily smuggle weapons to inmates, who form heavily
armed rival gangs that fight for territory and haggle over
control of a lucrative drug trade in cocaine and heroin
within the prisons. Prisoners also plot mass escapes,
which, like the gang rivalry, often end up in riots and
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.
Events following an inmate uprising at the General
Penitentiary of Venezuela in October, 1991 reveal the
extent to which officials may go-not only in the use of
deadly force to quell restless prisoners, but also in cov-
ering up their acts after the fact. After the national guard
put the riots down, prisoners claimed that rebellious
inmates had been murdered and their bodies dumped
into “wells of death.” The attorney general’s office car-
ried out an investigation, and concluded that the inmates
allegedly killed by the national guard had simply been
transferred to other jails. Prisoner agitation continued,
however, forcing a new investigation. This time, the
wells and the corpses of several prisoners were found.
Prison officials then blamed other inmates for the mur-
ders, but the prisoners vigorously denied the accusation.
The matter was never resolved, however, as the govern-
ment simply dropped the investigation.
short-term effect, however, unless the Venezuelan
government addresses the lack of institutional coor-
dination and the poor protection of detainee rights that
have all but destroyed the criminal-justice system. Most
of the agencies responsible for overseeing the prisons
and guaranteeing prisoners’ rights work at cross-purposes
or do not work at all. “The Venezuelan state is so disor-
ganized,” said a recent report of the national comp-
troller, “that it is at the point of disappearing-if it
hasn’t done so already.” 8
The government’s first step out of this chaos is to con-
front the immediate cause of prison overcrowding-the
large percentage of prisoners awaiting trial. When
democracy was reestablished in Venezuela in 1958,
some 50% of the country’s prisoners awaited trial and
sentencing. Today, that figure is over 70%.9 The bottle-
necks begin in the courts-too mired in a crumbling
infrastructure and a lack of judges to handle even a frac-
tion of the cases before them. On average, the length of
detention from the point of the detainee’s initial declara-
tion to the first sentencing lasts four years, and the aver-
age criminal trial can take four-and-a-half years.
Because of these delays, some prisoners languish in jail
for eight years before being found innocent. One pris-
oner at Ret6n de la Planta said he had spent five years
there in the 1980s before being acquitted. Others end up
serving more time than their sentences would have dic-
tated. The release of a mentally ill prisoner from Ciudad
Bolivar prison, for example, was held up for 11 years
because of bureaucratic snafus. Huge backlogs of this
kind are a chronic problem in Latin America, especially
compared to the poorer countries in Europe and even
Africa.10 In Argentina, for example, about 75% of the
actual prison population in Buenos Aires province has
waited over two years to be sentenced.” In El Salvador,
about 77% of its 6,300 prisoners are unsentenced. Peru’s
Family members of victims of police violence protest in 1995
against official impunity. Sign reads: “No More Impunity ”
Vice Minister of Justice said the rate of unsentenced
inmates in his country was around 90%.
Compounding the slowness of the Venezuelan judicial
system is the fact that many of those arrested lack
resources to hire private lawyers and must rely on state-
provided public defenders. Yet there is a serious short-
age of public defenders, and those that do practice are
seriously overloaded, handling an average of 300 to 400
cases a year. As a result, the vast majority of detainees
receive little or no legal representation. The initial crim-
inal investigation, known as the sumario, also impedes
detainees from having an adequate defense. The
sumario, which examines the charges against the
accused and the events surrounding the case, is carried
out in secret, supposedly to prevent external interfer-
ence. The defendant’s only right during the sumario is to
view the official court file, which cannot be copied.
No amount of due-process provisions in national or
international law seems capable of counteracting plain
institutional indifference. Many regulations on proba-
tion and conditional liberty introduced in the 1980s
have since become dead letters because of a lack of
follow-up. For example, most of the Assistance
Centers established by a 1980 law, which helped thou-
sands of exprisoners and kept their rate of recidivism
below 4%. have fallen into disuse.1 2 Legal-aid, bail
and prisoner-work laws legislated in the early 1990s
helped reduce Venezuela’s prison population from an
all-time high of 31,400 in 1992 to just under 25,000 in
1995 through outreach to the poor and alternative
methods of conflict resolution. Today, they too are
underfunded and inconsistently applied.
