Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro announced on Tuesday the appointment of a new Minister of Penitentiary Affairs just after an organization that ensures the rights of those deprived of liberty rled to the start of a hunger strike in several prisons.
Maduro appointed the official lawyer and legislator Julio García Zerpa to replace Vice Admiral Celsa Bautista. The president, who did not mention the hunger strike, thanked the military chief for her “important work at the head of this ministry.”
The appointment occurred two days after the Venezuelan Prisons Observatory reported that inmates in 19 prisons and 14 detention sites in police stations, where the stay should be short, declared a hunger strike demanding the “granting of humanitarian measures, transfers to prisons of origin.” The organization assured that the country’s prisons face critical overcrowding and offer precarious food.
Neither Maduro nor the Ministry of Penitentiary Service have confirmed or denied that there is a strike by the prison population. The Associated Press He requested comment from the authorities but received no response.
Women deprived of their liberty at the National Institute for Women’s Guidance (INOF)—the only women’s prison in the country—also joined the strike to complain about delays in their judicial processes, the situation in prisons, and discontent over the programs. government “that have not provided any solution to their legal situation,” added the Observatory.
The images released by the Observatory show dozens of prisoners, women and men, displaying banners inside the penitentiary centers, demanding immediate release for prisoners who accuse procedural delays and denouncing serious problems with food and health care.
A report from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in 2023 described the situation of those deprived of liberty in Venezuela as “one of the most serious in the region.” Among the main deficiencies, he mentioned overcrowding and the lack of updated official figures in the prison system.
According to the IACHR, official figures recorded a prison population in 2022 of 33,558 prisoners in 45 prison centers. However, he assured that there is a “duality of the penitentiary system” that takes shape in preventive detention centers, which he called “dungeons”, raising the registry to 35,000 inmates. He did not have access to data from 2023, he added.
Overcrowding, which can exceed 200% in some prisons in the country, “can constitute in itself a form of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, violating the right to personal integrity and other human rights,” the organization indicated. regional.
Another problem that the Prison Observatory points out in its reports published on the internet is that those deprived of their liberty are detained without taking into account their proximity to their families or the jurisdiction or territory where their cases are being processed. 70% of the procedural delay is due to transportation problems, he added.
At the beginning of May, the non-governmental organization asserted that prisoners in a prison in Caracas had not eaten protein for three months, a situation that, it assured, “is experienced in the rest of the prisons in Venezuela.”
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