VENEZUELA-PRISONS: Thrust Back in the Headlines by New Massacre

By Estrella Gutiérrez Reprint | | Print |

Estrella Gutierrez

CARACAS, Aug 28 1997 (IPS) - Another massacre thrust Venezuela’s prison system back into world headlines Thursday, with at least 42 killed in a brawl in the isolated El Dorado penitentiary, 600 kms southeast of Caracas.

But since there were no telephones, vehicles or doctors in the prison when the three-hour fight broke out, the casualty list will grow, “because there are seriously wounded victims who took a long time to be transferred to the nearest health centre,” the local press reported.

The coordinator of the non-governmental FundaReo, Henry Castro, told IPS that El Dorado “is a warehouse of human beings, where it cannot be said that human rights are violated, because such rights simply do not exist there.”

There are 420 inmates in the prison, according to statistics supplied by Justice Minister Hilarion Cardozo on his way by airplane to the prison, located in the jungle and mining region of Guayana.

The tragedy is the worst since 25 inmates were burnt to death in a Caracas prison in October 1996. In recent months, authorities had been successful in curbing the high levels of violence plaguing Venezuela’s notorious prison system, where most of the over 25,000 inmates packed into the country’s 33 overcrowded prisons, often in subhuman conditions, are still awaiting trial.

The brawl broke out around 5:30 in the morning (9.30 GMT) Thursday, when breakfast began in the maximum security area, and a semblance of control was restored only three hours later.

Many of the victims were members of the Wayuu indigenous group, transferred last November from the state of Zulia, more than 1,300 kms away in the extreme northwestern region of the country.

The priest of a parish church separated from El Dorado prison by a river, Marco Viloria, said tension had been growing in the facility since the transfer of the indigenous prisoners.

FundaReo’s Castro pointed out that El Dorado was officially an agricultural colony created for men charged with administrative crimes by the authorities of the country’s 22 state governments, without going through the courts. Many of the inmates were imprisoned under a law on “vagrants and idlers,” one of Venezuela’s most heavily criticised laws, which permits the detention of those charged with “affecting public peace.”

Located a few kilometres from the mining town of El Dorado — the source of a myth of endless wealth during the Spanish conquest — the prison population ranges from homosexuals to panhandlers, as well as the odd “leader of street vendors, for example, who may have been causing problems for local authorities,” said Castro.

Speaking by cell-phone, Justice Minister Cardozo said the fighting broke out when a group of prisoners escaped from the maximum security wing and tried to set fire to the area controlled by the Wayuus.

In Caracas, Deputy Minister of Justice Kurtnagel Von Jess said the brawl was “between rival gangs for control of the prison.” He acknowledged that it is the prisoners rather than the guards or the military National Guard who set the rules there.

The prisoners reportedly used firearms as well as homemade knives in the fight.

Cardozo confirmed that the Wayuu prisoners were involved in the fight. He added that their transfer was ordered by the governor of the state of Zulia, not the Ministry of Justice.

A battle among Wayuus — Venezuela’s largest ethnic group, from the western region of Goajira — was part of the origin of a 1994 massacre in Sabaneta prison in Zulia, in which more than 100 inmates were killed.

Prison director Monica Fernandez was investigating the situation of the Wayuu inmates with a view to returning them to a Zulia prison, after a group of Wayuu mothers protested to Cardozo that their sons were the targets of a plan to eliminate them.

According to Cardozo, the women had reported that one Wayuu prisoner a day was being killed as part of the plan. But he did not clarify whether such reports had been confirmed by the director of El Dorado prison. “The only thing they have there is a radio that half functions,” said the minister.