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LATIN AMERICA |
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Book
Reveals the Drama of Venezuela’s Violent
Prisons
By Paula Vilella
CARACAS – Arms, drugs and murders behind
bars are rife in Venezuelan journalist
Patricia Clarembaux’s book “A Ese Infierno
Ya No Vuelvo” (I’ll Never Return to This
Hell), which reveals the drama in her
country’s prisons, the most violent in the
Americas.
In the 31 penitentiaries that house 24,360
prisoners, some 422 inmates died in 2008,
which makes Venezuela the country with the
most slayings of inmates on the continent,
according to figures of the Venezuelan
Prison Observatory, or OVP.
The OVP said that the number of violent
deaths in Venezuelan prisons was greater in
2008 than in all the jails of Mexico,
Brazil, Colombia and Peru combined, while
over the past 10 years there have been a
total of 3,664 slayings.
From the pages of the daily Tal Cual,
Clarembaux has spent three years reporting
on the horror in which the nation’s inmates
survive, completely “forgotten by the
government,” which condemns them to living
in “subhuman conditions.”
The reporter found the jails to be
overcrowded, without walls, with an
accumulation of garbage and excrement, with
inmates better armed than the prison guards
and where they can get any drug they want.
“Jails turn those deprived of their freedom
into beings impossible to return to society
since instead of rehabilitating them, they
give them the tools to become better
criminals,” Clarembaux, who never calls them
prisoners in order to ‘humanize them,’ said
in an interview with Efe.
She said that the main cause of this
situation is outside the prison walls, in a
society where so many children grow up
without fathers, with mothers who can’t
attend to their education because they work
all day, and where criminals are role
models.
“In poor Caracas neighborhoods the figure of
the ‘malandro’ (criminal) is a hero that
kids want to imitate when they grow up,” she
said, and so for minor crimes they can end
up sharing cells with murderers and rapists,
since in Venezuela inmates are not
classified according to their crimes.
Behind bars, the government is a mere
administrative figure without any real
function that has to negotiate everything it
does with the bosses inside the jails.
Clarembaux compares them to the board of
directors of a company, taking decisions
that are obeyed by the rest of the inmates
and even the warden, who “can do nothing
without talking it over with them because it
could spark a massacre.”
“Lots of money, drugs and weapons” circulate
inside prisons, she said, while according to
OVP, in 2008 alone, 2,148 weapons were
seized inside Venezuela’s penitentiaries.
Nonetheless, the journalist said that the
bosses are also those who provide activity
programs for their centers, keep order and
resolve problems like the trash and internal
conflicts.
But it is the most populous jails with
several bosses that are the most violent,
since the priority is “to assert one’s
authority over the others” and that leads to
most of the killings behind bars, she said.
But what most struck Clarembaux in her
successive visits to the different jails
around the country was the world of “the
witches,” inmates who had betrayed someone’s
trust and that nobody wants anything to do
with.
A world that, she said, is “in black and
white” and is inhabited by “the saddest men
I’ve ever seen.”
Not even religion can redeem this group,
since the evangelicals, who have special
cellblocks and who are the most respected
people inside the penitentiaries, demand
genuine proofs of faith from inmates for
them to be accepted as members.
Clarembaux said that she would never enter a
jail without the company of evangelicals,
who can “walk into any cellblock or cell,
they embrace all and are respected,” unlike
Catholics, who “have no credibility” inside
the prisons. EFE
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