Because of their inability to keep track of exconvicts,
coupled with the poor quality of resocialization pro-
grams inside the prisons, many penitentiary officials are
reluctant to release detainees. In some cases, legal provi-
sions set up to protect defendants actually keep them
ensnared in the judicial bureaucracy. The 1994 Narcotics
NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 40REPORT ON CRIME AND IMPUNITY
Law is a case in point. This law’s automatic appeals
process–coupled with bureaucratic incompetence-has
kept many detainees incarcerated while awaiting higher
court review. Some linger on in prison even after being
acquitted twice.
This poor coordination among state agencies run-
ning the criminal-justice system has given rise to the
systematic violation of detainees’ rights. One exasper-
ated official from the attorney general’s office said that
although public prosecutors are supposed to be present
when a detainee gives his or her statement to the
police, detainees are routinely brought to police sta-
tions with clandestine basements where confessions
are often extracted under torture. Rights protection is
even more precarious inside the prisons. The federal
criminal code mandates that judicial officials must
inspect prison conditions every 15 days and hear pris-
oner complaints. But even when such visits do occur,
they are rarely followed up.
The national
guard killed
rebellious inmates
after a prison riot in
1991 and dumped
their bodies into
“wells of death.”
Only after months
of prisoner
agitation were the
bodies discovered.
Left to fill the vacuum
created by this disinte-
grating public administra-
tion are Venezuela’s numer-
ous police forces. At the
national level, the judicial
police has used its crimi-
nal-investigative powers to
create a sophisticated net-
work that has all but
replaced the authority of
judges over arrest proce-
dures and treatment of
detainees. The criminal
code gives the police wide
control over the penal
process, and their superior
organization and actual
physical control over
detainees allows them to
dominate the sumario and other pretrial procedures.
Out on the streets, meanwhile, forces like the Caracas
Metropolitan Police carry out mass detentions, conduct
illegal curfews and commit arbitrary killings-all with
little accountability. Individuals are often arrested in
police sweeps for not possessing identity documents, and
many are then held indefinitely because of their prior
criminal records. Over 500 people are arrested yearly
under the Law of Vagabonds and Crooks, a military
statute from the 1930s which allows for the arrest of “suspicious” individuals or those “fomenting vices in
public.” Several attempts to have the law declared
unconstitutional have failed. “Either the government is
completely incompetent, or they want the law to stay as
it is,” said a resident of Catia, a poor barrio in Caracas,
who was detained in one of the many police roundups
carried out under law. “It’s the only criminal ‘policy’ the
government has, and it’s seen as being ‘tough’ on crime.”
rowing public anxiety, fueled by a lack of gov-
ernment direction, is the third and most
entrenched problem surrounding the prison cri-
sis. Venezuelans’ greatest fear is violent crime. In a 1990
nationwide poll, 43% said that delinquency was their
chief worry. 1 3 (The cost of living came a distant second
at 15%.) In another survey, 69% said they were likely to
be the victim of an assault or a robbery within the next
two months, and-reflecting the widespread perception
of the police–65% said they believed their attacker
would be an officer from one of the police forces.14
Such fears and distrust have fed into a wave of
vigilante-style justice in poor neighborhoods through-
out Caracas. Angry mobs have spontaneously lynched
criminals caught en flagrante delicto in the poor neigh-
borhoods of the city, while some communities have
formed watch groups that plan to take the law into their
own hands. Only a few lynchings occurred in 1994, but
this year a lynching has been reported almost weekly.
In a nationwide poll conducted last year, 57% said they
favored lynchings.15
Even in the face of such extremes, government
officials have not devised a coherent policy to deal with
the crime epidemic or its underlying causes. Instead,
officials have pandered to the public’s fears by both
condemning and tacitly supporting the practice of vigi-
lantism. The only consistent government policy has been
ever-increasing rates of incarceration, followed by
official claims that those arrested are the “real” source of
crime. Such equivocations and empty rhetoric have
served mainly to verify the belief of most Venezuelans
that the government is ill prepared to address crime and
the conditions that feed it. Of those surveyed in an April,
1995 poll, 92% said that they believed that neither the
nation’s leaders nor its institutions were capable of
resolving the country’s problems. 1 6
Reform efforts to respond to Venezuela’s prison
debacle, however, are gaining steam. In part because of
the political instability that has wracked the country for
the past several years, new groups have emerged to
challenge the traditional domination of the Venezuelan
political system by Democratic Action (AD) and
COPEI. These new movements, including the left-wing
Causa R, together with reform-minded elements within
AD and COPEI, have spearheaded efforts to reform the
worst aspects of both the criminal-justice process and
the penitentiary system. Members of Congress from
COPEI and Causa R, for example, recently introduced
a bill proposing a penal procedure code which would
eliminate the sumario. The Attorney General has pro-
posed the elimination of the powerful judicial police. In
the last few years, the government even began a cam-
VOL XX, o 2 EPT/cT 196 4 VOL XXX, NO 2 SEPT/Ocr 1996 41REPORT ON CRIME AND IMPUNITY
paign against corruption in the prisons, estimated to
account for $10.6 million per year. Last year it replaced
hundreds of corrupt guards at Ret6n de Catia prison
with newly trained personnel.
