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After Dozens Die in a Jail Fire, Venezuela Tear-Gasses Their Relatives Venezuela, Accustomed to Tragedy, Is Shaken Again by Horrific Jail Fire
(about 5 hours later)
VALENCIA, Venezuela — Like most jails in Venezuela, the one attached to the police station in the northern city of Valencia was packed beyond capacity. Built to house roughly 60 inmates, it contained about 200. VALENCIA, Venezuela — It began as a jailhouse party. It ended in carnage.
Simmering anger fueled a riot there on Wednesday morning: A prison guard, wounded by a knife, was taken hostage. Inmates threatened to kill him with a grenade unless their demands were met. Others set mattresses alight. On Thursday, grieving families collected their dead after one of the worst prison fires in the country’s history claimed the lives of 68 people. The relatives searched for answers, but also offered a chilling account of what they had learned so far: The fire began after gangs running a party in an overcrowded jail fought with the guards. A hostage was taken; a fire broke out.
The fire turned the jail into an inferno. Emergency workers punched holes in the walls to let the smoke disperse and the inmates escape. But by nightfall, 66 men and two women — who were evidently at the jail to visit loved ones — were dead and scores were injured. Enraging Venezuelans and rights advocates, the police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at grieving relatives who gathered outside the jail overnight demanding information. Dozens perished in the smoke and flames, screaming for help.
Late Thursday morning, a policewoman came outside and spoke to relatives demanding answers. She had a small sheet of paper in her hands. Yet the pain didn’t end there. Witnesses said that grieving relatives who had come were sprayed with tear gas by security forces who tried to disperse them.
“Carlos Sánchez?” she shouted. “I’ve been living here 55 years, and it’s the first time I’ve seen something like this,” said María, whose home is near the prison, and who refused to give her last name for fear of reprisals by the police for describing the tear-gassing.
The scenes were shocking, even in Venezuela, where tragedy has become the norm.
Grocery stores are short of food and hospitals are bereft of supplies as the country’s economic meltdown hastens. President Nicolás Maduro marches toward autocracy, isolating his country from humanitarian aid and keeping opponents in jail ahead of a presidential election in May. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled the country, seeking lives in lands where there is more hope.
Yet the fire underlined the fate of a group for whom escape was never possible: The tens of thousands of Venezuelan prisoners neglected in overcrowded cells by the very government charged with their custody.
“Put in the wider context, this country has gone broke,” said Jeremy McDermott, the co-founder of Insight Crime, a research group that has investigated prison conditions in Venezuela. “In the list of priorities, people in jail cells are not on anyone’s radar besides their loved ones. This has been a disaster waiting to happen.”
On Thursday, Judith Coromoto García, 45, waited with other two women to identify her son’s body inside the police station attached to the jail’s holding cells, where she had been waiting since 10 a.m. Ms. Coromoto had made the two-hour journey on public buses with her mother. Police said the body of the son was still on the floor of the station.
Eventually they let her in, and she stepped toward seven bodies covered in black plastic, she said. The police pointed to one of them.
“Here he is,” they said.
“That is not my son,” she responded, wincing at the stranger below her.
The government, she realized, had failed once again.
While the fire was one of the worst to strike a Venezuelan jail, it was far from the first deadly chapter for its prison system.
In 2013, 61 people died in clashes at a prison in Barquisimeto. In 2011 and 2012, dozens were killed in a series of riots that took place in a complex outside the capital, Caracas — events that prompted Venezuela to create a ministry just to handle overcrowded prisons.
Inmates’ relatives said the fire started after the authorities tried to break up a party overseen by gangs — known as pranatos — that rights groups say have long operated extortion rackets with impunity within prison walls.
On Wednesday, relatives said, wives and girlfriends of the inmates were permitted conjugal visits. The party got underway, and then the trouble started.
“The police wanted to get into the jail cells, they wanted to enter by force,” said Rosa Guzmán, 40, describing the account her sister-in-law gave.
Soon a prison guard was shot and taken hostage, relatives said. Inmates threatened to kill with him a grenade unless conditions were met. Family members said police set mattresses alight, and the fire turned the jail into a inferno. Emergency workers punched holes into the jail’s walls to let the smoke disperse and the inmates escape.
The events sparked outrage. How, people asked, had holding cells meant to house only 60 inmates been allowed to pack in more than 200? Why were Venezuela’s gangs, long known to rule the roost in the country’s prisons, allowed to host a celebration within a police station?
On Thursday, the United Nations human rights office criticized the attack on the relatives. The group, long critical of abuses it says have become typical in prisons, reproached the country once more for “widespread overcrowding and dire conditions” across Venezuela’s penal system and demanded an investigation.
“These conditions, which often give rise to violence and riots, are exacerbated by judicial delays and the excessive use of pretrial detention,” the human rights office said, while urging the authorities to carry out an investigation and provide reparations to the victims’ families.
