Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 April 2020
Venezuela has two types of prisons: a prison regime ruled by a hierarchical organisation of armed inmates and the securitised ‘New Regime’ system under the control of the Ministry of Penitentiary Services. This article uses a comparative approach to examine how legitimacy is constructed in these competing yet co-existing prison regime formations in Venezuela. Both the Venezuelan state and the prisons under ‘carceral self-rule’ legitimate their respective carceral orders through discourses of left-wing emancipation that correspond with different phases of the Bolivarian project. Yet contradictions emerge from these legitimising discourses and neither regime conforms to its respective discourse of participation or socialism. In the state-abandoned, violent and hierarchical prisons under carceral self-rule, prisoners are only partially empowered, while in the New Regime prison types predation at the hands of one's fellow inmates is replaced by the violence of the ‘humanising’ state.
Venezuela tiene dos tipos de prisiones: un régimen penitenciario dirigido por una organización jerárquica de prisioneros armados y el nuevo régimen securitizado bajo control del Ministerio del Poder Popular para el Servicio Penitenciario. Este artículo utiliza un enfoque comparativo para examinar cómo se construye la legitimidad en estos competitivos aunque coexistentes regímenes penitenciarios en Venezuela. El estado venezolano tanto como las prisiones bajo ‘autogobierno carcelario’ legitiman sus respectivos órdenes carcelarios a través de discursos izquierdistas de emancipación que corresponden a diferentes fases del proyecto bolivariano. Pero estos discursos legitimadores presentan contradicciones y ninguno de los regímenes está de acuerdo con sus discursos respectivos de participación o socialismo. En las cárceles violentas y jerárquicas abandonadas por el estado, los presos están solo parcialmente apoderados, mientras que en los tipos de cárcel ‘Nuevo Régimen’, el control depredatorio a manos de los compañeros de prisión es reemplazado por la violencia del estado ‘humanizador’.
Na Venezuela existem dois tipos de prisão: o regime carcerário governado pela organização hierárquica de presos armados e o novo sistema de regime securizado sob o controle do Ministério do Poder Popular pelo Serviço Penitenciário. Este artigo utiliza uma abordagem comparativa para examinar como a legitimidade é construída nestes competitivos, porém coexistentes, regimes de organização de prisões da Venezuela. Ambos o Estado e as prisões sob regime de ‘auto-administração carcerária’ da Venezuela legitimam suas ordens carcerárias através de discursos de esquerda de emancipação que correspondem a diferentes fases do projeto Bolivariano. Mas estes discursos de legitimação apresentam contradições e nenhum dos modelos realiza os ideais de seus discursos respectivos de participação ou de socialismo. Nas violentas e hierárquicas prisões abandonadas pelo Estado, os prisioneiros beneficiam de um empoderamento só parcial, embora nos tipos de prisões ‘Novo Regime’, a predação sob as mãos dos próprios colegas presidiários é substituída pela violência do Estado ‘humanizador’.
1 I conducted my fieldwork in two phases. During the first phase I visited the Internado Judicial Regional Capital El Rodeo I (although El Rodeo has three separate facilities, I refer to this prison as El Rodeo throughout this article), the Internado Judicial de Yaracuay (which I will refer to by its usual name of San Felipe) and the Internado Judicial Bolívar (commonly known as Vista Hermosa); during the second I visited the Centro Penitenciario Sargento David Viloria and a carceral self-rule prison on the outskirts of Caracas.
2 Cárcel o infierno (Jail or Hell) is a popular animated web series created by the late formerly incarcerated animator Luidig Alfonso Ochoa. See ‘Prisons in Latin America: A Journey into Hell’, The Economist, 22 Sept. 2012; Patricia Clarembaux and Alonso Moleiro, A ese infierno no vuelvo: Un viaje a las entrañas de las cárceles venezolanas (Caracas: Ediciones Puntocero, 2009); MacNeil, Donald, Journey to Hell: Inside the World's Most Violent Prison System (Preston: Milo, 2006)Google Scholar; Kane, Frank and Tilsley, John, In the Shadow of Papillon: Seven Years of Hell in Venezuela's Prison System (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 2007)Google Scholar.
