Venezuela’s U.N. for Drug Traffickers

Shouting Venezuelan girls play kickball in a courtyard. A fair-skinned British girl nearby answers a ringing pay phone in Spanish, jumps to answer a second phone in English, then jokes to a French girl at the adjacent food stand: “I don’t know which language to answer in.”

Recess at a school for the children of the diplomatic corps? Nope, it’s the female penitentiary outside Caracas, where Venezuela sends foreigners caught smuggling cocaine.

The inmates are a far cry from the stereotype of the impoverished local-girl-turned-mule by unscrupulous traffickers. Clearly, many middle-class Americans and Europeans are ready to do dirty work for drug rings too, and many of the unsuccessful end up here with eight-year sentences. Their life in lock-up can hold unusual luxuries — and unusual dangers.

As inmates tell it, Venezuela’s prisons are run not by the guards, but by the prisoners — and guns and drugs have become common currency inside prison walls. At the nearby male prison, which holds three times its capacity of prisoners, shoot-outs are a regular occurrence. Frightened foreign inmates say the understaffed, underarmed guards cannot stem the violence and do not even clean off the blood marks splattered across the walls.

“Nothing here makes sense,” one inmate at the men’s penitentiary told TIME, speaking — as all interviewed prisoners did — on condition of anonymity. “You can’t apply logic. There’s the law, and then there’s what actually happens.”

Venezuelan prisons are notoriously violent, and news of riots is common in the local press. Last January, 16 inmates at the Uribana prison were hanged, killed and stabbed to death as rival gangs battled for control. Inmates often rebel or go on hunger strikes to protest long procedural delays that leave them locked up for years before they’re given a sentence. The Venezuelan Prison Observatory, a Caracas-based NGO, says that the country’s jail system has the worst homicide rate in Latin America, calculating that 22 of every 1,000 inmates died violently in 2006.

But the Interior Ministry rejects those numbers. “I doubt the scientific rigor of such an alarming rate,” Fabricio Perez, general director for custody and rehabilitation at the ministry, told TIME. His colleague, deputy interior minister Ricardo Jimenez Dan, took aim at the director of the NGO, Humberto Prado, a former prison director under a previous government. “It would seem that the drama that our jails are living is the only way of life and sustenance that he has,” the deputy minister said.

Perez maintains that human rights conditions in jails are better now than before President Hugo Chavez came to power in 1998. But he was unable to produce official statistics on prison homicides. He said the state has a comprehensive plan for the prison system that includes training new prison staff, providing new equipment, and building 14 new jails to reduce overcrowding — construction on the first three is already under way, he says. But the dire conditions in a prison system that now houses many Europeans has prompted the European Commission to looking into funding a program to rebuild prisons and train prison staff in Venezuela, one embassy official said.

Despite their grim circumstances, many foreign inmates use their time inside to network, plotting future runs with other drug traffickers. “It’s not good for someone who wants to think about stopping,” a prisoner said. According to foreign inmates at the Los Teques prisons, a kilo of cocaine bought for $2,000 in South America can fetch around $25,000 in Europe — some prisoners were paid $4,000 for every kilo they carried, and could cart 10-12 kilos on any given trip. The pay scale makes it a tough profession to quit, even for middle-class twenty-somethings from the industrialized world for whom the price may include doing time at Los Teques.

A college-educated inmate from the U.S. arrived here last year after being caught trying to fly home carrying aerosol cans stuffed with three kilos of cocaine. He had, he said, been struggling to make ends meet, and running drugs had seemed an attractive proposition. “It was stupidity on my part,” he said, too scared of reprisals from fellow inmates to let his name be used, “but I was desperate.”

On arriving at Los Teques, the American was handed a broken slab of rubber and sent to a corner spot on a concrete floor. That was to be his living quarters. Basic articles like toilet paper, soap and razors were not provided. There was no toilet or shower and he bathed by throwing cold water over his head. Health services were geared mostly toward treating stab and gunshot wounds, he said, unsure why he and his companions had boils forming on their skin.

To improve his situation, the American paid a bribe — which embassy officials say is usually around $1,000 — for a spot in a special upstairs area where living conditions are more tolerable. There, inmates can have access, for a price, even to such luxuries as Direct TV or an Xbox. Some install kitchens in their rooms and pay someone to bring food from outside, so as to avoid the sardines and third-grade meat served in the prison. Funds come from prisoners’ families and, in some cases, taxpayers’ money in their home countries.

Still, even the luxury section is at double capacity. In fact, the American says, he is envious of the prisons depicted in the Hollywood movies he watches there. Just inside the second gate, where many of the shootings allegedly occur, inmates mill about freely in the hallways, far from their cells, joking around and chatting on cell phones, which are supposedly not permitted.

“The director tells us to be careful of this area or that — because that’s where the guns and drugs are,” said a consular official at an embassy in Caracas, asking to remain anonymous for fear of jeopardizing efforts to repatriate prisoners. Indeed, with no visiting rooms and few guards in sight, visitors must give inmates a small tip to fetch the prisoner they’ve come to see. Forget uniforms; prisoners wear the street clothes of their choice, though they are not supposed to wear dark colors that can hide blood spots. When inmates’ girlfriends come to visit, they go straight to the cells, which they are free to use as a love shack.

The women’s jail is more pleasant, with an open-air courtyard and views of surrounding hills. But inmates there say only eight guards watch over some 270 prisoners, and they don’t have pepper spray or handcuffs. “It’s not the good Venezuelans that are here; it’s the thugs,” said one foreign inmate there. “If they decided to take over the place, they could.”

Many of the foreign inmates are awaiting repatriation to their home countries, under bilateral prison transfer agreements. But their departure requires the necessary paperwork to be completed by the notoriously slow Venezuelan bureaucracy. “Obviously if you’ve got people being killed all the time, you want the prison transfer agreement to work,” a consular official at one embassy said.

Officials at three Western embassies in Caracas say Interior Minister Pedro Carreno has not signed a single transfer document for their nationals since President Hugo Chavez appointed him in January — and they’re getting antsy. They said that at a recent meeting with ministry officials, representatives from every major embassy grumbled that they were in the same predicament The ministry did not respond to requests for comment.

“It’s rough,” said one male inmate awaiting transfer. “Like a jungle.”