Four Prisoners Died at The Outbreak of a Grenade in Very Overcrowded Jail in Venezuela

“The authorities are reviewing the reports to determine what were the causes of the fact,” she told AVN Enrique Henriquez, Secretary of the Interior of the state ofBarinas, whose governor is Adan Chavez, brother of the president, Hugo Chávez.

Henriquez said the injured prisoners, all young people between 21 and 30 years, “were immediately taken to the Hospital Luis Razetti, the first medical center” of the city.

“Apparently he had problems”

Humberto Prado, director of the Venezuelan Observatory of Prisons, told Efe that the explosion occurred Sunday night when a group of prisoners from the detention center Barinas (Injuba) ”played” with a grenade.

Apparently, he added, the “game” was related to the ”execution”, hours before the inmate José Gregorio Blanco Henriquez, 50, who received ”more than five shots” of their peers, which ”apparently had problems ”.

75 percent of the 1,700 inmates have not been sentenced Injuba and is awaiting a trial against him, said Prado, whose NGO reported 476 deaths and 958 wounded in the country’s prisons in 2010.

The activist added that, in rejecting the so-called procedural delays and other problems, 1,500 family members, including 1,300 women, refuse to leave the cellsof their relatives imprisoned in Uribama prison in the central state of Lara, after a visit Sunday .

Prado said that, in addition, the 1,400 prisoners from the jail, located off the main square of the city of Coro, capital of Falcon state (northwest), refuse to leave their cells and do not leave the yard or the dining rooms, ”in a strike to protestovercrowding and procedural delays.”

That prison was built to house 400 inmates, and 1,100 of the 1,400 who occupy ithave not been sentenced, he said.

Control of drug trafficking and weapons

According to official reports match and NGOs, in addition to overcrowding and the procedural delays, the Venezuelan prison system, composed of 34 prisons with a capacity of about 14,500 prisoners but are home to 44,520, records, among other problems, ongoing clashes between gangs, largely caused by the control of drug trafficking and weapons, including grenades.

The Minister for the Correctional Service of Venezuela, Iris Varela, said last weekthat it is necessary to build more prisons and more studies to eliminate some.

Varela said in July that 20,000 prisoners had to leave the prison and that his officewould initiate a plan for “congestion” as a matter of ”justice.”

Chávez created the Ministry for the Prison Service on 26 July, after the longestcrisis and massive national prison system in a prison near Caracas, where fornearly a month a thousand prisoners resisted the use of firearms a massivemilitary siege.