MONTREAL — On their way into Discoteca Tokio, women were greeted with a single rose. It was Mother’s Day after all, and this was a Mother’s Day celebration. Ads for the concert had been running all week on local radio. Singers were brought in from Puerto Rico and Colombia. Ladies, ready for the raffle? Win a washing machine, or a 42” plasma HDTV!

Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

The party, which went on for the entire weekend, cost an estimated $93,000 and attracted around 5,000 revelers, according to a report published in the Caracas daily El Universal on Tuesday.

This would’ve been all that remarkable if Discoteca Tokio didn’t operate from inside Tocorón jail, some 70 miles southwest of Caracas. And it’s just one of several businesses that prison gangs are running. There’s also a bakery shop and a little farm breeding pigs. The three-day party inspired the satirical Chigüire Bipolar Web site, Venezuela’s answer to The Onion, to joke that Disco Tokio’s bouncers were under strict orders not to let anyone in unarmed.

None of this activity is sanctioned by the authorities, mind you, but then again Venezuela’s prison authorities long ago gave up trying to control what happens on the inside. In there it’s gangland.



Only when things really get out of hand, such as during the riot that killed 18 inmates in Tocorón in September 2010, do the authorities make a show of force. Back then, they raided the prison and shut down not just Discoteca Tokio but also several small restaurants, three bars, three cock-fighting rings, an illegal horse-race betting operation and even a motocross course. Within a year and a half, the nightclub and the bakery shop were up and running again.

Tocorón is just as crowded as the usual Venezuelan prison: it was built for 900 inmates and now houses 3,920, according to El Universal. But you might say it’s blessed with the leadership of an entrepreneurial “pran” — as prison gang leaders are known — a 25-year old who likes to be called El Niño Guerrero (The Warrior Child).

With Venezuelan prison guards limiting their energies to patrolling the perimeter, the “pran” becomes a de facto dictator behind bars. In prisons where the gang hierarchy is disputed, the contest for the pran’s throne can become very bloody very quickly. NGOs estimate that out of a prison population of over 40,000 nationwide — remarkably, nobody knows the exact number — 560 people were murdered last year.

The Warrior Child runs Tocorón on a strictly commercial footing, charging inmates between $12 and $25 per week for various services like special foods or simply not being killed in their sleep. Booze, mobile phones, drugs, laptops and guns cost extra.

That the complicity of Venezuela’s National Guard is needed to smuggle in these goods is not in dispute. Prison authorities are widely believed to get a cut of the transactions; in effect, they are taxing the entry of contraband into jails. Yet even as the system deteriorates — weapons that are smuggled in are now military grade — the country has yet to see any high-profile official prosecuted for being involved in the illegal trade.

If you ever find yourself on the wrong side of the law in Venezuela, I hope you end up in a place like Tocorón, where the pran is really most interested in making money. Or maybe San Antonio, a notorious party prison. Better to avoid places like Uribana, where the pran gets his kicks from watching inmates fight each other with knives, or La Planta and El Rodeo, where gang fights have escalated into all-out shooting wars with state authorities.