3 Between 2008 and 2014, the number of people incarcerated in Venezuela doubled, bringing the penal population to an all-time high of 55,000 people. See Table 1.
4 The National Guard operates under the control of the Ministry of Defence. Venezuelan law acknowledges the ‘military's inherent unfitness for prison duties’ and reserves its involvement for circumstances that are ‘exceptional’: Human Rights Watch (HRW), ‘Punishment before Trial: Prison Conditions in Venezuela’, 1997. Available at https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1997/venez/index.htm (last accessed 27 Dec. 2019).
5 Decree No. 8,266 (Gaceta Oficial no. 39,721, 26 July 2011).
6 Phillips, Nicola, ‘Doing Research in the Shadows of the Global Political Economy’, in Montgomerie, Johnna (ed.), Critical Methods in Political and Cultural Economy (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 115–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Ibid. Phillips defines this as ‘pursuing a wide variety of methods for collecting information, taking insights from wherever they are to be found and relying on the cumulative results’.
8 Frisch, Michael H., A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2011 [1st edn, 1990])Google Scholar.
9 While my research focuses on the empirical data collected during prison visits, debates surrounding the implementation of Article 272 of the (current) 1999 Constitution (regarding rehabilitation and respect of prisoners’ rights) and the accompanying popular discourses around prisons in the media are also ripe sites of analysis; but they are beyond the scope of this article.
10 Lenin, Vladimir I., ‘Philosophical Notebooks – Summary of Dialectics’, in Collected Works, trans. Dutt, Clemens (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), vol. 38, pp. 220–2.Google Scholar
11 Müller, Markus-Michael, ‘The Universal and the Particular in Latin American Penal State Formation’, in Squires, Peter and Lea, John (eds.), Criminalisation and Advanced Marginality: Critically Exploring the Work of Loïc Wacquant (Bristol: Policy Press, 2013), pp. 195–216Google Scholar; Wacquant, Loïc, Prisons of Poverty (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003)Google Scholar.
12 See articles in the Special Edition ‘Informal Dynamics of Survival in Latin American Prisons’ of Prison Service Journal, 229 (2017): Sacha Darke and Chris Garces, ‘Surviving in the New Mass Carceral Zone’, pp. 2–9; Jon Horne Carter, ‘Neoliberal Penology and Criminal Finance in Honduras’, pp. 10–14; Julienne Weegels, ‘Prisoner Self-Governance and Survival in a Nicaraguan City Police Jail’, pp. 15–18; Camila Nunes Dias and Fernando Salla, ‘Formal and Informal Controls and Punishment: The Production of Order in the Prisons of São Paulo’, pp. 19–22; Andrés Antillano, ‘When Prisoners Make the Prison. Self-Rule in Venezuelan Prisons’, pp. 26–30. See also Müller, Markus-Michael, ‘The Rise of the Penal State in Latin America’, Contemporary Justice and Survival: Co-Producing Brazilian Prison Order (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)Google Scholar.
13 Cerbini, Francesca, La casa de jabón: Etnografía de una cárcel boliviana (Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 2012)Google Scholar; Garces, Chris, ‘The Cross Politics of Ecuador's Penal State’, Cultural Anthropology, 25: 3 (2010), pp. 459–96CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Biondi, Karina, Junto e misturado: Uma etnografia do PCC (São Paulo: Editora Terceiro Nome, 2010)Google Scholar.
14 See note 12.
15 Nunes Dias and Salla, ‘Formal and Informal Controls and Punishment’.
16 Antillano, ‘When Prisoners Make the Prison’, p. 27.
17 See, respectively, Carter, ‘Neoliberal Penology’ and Weegels, ‘Prisoner Self-Governance’; and Darke, Conviviality and Survival.
