These past few days I have been reading with both fascination and horror the events that have been taking place in the Rodeo I and II prisons in Venezuela. As a Venezuelan, the mixture of shame, sorrow and, dare I say, hope (?) has found resonance all throughout the Venezuelan diaspora. It is a new and conflicting feeling, difficult to define, for it involves so many conflicting moral compasses that, under any other civil society, would be unimaginable to think they would ever comingle with such ease.
Our beautiful country has been living a nightmare for the past 11 years, and although many times we have felt on the brink of taking our country back, we have been foiled over and over again, to the point that, as a people, we have become cynical and apathetic. Somehow, we have forgotten who we really are, and have left this madness become our perpetual reality. We have forgotten how to hope.
It is impossible not to feel profound shame at the dismal situation that these events have brought to light regarding our prison system. It makes one's stomach turn to see how we treat the prison population. What does it say about a country when we have 30 jails holding 49,000 prisoners (in average, that's a staggering 1633 per jail, when most of them were built to hold only one fourth of that number)? It is no surprise then, that with such overcrowding -and understaffing-, chaos reigns within Venezuelan jails. Rival gangs fighting over territorial control within the jails (however small it may be) means that prisoners live in a constant state of violence. Add to that the fact that corrupt guards smuggle drugs and weapons into the jail, and what we have is a ticking bomb that has finally gone KABOOM!!
In response to the violence that erupted in the El Rodeo I and II prisons, the National Guard has vowed to quench the uprising, whatever the cost. This means that, while the president recovers from surgery for an unknown ailment in Cuba (by the way, what does THAT say about his confidence on the doctors formed by his "revolution"?), the second in command has sent 5000 troops and multiple war tanks to bring the situation under control. Only thing is that there's anything but control. How is it possible that such a vast number of armed soldiers cannot bring the situation under control? Well, because we're dealing with a mini army of its own inside that prison, that's why. And while relatives of the prisoners inside the jail despair waiting to know what has happened to their loved ones, one cannot help but to root for these prisoners, a hodgepodge made up of both criminals and innocent men. One cannot help but to hope that these prisoners make the national guard come to their knees, however improbable that may be. If nothing else, one hopes that these prisoners, who are now being systematically burned and killed, like cattle in a slaughterhouse, make the rest of the country wake up to the ineptitude of this government, that they bring back the fire, the will to get each and every last one of these corrupt government officials running for the hills.
Don't get me wrong. Many of those people are prisoners for a reason. Many have committed unspeakable crimes and deserve their fate. But in a country where the judicial system is corrupt and, quite frankly, led by the nose by one man, there are also many, many, many people who are in jail who should not be there – Innocent people whose crime has been to speak against a tyrant government, or who are still awaiting trial and have been for years, without seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. They deserve better. They deserve to be treated with dignity, and not to be piled up inside four foul walls, waiting for their turn to become cannon fodder. For them, and for the rest of us, I pray. Que Dios nos agarre confesados.