Hope for more long-term changes in Venezuela’s pris-
ons rests on efforts to decentralize the federal govern-
ment, which would mean greater leverage for the coun-
try’s 22 state governors to tailor penitentiary policy to
the prisons in their jurisdiction. The rise of new political
forces, coupled with a 1989 law replacing presidential
appointment of state governors with direct elections,
may give new impetus to state-level efforts to initiate
penitentiary reforms.
Other nongovernmental actors are also pressuring for
change. Universities like the National University’s
Institute of Penitentiary Education have established
programs in criminal-policy studies that are developing
new proposals and ideas. Criticism of Venezuela’s pris-
ons by the press and international human rights organi-
zations has also generated pressure for change.
But unless these various initiatives and openings add up
to an honest look at the causes of the country’s social,
political and economic ills, they will have little chance of
succeeding. Despite their particularly horrible conditions,
the prisons of Venezuela and other countries are not an
isolated phenomenon. They are an extension of the legal
system, of government practices and the way leaders por-
tray the issue of law and order. While the political and
economic institutions that have generated the prison cri-
sis cannot be changed overnight, it is important to culti-
vate greater public understanding of how these institu-
tions affect ordinary citizens. “The only thing I would
ask,” says Roberto M., who was recently released from El
Dorado prison after five months for not having his identi-
fication card, “is that everyone understands how hellish
these prisons really are.”
Prison Mayhem
1. The Ministry of the Family, Venezuela ante la Cumbre Mundial
Sobre Desarrollo Social (March, 1995), p. 23.
2. Central Office of Statistics and Information, Anuario Estadistico
de Venezuela, 1993 (Caracas: Presidency of the Republic: 1993),
Table 631-04, pp. 799-800.
3. Author’s interview with Mirna Yepez, Director of Information of the
Ministry of Justice, April 20, 1995, and with anonymous officials of
the Office of Penitentiary Security of the Ministry of Justice.
4. In Argentina, about a third of the prison population is HIV-posi-
tive. See Calvin Sims, “On Every Argentine Cellbock, Specter of
AIDS,” The New York Times, March 22, 1996, p. 4.
5. Office of Penitentiary Security, Ministry of Justice. This does not
include the 2,826 in provisional liberty.
6. Information on the prison populations is from the Office of
Information and the Press Department of the Office of Defense
and Civil Protection, both agencies of the Ministry of Justice.
7. For trends in child abandonment and youth crime, see the
Anuario Estadistico de Venezuela. Also see Natacha Salazar,
“Children Stalk Venezuelan Cities,” Reuters News Service, (June
24, 1996).
8. National Comptroller’s Office, Annual Report to the Congress of
the Comptroller of the Republic, 1995.
9. Estimates vary widely. Since 1990, the rate has fluctuated
between 68% and 75%. Office of Penitentiary Security, Ministry
of Justice.
10. For the most recent information on prison conditions and rates
of incarceration around the world, see Observatoire international
des prisons, Rapport 1995: les conditions de detention des per-
sonnes incarceres (Lyon: France, 1995).
11. Author interview, Juan Scatolini, Director of the Human Rights Office
of Buenos Aires Province, La Plata, Argentina, November 16, 1994.
12.Alexandra Elia de Molina, “Alternative Measures to
Imprisonment,” Policia Cientifica, Vol. 1, No. 4, October, 1992.
13. Marcanalisis 21 (Caracas), January, 1990.
14. Consultores 21 (Caracas), January, 1990.
15.El Nacional (Caracas), March 14, 1995; El Diario de Caracas
(Caracas), March 15, 1995, p. 2.
16. El Globo (Caracas), April 3, 1995, p. 7.
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