18 Darke and Garces, ‘Surviving in the New Mass Carceral Zone’, p. 7.
19 Biondi, Junto e misturado.
20 For a more in-depth examination of the structure of the Carro see Antillano, Andrés, Pojomovsky, Iván, Zubillaga, Verónica, Sepúlveda, Chelina and Hanson, Rebecca, ‘The Venezuelan Prison: From Neoliberalism to the Bolivarian Revolution’, Crime, Law and Social Change, 65 (2016), pp. 195–211CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Antillano, ‘When Prisoners make the Prison’, p. 28.
22 Whilst Venezuela is not officially a socialist state, its discourse is that of a socialist state.
23 For the economic and social life of prison gangs in the United States, see Skarbek, David, The Social Order of the Underworld: How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more on the communal councils, see Ciccariello-Maher, George, Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela (London: Verso, 2016)Google Scholar.
24 Andrés Antillano, ‘Neoliberalismo desde abajo: Orden carcelario y orden social en Venezuela’, Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, New York, 30 May 2016.
25 See note 12.
26 HRW, ‘Punishment before Trial’.
27 In 2007, 3,825 arms of various types were confiscated from people in prison; this includes ‘bladed weapons, pistols, grenades, submachine guns, revolvers, and teargas bombs’: Lucía Dammert and Zúñiga, Liza, Prisons: Problems and Challenges for the Americas (Santiago: FLACSO, 2008), p. 107Google Scholar. Tom Phillips reported in The Guardian that a 50-calibre anti-aircraft machine gun was allegedly inside El Rodeo prison during the 2011 standoff: ‘Venezuela Prison Siege: El Rodeo Directors Arrested’, The Guardian, 28 June 2011.
28 ‘¿Quién mete las armas?’ [‘Who's Bringing in the Weapons?’], Tal Cual, 23 Jan. 2008.
29 Interview with Neelie Pérez, criminologist, 20 Nov. 2014.
30 Ibid.
31 Dammert and Zúñiga, Prisons, p. 105; Observatorio Venezolano de Prisiones (Venezuelan Prison Observatory, OVP), Informe anual 2015, table ‘Muertos y heridos 1999–2014)’ (all the OVP's reports are available at http://oveprisiones.com/informes/, last accessed 13 Jan. 2020); de Guerrero, María G. Morais, El sistema penitenciario venezolano durante los 50 años de la democracia petrolera, 1958–2008 (Caracas: Fundación Empresas Polar, Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, 2011), p. 276Google Scholar.
32 OVP, Informe anual 2013, table ‘Muertos y heridos (1999–2013)’.
33 Fabiola Sanchez, ‘UN Agency: Venezuela Prison Violence “Alarming”’, The Seattle Times, 29 Jan. 2013; Dammert and Zúñiga, Prisons, p. 104; OVP, Informe anual 2014.
34 Dammert and Zúñiga, Prisons, p. 104.
35 Antillano et al., ‘The Venezuelan Prison’.
36 Ibsen Martínez, ‘Muerte de un “pran”’, El País, 5 April 2017. Clarembaux and Moleiro (A ese infierno no vuelvo) note that the word ‘pran’ originates from prisons in Puerto Rico in the early 1990s; in Venezuela the term is said to stand for ‘preso rematado, asesino nato’, something that could translate into ‘born killer, top prisoner’. Neelie Pérez Santiago and Christopher Birkbeck claim that it is an onomatopoeia aimed to mimic the sound of a machete hitting the ground: ‘Corrections in Venezuela’, in Kent R. Kerley (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Corrections (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), p. 1045.
37 The Coro Community Penitentiary opened in 2008 (three years prior to the formation of the MSP) and represented the model prison within the government project to ‘humanise’ prisons by reinserting a rehabilitative framework into penal policy. Despite lively debate, press and an investment of over US$62 million into this ‘community penitentiary’, the people whom I interviewed who had been interned there did not see this prison as distinct from the securitised New Regime prisons managed by the MSP. See Agencia Bolivariana de Noticias (ABN), ‘Primera cárcel modelo será inaugurada este jueves en Coro’, 8 July 2008, available at https://www.aporrea.org/actualidad/n116631.html (last accessed 27 Dec. 2019).
