68 killed in horrific prison fire in Venezuela
Fight broke out in overcrowded jail
VALENCIA, Venezuela — It began as a jailhouse party. It ended in carnage.
On Thursday, grieving families collected their dead after one of the worst prison fires in the country’s history killed 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.
Dozens perished in the smoke and flames, screaming for help.
Yet the pain didn’t end there. Witnesses said grieving relatives who had come were sprayed with tear gas by security forces who tried to disperse them.
“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 before 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 chargedwith 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 sevenbodies covered in black plastic, she said. The police pointedto 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.
Inmates’ relatives said the fire started after 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 an inferno. Emergency workers punched holes into the jail’s walls to let the smoke disperse and the inmatesescape.
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.