Dozens dead in riot, Venezuela clears out prison

CARACAS, Venezuela — The death toll has risen to 61 after fierce gunbattles between inmates and National Guard troops at a Venezuelan prison, a hospital director said Saturday. About 120 more people were wounded in one of the deadliest prison riots in the nation’s recent history.

Penitentiary Service Minister Iris Varela said Saturday that officials had begun evacuating inmates from the Uribana prison in Barquisimeto and transferring them to other facilities, but she did not provide an official death toll.

However, Dr. Ruy Medina, director of Central Hospital in the city of Barquisimeto, said that the number of dead had risen to 61. He initially told Venezuelan news media after the Friday uprising that about 50 were killed.

Medina said that nearly all of the injuries were from gunshots and that 45 of the estimated 120 wounded people remained hospitalized and some underwent surgeries.

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

Nayibe Mendez, the mother of a 22-year-old inmate, said she was able to talk by phone with her son and he was uninjured.

“What they say is that there were shots all over the place, and they don’t know where they came from,” Mendez said. “It was a massacre. A full list hasn’t come out of the dead and injured.”

Varela said during a news conference that officials decided to evacuate all inmates from the prison in order to “close this chapter of violence.” She did not provide any estimates of the numbers killed and injured, and instead criticized Venezuelan news media at length for their coverage of the violence.

Vice President Nicolas Maduro called the bloodshed tragic and said Prosecutor General Luisa Ortega Diaz and National Assembly President Diosdado Cabello would lead the investigation.

Varela said that the violence began at Uribana prison on Friday when groups of inmates attacked National Guard troops who were attempting to carry out an inspection.

She said the government decided to send troops to search the prison after receiving reports of clashes between groups of inmates during the previous two days.

Douglas Briceno said his nephew, who is held at the prison, was wounded in the foot during the shooting. “I think he’s out of danger,” Briceno said. “I haven’t been able to communicate with him because they don’t let me pass to the prison.”

Opposition leader Henrique Capriles condemned the government’s handling of what he and many other critics call a growing crisis in the country’s prisons.

“Our country’s prisons are an example of the incapacity of this government and its leaders. They never solved the problem,” Capriles said on his Twitter account. “How many more deaths do there have to be in the prisons for the government to acknowledge its failure and make changes?”

The riot at Uribana prison was the latest in a series of bloody clashes in the country’s severely overcrowded prisons, where inmates often freely obtain weapons and drugs with the help of corrupt guards. Venezuela currently has 33 prisons built to hold about 12,000 inmates, but officials have said the prisons’ population is about 47,000.

The Venezuelan Prisons Observatory, a watchdog group, said in a statement that in 2007 the Costa Ricabased Inter-American Court of Human Rights had ordered the government to seize weapons that inmates had in their possession at Uribana prison and to take measures to avoid deaths in the facility. The group called for the government to release a list with the names of the dead and wounded in Friday’s violence, as well as details about weapons seized in the search.

The group says Uribana prison was built to hold up to 850 inmates but currently has about 1,400.

President Hugo Chavez’s government has pledged improvements to the prison system, but opponents and activists say the government hasn’t made progress.

Varela, the prisons minister, said news media including Globovision and a local newspaper had run reports on the inspection by authorities, which she said had in fact been a “trigger for the violence.”

Humberto Prado, an activist who leads the Venezuelan Prisons Observatory, denied that, saying: “The problem isn’t the work of the media. The problem is that the government hasn’t disarmed the prison population.”

AP/ROGER VARELA People react Friday to the news that their inmate relatives were killed or injured in a riot earlier in the day at the Uribana prison in Barquisimeto, Venezuela.