38 The pernocta, unlike a formal conjugal visit, placed no restrictions on access to the prison and no formal documentation of marriage was required. Shortly after the conclusion of my fieldwork in 2015, the practice was ended in most Venezuelan prisons.
39 Interview with inmates at Vista Hermosa prison, 19 Oct. 2014. Even though Brizuela was not physically incarcerated at Vista Hermosa when I visited in October 2014, I was assured that he would return. (It is not known whether he did or not.)
40 Interview with formerly incarcerated person, 14 Sept. 2014. The weekly tax varied between prisons but during my fieldwork in 2014, when inflation was roughly at 64 per cent, la causa ranged from 2 to 35 per cent of the monthly minimum wage. The Carro also had a monopoly on the sale of drugs and weapons, which was probably more profitable than the surplus extracted through la causa.
41 Interview with Pérez, 20 Nov. 2014.
42 Clarembaux and Moleiro, A ese infierno no vuelvo.
43 Samet, Robert, ‘The Subject of Wrongs: Crime, Populism, and Venezuela's Punitive Turn’, Cultural Anthropology, 34: 2 (2019), pp. 272–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
44 Wacquant, Prisons of Poverty, p. 1.
45 The criminalisation of poverty was carried out through the Ley de vagos y maleantes (Law on Vagrants and Crooks), a 1956 law established by the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship, which criminalised loitering, gambling, informal workers, sex workers and homosexuals. In 1997, a year prior to Chávez's election, the Venezuelan Supreme Court declared the law to be unconstitutional, but the concept remains shorthand for the criminalisation of the poor.
46 In 2000, the partial reform of the Ley de Régimen Penitenciario (Gaceta Oficial no. 36,975, 19 June 2000) established the rhetorical goal of preparing people in prison for ‘social reinsertion’ instead of ‘rehabilitation’ and also mandated the immediate release of anyone who had been incarcerated for more than two years and had not been sentenced: this resulted in an abrupt drastic reduction in the prison population, which plunged from 22,914 in 1999 to 14,196 in 2000 (Morais de Guerrero, El sistema penitenciario, p. 276).
47 Gregory Wilpert, ‘An Assessment of Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution at Twelve Years’, Venezuelanalysis, 2 Feb. 2011.
48 Chris Arsenault, ‘Venezuela Crime Soars amid Declining Poverty’, Al Jazeera, 23 Oct. 2012. See also: David Smilde, ‘Crime and Revolution in Venezuela’, Nacla Report on the Americas, 49: 3 (2017), pp. 303–8.
49 ‘2014 Crime Rate Drops in Venezuela’, TeleSUR, 8 Sept. 2014.
50 Dorothy Kronick, ‘How to Count our Dead’, Caracas Chronicles, 1 July 2016; International Crisis Group, ‘Violence and Politics in Venezuela’, Report no. 38, Aug. 2011. However, in his article ‘Caracas: The Most Dangerous City in Latin America – or Is It?’, Christian Science Monitor (21 Aug. 2012), Robert Samet explores the inaccuracies inherent in crime statistics in Venezuela. The ‘official 2010 homicide rate’ incorrectly claimed that Caracas had 109 homicides per 100,000; but, adjusted for the actual population, the rate goes down to 71 per 100,000. These rates exclude those killed by police or security forces, which was calculated to be 3,482 in 2010.
51 Programa Venezolano de Educación – Acción en Derechos Humanos (PROVEA), Situación de los derechos humanos en Venezuela: Informe anual enero/diciembre 2013 (Caracas: PROVEA, 2014), p. 437.
52 ‘The Modern History of Venezuela, Why Still So Much Crime? – Edgardo Lander on Reality Asserts Itself’, 18 April 2014, at https://therealnews.com/stories/elander140402raipt7 (last accessed 31 Dec. 2019).
