Carlos Nieto Palma, director of the NGO Una Ventana a la Libertad, said that diseases and malnutrition are monopolizing deaths in prisons. For her part, Martha Tineo of the NGO Justicia, Encuentro y Perdón, stressed that 55% of political prisoners are serving an early sentence
The director of the NGO Una Ventana a la Libertad, Carlos Nieto Palmadenied that the Executive’s initiative to bring the courts to the prisons to solve the problem of procedural delays and decongest the prisons in the country has been effective, explaining that they only worked for a while and that they released some 14,000 people for later “forget about it”
Nieto Palma, who participated in the forum “Venezuelan Prisons: A Neglected Crisis,” said on Thursday, January 26, that prison overcrowding is a serious issue that has not yet been comprehensively addressed, recalling that the process against a private of freedom should last between six months and a year maximum. He added that out of a total population of 100,000 inmates, only 35,000 are in prison.
However, in Venezuela it is recorded that a person can be in preventive detention for up to 20 years and that, when the trial takes place, the person deprived of liberty has served more than the time he should have spent in prison.
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This variable is concatenated with what is overcrowding in preventive detention centers (CDP). He stated that President Nicolás Maduro, on June 23, 2021, ordered these cells to be closed in the police stations to decongest them and transfer people to a place where they were comfortable. However, he regretted that it did not happen.
He recalled that when the Ministry of Penitentiary Services was created, with Iris Varela at the helm, the rule began to apply that new inmates could not enter prisons if they were not authorized by that instance. This led to the transfer of those deprived of liberty to the CDP, which were created so that a person would be detained for a maximum of 48 hours until the court decided whether he would go to trial or if he was released.
He denounced that in Venezuela there is a kind of duality in the prison system because, on the one hand, there are around 45 to 50 formal prisons, after separating the pavilions for men and women and counting them as different; and on the other hand, some 500 CDPs throughout the country, where there are more detainees than in prisons, since it is said that there are 65,000 in police cells.
In the country’s prisons, according to Carlos Nieto Palma, in addition to overcrowding problems, there are crises in food, health and hygiene; resulting in malnutrition and the appearance of diseases that are not controlled by the authorities. «The deaths due to confrontation between gangs is a myth. Now they are dying of hunger and disease,” he warned.
*Read also: Overcrowding in preventive detention centers in Venezuela “exceeds 150%”
On the one hand, he indicated that in the CDP there is no capacity to provide food or conditions so that those deprived of their liberty can be moderately well, but rather they expressly depend on their relatives. This, coupled with the little space in the dungeons where they cannot cook much and drink little water, affects their diet and leads to malnutrition.
In contrast, there is the health problem that has become the leading cause of death for prisoners for many years. In this sense, deaths from diseases such as tuberculosis, which is not properly treated, is the one that has caused the most deaths. “It has become the covid in prisons,” he said.
It then revealed that in the first half of 2022, of 30 registered deaths, 18 were due to tuberculosis with the highest number, followed by malnutrition and HIV. He did not want to say more because they plan to present last year’s report on this matter on February 15.
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Political prisoners live the same in prisons
For her part, the general coordinator of the NGO Justicia, Encuentro y Perdón, Martha Tineo, indicated that, according to their records, unofficially there are 309 political prisoners in Venezuela who suffer the same ills as the prison population in general; although he said with the accent that in many cases there is no evidence or proceedings open against these people, but rather they enter prisons or CDPs arbitrarily.
He warned that 55% of those deprived of liberty for political reasons are serving an early sentence and denounced the lack of certainty in their cases by the Venezuelan penal system. Similarly, only 2% of them are politicians or have a party affiliation, because all the rest are civilians and military.
He took the opportunity to accuse the authorities of making transfers without notifying the relatives of the prisoners, which leaves these people incommunicado.
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