This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Distraught families are demanding information from the Venezuelan authorities about how at least 78 people died in a fire while they were locked in police cells.

Police fired teargas as relatives clashed with police outside the facility in Valencia, Carabobo state, after local officials would confirm only that there had been deaths in Wednesday’s fire.

The fire appears to have broken out during a disturbance at the holding – reportedly designed to hold a maximum of 60 prisoners – with gunfire heard during the riot.

“I don’t know if my son is dead or alive,” Aida Parra, the mother of one of the prisoners inside the facility, told the Spanish news agency EFE. “They haven’t told me anything.”

The United Nations human rights office said it was appalled by the fire and called on authorities in Venezuela to carry out a speedy investigation and to provide reparations to victims’ families.

Juan Miguel Matheus, a deputy in the country’s national assembly, said the information he had was that 68 men and 10 women had died.



Speaking to a local newspaper, Mattheus also criticised the authorities. “Until now they have not released a list of the dead. There are bodies which have not been able to be identified because the bodies are so charred.”

“They have told us nothing. Instead the police have treated us like dogs,” said Lissette Mendoza, mother of 19-year old detainee Yorman Salazar. “He was being held for robbery, but they should not be allowed to take his life as if he were a dog,” she said.

Venezuela’s attorney general, Tarek William Saab, said late on Wednesday that 68 people had died in the fire, nearly all of them prisoners. He said four prosecutors would investigate the circumstances.

A Window to Freedom, a non-profit group that monitors conditions in Venezuela’s jails and prisons, said preliminary but unconfirmed information indicated that a riot began when a detainee shot an officer in the leg.

Shortly after, a fire broke out and grew quickly as the flames spread to mattresses in the cells, it said. Rescuers apparently had to break a hole through a prison wall to free some of the prisoners.

The fire is the latest incident to hit Venezuela’s overcrowded and decrepit prison system in a politically and economically challenged country where violent crime has become endemic.

It was one of the worst jail disasters in the country, where human rights groups complain about poor conditions for inmates. A fire at a prison in the western state of Zulia killed more than 100 prisoners in 1994.



The state of Venezuela’s jail system has been described by Human Rights Watch alleging that “corruption, weak security, deteriorating infrastructure, overcrowding, insufficient staffing, and poorly trained guards [have] allow[ed] armed gangs to exercise effective control over inmate populations within prisons.

“The Venezuelan Observatory of Prisons, a human rights group, reported that 6,663 people died in prisons between 1999 and 2015. As of July, average overcrowding of 210 percent plagued Venezuelan prisons.”

In March, four inmates and a prison guard died when detainees and security officers clashed at the Fénix Penitentiary Center in Lara State. Fifty-two detainees, four prison guards and the prison director were injured. The press has reported other violent prison incidents in 2016, in which at least 20 more people died.

People waiting outside the station on Wednesday said dozens of detainees had been kept in squalid conditions and they feared the worst for their loved ones.

Carlos Nieto Palma, the director of A Window to Freedom, said officials should be held accountable for failing to address poor conditions in police station jails. He said overcrowding had become common throughout Venezuela, with detainees being kept long past customary brief holding periods before being released or sent to larger jails to await trial.

“It’s grave and alarming,” he said. “What happened today in Carabobo is a sign of that.”

Juan Miguel Matheus, an opposition politician, demanded the pro-government leader of Carabobo state inform relatives about what happened. “The desperation of relatives should not be played with,” he said.