53 International Crisis Group, ‘Violence and Politics in Venezuela’, p. 30.
54 In 2009 the then Justice Minister Tareck El Aissami estimated that the police were involved in 15–20 per cent of criminal activity in Venezuela. In his 2009 article in The Guardian, ‘Deadly Force: Venezuela's Police Have Become a Law unto Themselves’ (6 Sept.), Rory Carroll reported the results of one poll which showed that 70 per cent of those surveyed said that ‘police and criminals are practically the same’ and that human rights groups had estimated police involvement in an average of 900 killings a year. A US State Department report noted that, before the dismantling of the MP, of its nearly 9,000 officers 1,800 were under investigation for criminal activity such as ‘arbitrary arrests, torture, and unlawful detention’: Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, 2009 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Venezuela, 11 March 2010, available at https://2009-2017.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2009/wha/136130.htm (last accessed 25 Jan. 2020).
55 See blog of popular criminologist Freddy Perdomo Sierralta: http://criminologiaucab.blogspot.com/ (last accessed 30 Dec. 2019).
56 Héctor Bujanda, ‘Andrés Antillano: La recesión económica y el aumento de la represión son una chispa eficaz para los estallidos sociales’, Contrapunto, 27 Aug. 2015.
57 Antillano suggests that the lack of universality of the social programmes – which were largely administered on a grassroots and opt-in basis – produced inequalities among poor communities by excluding certain sectors, particularly ‘poor kids who are brown and male’, and that this was a contributing factor in increased crime rates, violence and a general social breakdown. Some of the language used to describe the most excluded sectors seems to reflect conservative narratives built on moralism, which point to the ‘culture’ of the poor, for example casting blame on single mothers for crime: Andrés Antillano and Rachael Boothroyd Rojas, ‘Andres Antillano: “The Revolution Has an Outstanding Debt to the Socially Excluded”’, Venezuelanalysis, 1 March 2018.
58 Wacquant makes these claims specifically in relation to socialist leaders in Europe: Prisons of Poverty, p. 4.
59 The goal of the 1998 COPP reform was to speed up criminal proceedings (although it had the opposite effect, perhaps by creating more legal opportunities for hearings, appeals and alternative sentencing). Interview with Pérez, 20 Nov. 2014.
60 Morais de Guerrero, El sistema penitenciario. By 2014, the prison population was 55,007, marking a 77 per cent increase from the previous all-time high of 31,086 in 1991, which was directly related to heightened rates of poverty caused by neoliberal restructuring. However, in 2015 the total prison population decreased to 49,664, halting the six previous years’ dramatic increases: OVP, Situación carcelaria en Venezuela / Informe anual 2015. Some of the decrease in prison population was due to an increase in the use of police jails for holding pre-trial detainees.
61 Dammert and Zúñiga, Prisons, p. 53.
62 OVP, Informe anual 2014, p. 5; Antillano et al., ‘The Venezuelan Prison’.
63 Dammert and Zúñiga, Prisons, p. 53.
64 For a journalist's accounts from the inside see Steve Inskeep, ‘Inmates in a Venezuelan Prison Build a World of their Own’, NPR, 11 June 2013. For a photo essay and report on Wilmer Brizuela and Vista Hermosa prison see Jorge Benezra, ‘On the Inside: Venezuela's Most Dangerous Prison’, Time Magazine, 6 June 2013.
65 Fonseca, Brian and Pamelá, Pamela, ‘Organised Chaos: Venezuela's Prison Crisis’, in Rosen, Jonathan D. and Brienen, Marten W. (eds.), Prisons in the Americas in the Twenty-First Century: A Human Dumping Ground (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), pp. 115–27Google Scholar.
66 See https://www.mppsp.gob.ve/index.php/noticias/3382-revolucion-penitenciaria-contribuye-a-la-produccion-nacional and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4Edjwl0Ofw (URLs accessed 12 Jan. 2020).