Henrique Capriles, an opposition leader who has been barred from holding public office, expressed his outrage on Twitter.
“How many more times are we going to see the same horrific scenes with the country’s prisoners?” Mr. Capriles asked. The deaths show the “failure of a government that is obliged to guarantee the lives of Venezuelans.”
Responding to the criticism, Rafael Lacava, the governor of the state of Carabobo, of which Valencia is the capital, defended the government on Thursday, saying that “we are, before anything, a government which guarantees human rights.”
However, the governor, who is from Mr. Maduro’s ruling party, did suggest that wrongdoing might have occurred. He said that the state government was working with the attorney general to “hold those responsible to pay for the crimes committed, both in their actions and inactions.”
The overcrowding in Venezuela’s jails is staggering even by Latin American standards. In 2015, the most recent year for which reliable figures are available, 49,644 people were incarcerated in prisons designed to hold 19,000 inmates, Insight Crime reported last year. An additional 33,000 people were held in temporary holding cells built for 5,000, it said.
The inmates include everyone from convicted murders to political prisoners of the government and protesters who were rounded up during demonstrations against Mr. Maduro last year and are being held in military jails.
More than 6,600 people died in the country’s prisons between 1999 and 2015, Human Rights Watch reported. Last year, a mass grave holding 15 bodies was found by construction workers at a prison in the state of Guárico. In 2014, officials said more than 30 were killed in a mass poisoning of prisoners on a hunger strike.
Roberto Briceño-León, the head of the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a nongovernmental group, said Venezuela’s reliance on temporary holding cells to keep prisoners has caused its own problems.
He said in many police stations up to a third of officers are now guarding prisoners rather than policing the streets. The facilities are not built to house people for the long term, yet some inmates remain for years.
“I’m not just talking about having no place to go to the bathroom or to sleep — they don’t have anything to eat there,” said Mr. Briceño-León. Because of the shortages, he said, “the police themselves don’t have enough food to eat.”
At a funeral home near the jail, relatives awaited the arrival of bodies on Thursday. One mother named Andrea, who did not give her last name because she feared reprisals by the police, waited to take home the remains of her son.
She could not contain her anger against the police.
“I want him to be at home, and then I want to bury him properly, not like a dog,” she said. “They treated him like a dog. I lost a part of me”.
Back at the police station, the mother of Carlos Sánchez, one of the deceased, waited for word on her son. When officials called her, she knew the bad news had come. She repeated Mr. Sánchez’s name over and over.
“Carlos Sánchez?” a policewoman shouted.
A woman immediately raised her hand and yelled, “I’m his mother, yes.”A woman immediately raised her hand and yelled, “I’m his mother, yes.”
“He died,” the policewoman said.“He died,” the policewoman said.
The mother started crying. She said her son had less than a year on his sentence. The policewoman who delivered the news recited some names of inmates who had survived the fire and then shouted: “Look, I haven’t had any breakfast, so let’s calm down. These are the names I have, that’s it.”
The policewoman recited some names of inmates who had survived the fire and then shouted: “Look, I haven’t had any breakfast, so let’s calm down. These are the names I have, that’s it.” Mr. Sánchez’s mother hugged her daughter and the two eventually fell to the floor, crying and asking God to hear their prayers.
With Venezuela in an economic collapse even worse than the Great Depression and its public health system in free fall, inmates throughout the country are going hungry. Protests are on the rise. Weapons and drug smuggling are prevalent, as is bribery of guards and of the heavily armed groups who hold sway over cellblocks and police holding cells like the ones in Valencia. Yet amid the grief, some prayers were being answered that day.
Other marks of the crisis include hyperinflation, extreme shortages of food and medicine, constant electrical blackouts, thousands of children dying of malnutrition, rampant crime in every province and looting and rioting in the streets. Ms. García, who had taken the bus to the jail only to have police take her to identify the body of someone who wasn’t her son, went looking for him in the jail, before ending up in an area that prisoners call “El Tigrito,” or the Little Tiger.
The fire was one of the worst disasters in the history of Venezuela’s prisons and its toll surpassed the 61 who died in a riot at a prison near Barquisimeto in 2013; the 17 who died in a fire in Tocuyito, near Valencia, in 2015; and the 37 who died in a prison uprising in Puerto Ayacucho, in the state of Amazonas, last August. There, crowded with 20 other men, was her son.
Inmates’ relatives said on Thursday that they had been told the fire started after the authorities tried to break up a party overseen by gangs — known as pranatos — that have paid off or intimidated the prison staff to permit drugs, alcohol and sex. On Wednesday, they said, wives and girlfriends were permitted to visit their loved ones at the prison. “I could feel my soul coming back to my body,” she said.
“The police wanted to get into the dungeons. They wanted to enter by force. That’s what my brother told his wife,” said Rosa Guzmán, 40, describing the account her sister-in-law gave. “We came here and the police were very aggressive. They made us run.” Her son told her about what had happened.
