Inside the Ghost Town Left Behind by Venezuela’s Prison Lords

By Indira Guerrero

San Juan de los Morros (Venezuela).– A leopard-print negligee still hangs from the wall of a barracks. The smell of rats, excrement, drugs, weapons, alcohol, blood, and the sweat transpired by five thousand men travels through the atmosphere of a ghost town where everything remains intact, as if an army of barbarians were about to return at any moment.

This is the General Penitentiary of Venezuela (PGV). Once the heart of crime, it is now the sad memory of Venezuela’s failed prison system.

For over a decade, Venezuelan prisons operated under a bizarre social contract: the State guarded the perimeter walls to prevent escapes, but inside the gates, authority was surrendered entirely to the inmates. This vacuum created the figure of the “Pran”—an inmate warlord who acted as judge, jury, and administrator of a parallel state.

From the outside, the maximum-security prison looked like any other detention center: towering watchtowers overseeing the barbed wire, massive white walls stained by the yellowish dust of the fields of San Juan de los Morros in central Venezuela. But inside those walls lay a capital of crime where the rule of law did not apply.

An unfinished sandwich on a table in a shopping gallery corridor. Signs offering manicures, orthodontics, tattoos, marijuana, and pet supplies. Intact mirrors in the nightclub, the gym, the playground, the motorcycle track. These are the traces of a ghost town abandoned suddenly and without luggage.

These luxuries were financed by “The Cause” (La Causa), a mandatory weekly tax that every inmate had to pay to the Pran just to stay alive. It was a multimillion-dollar criminal enterprise run from behind bars, fueled by weapons and drugs that entered through the front door, often with the complicity of corrupt officials.

No one has returned since late October 2016. The prison was taken over by the government’s Immediate Response and Custody Group (GRIC) for its total evacuation and the “humanization” of prisons.

In the maximum-security barracks, in the first room with pink walls, the bed is still made. Clothes hang neatly, perfumes sit on the vanity, dolls rest in the adjacent children’s room, and thongs for a night of partying belonging to the wife of Franklin “Masacre” Hernández remain.

Franklin was the leader of the prison, the Pran—an acronym for “Born Assassin Prisoner” (Preso Rematado Asesino Nato). He held the highest hierarchy among inmates and exercised “the government” within the PGV.

The irony of Franklin’s rule was absolute: he wasn’t even a prisoner anymore. He had returned voluntarily after serving his sentence, protecting himself from the streets in the only place where he wouldn’t have to face the police or his enemies. Inside, he was safer than outside.

But in late September 2016, the disappearance of an arsenal of grenades stolen from a nearby military barracks triggered the pacification process of the country’s most violent prison.

For a month, inmates escaped one by one, jumping the fence, surrendering to authorities, fleeing the hell where the church had become a war fortress. They left everything behind, even that disturbing smell.

On October 28 of that year, Franklin “Masacre” was the last to leave after a month of resistance that left dozens of inmates dead. More than 400 mutilated prisoners were rescued from a punishment zone called “The Thresher” (El Trillo), where “slackers” who couldn’t pay the tax were shot in the hands or legs as a warning.

In the middle of the courtyard stand the walls of a colonial-style chapel built in the 1950s. Light filters through the windows of the vestibule and sanctuary, which were perforated with precision by prisoners to aim their automatic rifles at the military watchtowers surrounding the prison.

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This afternoon, while guards tear down the walls of the PGV searching for hidden weapons left by prisoners before the evacuation, just a few kilometers away lies “26 de Julio,” one of the new penitentiary centers operating under “The New Regime.”

The government’s response to the chaos of the Pranes was a swing to the opposite extreme: a strict, militarized discipline known as the New Regime.

Almost four months after the evacuation of the PGV, many of those same men are now formed in lines, dressed in yellow uniforms, with shaved heads, standing firm with palms on their hips, rigid as Chinese vases.

The inmate commanding the group is a former military man imprisoned for stealing state materials. Now part of the prison’s flag guard, he shouts: “Independence and Socialist Homeland!”

A second later, his fellow prisoners answer in unison: “We will live and we will conquer!”

“The stateless will never return!” he shouts again.

“They will never return!”

“The Esequibo is ours!”

“It has always been and always will be!”

They advance, retreat, merge into columns of two, one, then four, with martial dexterity, chests puffed out, gazes held high.

Reveille wakes them at 5:30 AM, and taps leaves them in their cells at 9:00 PM every day, every week, every month, throughout their sentence served in barracks segmented by their crime: homicide, drugs, weapons, rape.

Meanwhile, to the east of the country, in the Puente Ayala prison—a center still under the old regime where the Pran’s horse, calves, and a small deer frolic in the yard—an inmate knows the news. He senses that soon it will be his turn to hand over the “government.”

Some 83 national internships have been “pacified” in the last five years in intense operations led by Iris Varela, the controversial minister and precursor of this system intended to forge a “New Man.”

The Mandela Rules, UN minimum standards for the treatment of prisoners, state that the prison regime should seek to minimize differences between life in prison and life in freedom. This principle fuels criticism of the excessive nature of the new regime and the permissiveness of the old one.

But it also lays the foundation for doubt. In a country with one of the highest crime rates in the region, what is the model system? Especially when the ex-convict will have to return to the same slum, to the same context where he became a criminal.

Back in the new facility, young inmates dressed in intense blue recite poetry.

“No, ma’am, never again. I don’t want to be part of the waste of this society anymore, we want to be part of the solutions, I want to be a New Man,” says Luis, a teenager interned in one of the new institutions.

He recites from memory an excerpt from Pablo Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, learned during the last six months and ten days he has been sleeping in the “Pablo Neruda” cell.

From the leopard negligee in a ghost town to the poetry recital in a militarized camp, the Venezuelan prison system swings like a pendulum between two extremes, searching for order in a nation defined by chaos. EFE