67 Pérez Santiago and Birkbeck, ‘Corrections in Venezuela’. Many eye-witnesses whom I interviewed estimated the casualties to be much higher.
68 Six months earlier, a similar standoff took place at La Planta prison and, upon gaining control of the prison, the government recovered over 125 weapons, 27 explosive devices, more than 64,000 rounds of ammunition and 6 kg of drugs: ‘Weapons Stash Uncovered at Venezuelan Prison’, The Telegraph, 4 June 2012.
69 The following interviews were conducted during a prison visit on 9 Feb. 2015. Since many interviews took place in the presence of prison administrators, I did not ask people to tell me their names; instead, I asked them to tell me about themselves. None of the interviews from this visit reported here will include names.
70 Interview with Yorval Estévez, Coordinator of the Directorate for Social Integration with the Family of the MSP, 3 Oct. 2014.
71 A mural in the administrative block of the Sargento David Viloria Penitentiary features Che Guevara.
72 Martinez-Saenz, Miguel, ‘Che Guevara's New Man: Embodying a Communitarian Attitude’, Latin American Perspectives, 31: 6 (2004), pp. 15–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
73 The interviewee is referring to the old currency system, in which 1,000 bolívares was the smallest bill; this had resulted from runaway inflation. In 2006, the Venezuelan bolívar fuerte was introduced. Some people, especially those in prison, still refer to the pre-2006 bolívar and say ‘1,000 bolívares’, which translates to 1 bolívar fuerte. As noted above, the causa represents 2–35 per cent of the minimum wage.
74 The inmates (allegedly in the Coro Community Penitentiary) were beaten with a wooden paddle. In the video, they show their bruised buttocks and denounce the abuse: Rafael Romo, ‘Video Captures Alleged Prison Abuse’, CNNI [2012], https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIqecuZaBis (last accessed 30 Dec. 2019).
75 Ley de Redención Judicial de la Pena por el Trabajo y el Estudio, Gaceta Oficial, no. 4,623, 3 Sept. 1993.
76 These numbers come from an official MSP Press Release (‘Ministerio Penitenciario trabaja para transformar y humanizar el sistema penitenciario en Venezuela’), May 2015 (copy available on request from the author). The inmates whom I interviewed at El Rodeo prison confirmed that around 200 people who had been charged with possession of under 20 g of drugs had been released the very day that Plan Cayapa came to the prison in early 2015.
77 Pérez Santiago and Birkbeck, ‘Corrections in Venezuela’. The OVP has claimed that the tribunals are unconstitutional and has challenged the legitimacy of Plan Cayapa: interview, Marianela Sánchez, lawyer with the OVP, 9 Sept. 2014.
78 See note 76.
79 Interview with Estévez, 3 Oct. 2014; interview with Sánchez, 9 Sept. 2014.
80 This exact scenario is depicted in a riveting episode of the NPR podcast Radio Ambulante entitled ‘The Final Days of Franklin Masacre’, produced by Mariana Zúñiga, 23 May 2017.
81 Interview with Estévez, 3 Oct. 2014.
82 Interview with Maryelis Valdez, 17 April 2015.
83 Human Rights Watch, ‘Venezuela: Deaths in a Prison Protest’, 1 Dec. 2014. Available at https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/12/01/venezuela-deaths-prison-protest (last accessed 30 Dec. 2019).
84 Lucas Koerner, ‘Hostages Freed from Venezuelan Prison after 4-Day Standoff’, Venezuelanalysis, 22 March 2016. For more commentary on weapons inside Venezuelan prisons see http://www.informeonline.com/pranes-han-ejecutado-a-4-internos-y-tienen-ametralladoras-para-destruir-tanques/ (last accessed 30 Dec. 2019).
85 See note 12.
86 For an excellent overview of hybrid post-neoliberal state formation see Fernandes, Sujatha, Who Can Stop the Drums? Urban Social Movements in Chávez's Venezuela (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 19–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.