Another woman, 20-year-old Yesenia Morillo, said that she had two nephews awaiting trial inside the jail. “Everyone was shouting asking for help.” he recalled him saying. “Mom, that was ugly.”
“Last week, an internal fight caused one death, but that’s normal,” she said of the jail, adding that her nephews had survived the fire. The family celebrated his being alive. But there was no escape from the dangers: He remains in jail, locked up for the last two years after stealing a cellphone.
“They said there was a party and that police asked them to shut down the party and the prisoners didn’t want to end the party,” she said. “So one prisoner took the policeman’s gun and then they started shooting and the police shot a woman. That’s when everything started.” Like other survivors from the jail, he is still awaiting his trial.
María, 56, who lives around the block from the jail and who insisted that her surname not be used because she fears reprisal, said the authorities fired rubber bullets on angry crowds who had congregated nearby to demand answers.
“I’ve been living here 55 years and it’s the first time I’ve seen something like this, so big,” she said.
María described the jail as a chaotic mess. On weekends, she said, a truck delivers ice and food for the parties overseen by the gangs, and prostitutes regularly enter and leave the police station attached to the jail.
The Venezuelan Prisons Observatory said it had warned for a long time about the untenable situation at police station jails, where detainees are often kept far longer than the 48-hour holding period mandated by law after an initial arrest. Venezuelan prisons have long suffered overcrowding, a situation which has led to international condemnation and riots by the prisoners themselves.
The most notorious occurred in a packed prison complex known as Rodeo, outside of Caracas, where riots in 2011 and 2012 left dozens dead. That led then-President Hugo Chávez to form a government ministry devoted to overseeing the prison population.
But reform efforts did not go as planned, experts say. In the years that followed, the new ministry ceded much of the authority of running the prisons, once in the hands of wardens, to the prisoners themselves. This led to the rise of mafia bosses who essentially ran the prison complexes in extortion rackets.
Worse for those in the state of Carabobo, of which Valencia is the capital, it seems their cells weren’t under the ministry’s authority.
Being part of a police station, the jail was a place meant to hold inmates for short periods of time after arrest, said Jeremy McDermott, the co-founder of Insight Crime, a research group which has studied Venezuela’s prison system. In recent years, as traditional prisons have become overcrowded, police jails have been used as an overflow area for the inmates.
“People have spent months, if not years in these holding cells — ones that don’t fulfill even basic human rights,” said Mr. McDermott, who said that police often have no budget to care for the prisoners. “A large percentage haven’t had their case heard.”
The Venezuelan Program of Education-Action in Human Rights, known by its acronym Provea, is one of the main humanitarian organizations in the country. It said on its Twitter account that the “indolence” of the government had contributed to the death toll.
Critics within and outside Venezuela condemned the country’s leftist authoritarian government on Thursday, as reports emerged that the police had used tear gas to disperse relatives who had gathered in front of the police station in Valencia to demand information.
The United Nations human rights office, which has repeatedly criticized Venezuela for jailing and beating political opponents, censoring critics and failing to protect citizens from malnutrition and disease, noted “widespread overcrowding and dire conditions” across Venezuela’s penal system, in which police cellblocks are often used as permanent detention centers.
“These conditions, which often give rise to violence and riots, are exacerbated by judicial delays and the excessive use of pretrial detention,” the human rights office said, while urging the authorities to investigate and provide reparations to the victims’ families.
Henrique Capriles, an opposition leader who has been barred from holding public office, wrote on Twitter: “How many more times are we going to see the same scenes horrific with the country’s prisoners? More than 70 deaths crammed into a police headquarters shows the failure of a government that is obliged to guarantee the lives of Venezuelans.”
Another opposition leader, Antonio Ledezma, a former mayor of Caracas who fled to Colombia last year, suggested on Twitter that Venezuelans should rise up against their leaders, as Tunisians did at the start of the Arab Spring.
In 2015, the most recent year for which reliable figures are available, 49,644 people were incarcerated in prisons designed to hold 19,000 inmates, InSight Crime reported last year. An additional 33,000 people were held in temporary holding cells built for 5,000, it said.
Armed gangs control life in many Venezuelan prisons and many people die in detention. More than 6,600 people died in the country’s prisons between 1999 and 2015, Human Rights Watch reported, citing data from the Venezuelan Observatory of Prisons. Last year, a mass grave holding 15 bodies was found by construction workers at a prison in the state of Guárico. At least 23 people were killed in weeks of battles between armed prisoners and Venezuelan security forces in a jail outside Caracas in 2011.
Rafael Lacava, the governor of the state of Carabobo, expressed his condolences and promised “a serious and thorough investigation,” which he said the nation’s Interior Ministry, along with prosecutors and police, would participate in.
A spokesman for the state government, Jesús Santander, posted a passage from the Book of Isaiah on Twitter.
“The Lord longs to be gracious to you; therefore he will rise up to show you compassion,” it says.