Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

VENEZUELA: Mass Hunger Strike Hits Prisons

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Jul 12 2006 (IPS) - With the final match already played at the football World Cup, which may have stolen the limelight from their protest, inmates at seven of Venezuela’s 30 prisons went on hunger strike on Monday, and by Wednesday 8,000 inmates at 13 prisons were refusing food.

The hunger strikers are demanding an end to regulations barring reoffenders from certain privileges, a legal reform to increase opportunities for working outside prison walls, as well as inmates’ eternal petitions for better health conditions and food, more sports, an end to overcrowding, and above all, an end to trial delays.

“Trial delays have been a problem for many years in Venezuela. There are 19,000 people in prison, of whom more than 50 percent have suffered procedural delays, which gives an idea of the dimensions of the problem,” said Minister of Interior and Justice Jesse Chacón.

So far, the hunger strike has been peaceful, “and we hope that the prisoners, whose demands for speedy trials we support, will keep it that way and not resort, for example, to the so-called ‘blood strikes’ (cutting themselves on the arms and torso),” Catholic priest Pedro Moreno, chaplain general of prisons, told IPS.

Joining in the hunger strike were the inmates at the Coro women’s prison, 400 km northwest of Caracas, where 13 cases of fainting were reported. But so far there have been no fatalities or violence associated with the mass action.

The peaceful nature of the strike was in marked contrast to the violent climate of Venezuelan jails, where groups of prisoners avail themselves of knives, pistols, revolvers and even grenades, and where insecurity often reigns.

The average prison death rate is close to one per day. Totals in recent years for deaths from prison violence were 277 in 2004, 408 in 2005 and 150 in the first 196 days of 2006, according to the Venezuelan Prisons Observatory, a non-governmental humanitarian organisation.

“The inmates are carrying out their protest peacefully, and some of their activists have asked us to voice their demands so that they can remain anonymous, as they are afraid that after the hunger strike they may be transferred to other prisons,” Humberto Prado, director of the Observatory, told IPS.

A document containing their demands was delivered to the Ministry of Interior and Justice, the Supreme Court of Justice and the National Assembly. Deputy Justice Minister Yuri Pimentel has engaged in negotiations with the movement’s leaders.

Inmates demand an end to the implementation of articles of the Criminal Justice Code, according to which repeat offenders are ineligible for privileges such as working outside the prison, or conditional release on probation for good behaviour after serving part of their sentence.

Psychosocial evaluations for the behaviour requirement are excessively delayed, according to the inmates. They also demand that judges comply with the ruling that people who have been imprisoned without sentence for two years must be released.

Chacón said he has taken the necessary measures againstátrial delays, “such as providing every prison with vehicles for transferring” prisoners to the courts, but that other authorities are also involved in the matter, including the Judiciary and the Citizen’s branch, which includes the Public Prosecutor and Ombudsman.

After a tour of the prisons, deputy minister Pimentel said, “There appear to be well-founded reasons (for the protest) and in effect, (the inmates) are right.”

“We only hope that the situation will not become violent. So far, the actions have been carried out peacefully,” he said.

Pimentel said he hopes that “in the next few hours, or the next few days at most,” the hunger strike will end, because the demands are being heard by the authorities in the judicial and legislative branches.

The president of the Supreme Court, Omar Mora, said that “criminal justice in Venezuela meets international standards, as cases take between one and two years to be dealt with by the first and second instance judges.”

Observatory director Prado insisted that “all these state institutions have the responsibility of safeguarding the life, integrity and other human rights of the prison population, and to respond to its complaints about overcrowding, and demands for work, study and sports opportunities, and for professional prison guards.”

Moreno pointed out that “all these demands have been made for years, they have been repeatedly claimed for a long time. What is new is that the prisoners are uniting to present their demands collectively, and without resorting to mutinies or violent acts.”

Last year, inmates and their relatives attempted another form of struggle, consisting of the mass self-abduction of dozens, sometimes hundreds, of prisoners’ relatives, including children, for several days following the weekly visiting day.

The tragic violence within prisons is due mainly to acts of revengeáand struggles for control of particular spaces by groups of inmates, a situation that is exacerbated when there are mass transfers from one prison to another.

But there have also been massacres at the hands of unscrupulous prison guards, sometimes leading to inmates being burnt alive in their cells: over a period of 14 years, 180 prisoners were burnt to death in Venezuelan jails, according to human rights organisations.