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. 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. Late Thursday morning, a policewoman came outside and spoke to relatives demanding answers. She had a small sheet of paper in her hands. “Carlos Sánchez?” she shouted.
Some grieving relatives were told by a policewoman: “Look, I haven’t had any breakfast, so let’s calm down.”
A woman immediately raised her hand and yelled, “I’m his mother, yes.” “He died,” the policewoman said. The mother started crying. She said her son had less than a year on his sentence. 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.” 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 s way over cellblocks and police holding cells like the ones in Valencia.
Relatives of prisoners waiting outside the police station where the fire broke out.
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. 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. 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. “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.”
A woman was affected by tear gas fired near the police station.
Another woman, 20-year-old Yesenia Morillo, said that she had two nephews awaiting trial inside the jail. “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. “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.” 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.
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Originally Posted by waltky
