Inmates evacuated from prison in Venezuela

61 reportedly killed, 120 hurt in clashes

CARACAS, VENEZUELA — Venezuelan authorities on Sunday finished evacuating inmates from a prison where 61 were reported killed in one of the deadliest prison clashes in the nation’s history.

Venezuela’s Penitentiary Service Minister Iris Varela said in a message on Twitter that the evacuation of Uribana prison in the city of Barquisimeto was completed Sunday morning. Inmates were loaded aboard buses and driven to other prisons.

Varela posted photos of inmates filing out led by authorities, and said that what will come next for the prison is “now the reconstruction!”

Two days after the violence, government officials had yet to provide an official death toll from the fierce gun battles, which pitted armed inmates against National Guard troops.

Dr. Ruy Medina, director of Central Hospital in the city, told the Associated Press on Saturday the death toll had risen to 61, while about 120 were wounded.

Medina said nearly all the injuries were from gunshots and 45 of the estimated 120 wounded remained hospitalized.

Relatives wept outside the prison during the violence, and at the morgue as they waited to identify bodies.

The riot was the latest in a series of deadly clashes in Venezuela’s overcrowded and often anarchical prisons, where inmates typically obtain weapons and drugs with the help of corrupt guards. Critics called it proof the government is failing to get a grip on a worsening national crisis in its penitentiaries.

The gun battles seized attention amid uncertainty about Venezulean President Hugo Chavez’s future, while he remained in Cuba recovering and undergoing treatment for more than six weeks after his latest cancer surgery.

Government officials pledged a thorough investigation. Some critics said there should have been ways to prevent such bloodshed.

The riot was the deadliest in nearly two decades. In January 1994, more than 100 inmates died in the country’s bloodiest prison violence on record when a riot and fire set by inmates tore through a prison in the western city of Maracaibo. In 1992, about 60 inmates were killed in a riot in a Caracas prison.