VENEZUELA-CRIME: Notorious Prison to be Demolished

By Estrella Gutiérrez Reprint | | Print |

Estrella Gutierrez

CARACAS, Feb 16 1997 (IPS) - The first thing that overcomes any visitor to Venezuela’s notorious Catia prison is the stench left left behind when its inmates were transferred to new penitentiaries.

A government decision still has to be made on whether the 31- years- old Catia building will be demolished or renovated. A sign reading ” Condemned” on the doors of the prison gives a clue to someone’s thinking and reporters and others, who accompanied Justice Minister Henrique Meier and Caracas Mayor Antonio Ledezma on a tour of the rundown buildings.

rated for 31 years and which hide the memories of 3,700 deaths.

“I have visited Nazi extermination camps, but this is worse,” said Jacobo Borges, one of the country’s foremost living artists and a native of Catia, the impoverished neighbourhood of one million on the westside of Caracas that is the site of the prison.

The Catia penitentiary at one time held 3,500 inmates in spite of its nominal capacity of 875. It became a symbol of Venezuela’s prison system, infamous for its sub-human conditions, mistreatment of inmates, corruption and overcrowding. Three-quarters of the inmates were awaiting trial and sentencing but the slow pace of court hearings kept them incarcerated. Worse still is the grim statistic that 3,700 prisoners died while housed at Catia.

On his Latin American tour last year, Pope John Paul II stopped at the doors of the Catia prison to give the inmates his blessing and to call attention to the appalling conditions there. But police dressed as prisoners – later justified by the then-Justice Minister as a safety measure – were all he saw.

The inhabitants of Catia are now afraid that plans to knock down the prison, which had made the name of their neighbourhood a synonym for disgrace, will give way to a scheme for the renovation of the buildings, pushed by several groups who want to see it turned into a centre for studies, a library, or left standing as testimony to the past.

Borges argued that “tearing down this prison is necessary for rebuilding the city. It has operated as a kind of invisible Berlin Wall dividing the city.”

A tour of the premises provided reporters a glimpse of the former inmates’ conditions. The overpowering stench of urine, humidity, sweat, rotting food and garbage assaulted the senses amid the squalor which was visible when eyes adjusted to the half-light.

Scraps of material made into improvised hammocks still hang in the punishment cells where 10 men slept in an area of less than three square metres. The normal cells, designed as individual quarters, were are not much better as again a rough count of shapeless mattresses on the floor showed around 10 persons in each cell.

The freshly painted walls of others gave testimony to the well- greased system of corruption and privilege that operated here, where everything, from floor-space to paint, had its price, as Minister Meier and Mayor Ledezma admitted to the T.V. cameras.

The tour made a special stop in the roomy subterranean cell that was the stronghold of one of Catia’s most infamous inmates: Hernan Grima, a killer of seven police officers who died in Catia in 1992 at the hands of a rival prison gang.

A single glance at the “kitchen” made it clear why those who were able to pay for the privilege of receiving meals cooked by their families did so, or prepared their food in their cells.

Borges participated in the tour in order to advocate the demolition of the penitentiary, and the incorporation of the grounds into the Park of the West, a 14 hectare – 46 have been promised – recreation area in which Caracans can commune with nature.

A majority of those who visited the prison while it was open to the public agreed that it should be torn down. Groups of high school students led by their teachers and a few families toured the rundown buildings, their exclamations gradually overwhelmed by shocked silence.

“Whatever the prisoners did, this is not fit for human beings,” commented 14-year-old Catia resident Ronny Vivas, who joined the reporters “because I wanted to see if it was as bad as they say.”

One of his uncles was forced to spend two years in Catia until he was found innocent of charges brought against him after his case was heard. “He was lucky because his case was really clear, and his family was around to make sure he didn’t break down and come out, like everyone else, a drug addict or murderer,” Ronny said

Leading Venezuelan criminologist, Elio Gomez Grillo, said the only sensible option for “that den of terror and death” is demolition.

Gomez Grillo maintained that “poverty, much more than crime,” is punished in Venezuela’s 32 prisons, home to 26,000 inmates. That is why, he contends, there is little social sensibility regarding an inoperative justice system that leads to inmates often serving much more time than they would had they enjoyed timely sentencing.

“Catia is irrecoverable,” says Justice Minister Meier. “It would cost us some 53 million dollars to rebuild, compared to 22,000 to knock it down….No one will block the demolition.”

Borges tells of the work of an interdisciplinary group of artists and volunteers that spent a year documenting life inside the prison. The group plans to use the material to create a kind of “horror museum, so it will never be forgotten.”

Reforms introduced by Meier did go some way to improving life in Catia before the prsoners were transferred elsewhere. A new prison director was successful in drastically reducing the incidence of crime and the number of murders and injuries within its walls. Under him, prison riots became almost non-existent and he was able to curb the rampant corruption and speed up processing for those awaiting sentencing.

The important thing for a prisoner, commented one inmate of Rodeo II, one of the two new prisons that took in the 1,600 inmates of Catia, “is to see the judge, to know your case isn’t stuck, because with a sentence you know you’ll eventually get out.”

Monica Fernandez, a young attorney named Director of Prisons in late 1996, says today’s authorities are up against “decades of neglect and of a culture in need of radical changes…There are too many evils enclosed in the system. But Minister Meier was finally able to put a padlock on the most disgraceful symbol of all: Catia.”