By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, Mar 5 1996 (IPS)

A mass break out at the Venezuelan ‘Reten de Catia’ prison, where Pope John Paul II’s blessing last month did little to improve the human rights abuses within, left three dead, two wounded and fourty prisoners at large, according to official reports.

Police Colonel Luis Camacho said three prisoners died and 10 were recaptured in neighbourhoods around the ancient building immediately following the incident.

The Pope had stopped before the prison on Feb. 9, shortly after he arrived in the country, appealing for “treatment worthy of human dignity” for the prisoners.

Inside the prison, some 2,000 men are squashed into a space planned for 700, living in medieval conditions in the middle of an extensive poor residential neighbourhood.

During the papal visit prisoners within the building were seen waving little flags with the Vatican colours, but days later the Catholic leadership revealed that the majority of these supposed inmates had in fact been plain clothes police officers.

The authorities classed the move as a security measure, but religious and human rights groups took it as a demonstration of the corruption which runs through the Venezuelan prison service like the letters through rock.

Corruption was undoubtedly behind the jailbreak this Tuesday as prison officials were warned the inmates might attempt such action, taking advantage of a trench alongside the wall left from external remodelling of the prison.

Camacho said during the early morning the sentry boxes overlooking the southern part of the prison, where the less dangerous prisoners are kept, were attacked by fire from a passing vehicle, and gunmen both within the prison and outside.

The shots distracted the guards while dozens of prisoners advanced to the exterior wall, breaking through to the external drainage ditch.

Social democrat deputy Rafael Narvaez, leader of a parliamentary commission on the prison situation, said he would call for an investigation “because it isn’t possible that 40 men escaped in only a few minutes.”

Narvaez insinuated the guards had cooperated, adding that jailbreaks were a recurring unresolved problem in Venezuelan detention centres.

On one previous occasion the prison was in such uproar that the army had to be called in to restore order.

“We’ve heard enough diagnoses, it’s now time the government did something,” he exclaimed.

“Information and warnings had been circulating since the weekend, saying that dangerous prisoners were moving into the southern section to get to the trench,”said Jorge Leon of Fundareo, a non-governmental organisation campaigning for better conditions in the prisons.

A representative from the building contractor who dug the trench said they had been warning prison security to step up the guard for several days, as only a few metres of soil lay between the prisoners and freedom.

Criminologist Elio Gomez said the escape “demonstrated how the Venezuelan prison service had collapsed, where hundreds of prisoners die each year, almost on the scale of a civil war.”

More than one prisoner is murdered on average each day in the Venezuelan prisons with mass murders in Catia in 1992, and in two other prisons in 1994.

“The problem is the corruption surrounding the prison industry. The third biggest illegal income in Venezuela, after drugs and robbery, is in the prisons, where millions of dollars change hands,” said Gomez.

Inside, “the prisoners pay for air, to see the sun, to have a visitor, for food or protection, to get their case into court or to move block or prison.”

The guards “charge to allow in drugs, weapons, grenades or visitors,” said Gomez, “and its a fruitful business, with a captive market and no competition.”

While the international human rights organisations complain about the horrific living conditions of the prisoners, the Venezuelan population in the streets outside suffer from the brutal impact of unrestrained crime, especially in Caracas.

There are around twenty murders each weekend, and the city itself is imprisoned by the iron bars protecting streets, houses and businesses from assault, while every two weeks another criminal is lynched by angry neighbourhood groups.

The 33 Venezuelan prisons hold 25,000 supposed criminals, though according to official figures some 18,000 of them are detained awaiting trial – the second worst record in Latin America behind Honduras.

Gomez, director of the University School of Penitentiary Education, said the situation is such “that only the poor devils go to prison. That’s why we can see several die in a desperate break-out and no one is the least bit worried.”

“If their place was taken by doctors or officials, the death of even one of them would cause a government crisis. But this doesn’t happen in Venezuela because the prisoners are unfortunates who are mostly paying for the crime of being poor,” concluded Gomez.

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