Una Ventana a la Libertad (A Window to Freedom, UVL) presented its 2019 annual report on the Human Rights situation of persons deprived of liberty in 239 Preventive Detention Centers in the country.
The organization currently monitors 15 states in the country with a team of 17 researchers. For this new report, UVL included information from Vargas and divided the state of Miranda into 3 sub-regions: the Miranda highlands, the Guarenas-Guatire axis, and the Tuy river valley, thus probing 239 dungeons.
In 2019, UVL confirmed the death of 192 inmates through alerts and constant monitoring in 15 states of the country. Carlos Nieto Palma, Coordinator-General of the organization, said that 46 of those deprived of liberty lost their lives due to illnesses; 40 for violence among prisoners, 35 for unknown causes, 34 during jailbreaks, 21 for diverse causes, and 16 for police abuse.
UVL also recorded: 358 escaped inmates, of which only 109 were recaptured, 442 political prisoners, and 146 accused of vandalism.
Similarly, they found that there were about 140 hunger strikes in the detention centers and 59 riots involving the participation of the prisoners. The capacity of these centers is 1,176 and they currently house 6,151 people deprived of liberty.
Carlos Nieto Palma, Coordinator-General of UVL, Magaly Huggins, Research Coordinator of the Organization. and Ronna Rísquez Sánchez, creator and editorial advisor to Monitor de Víctimas (Victims Monitor), denounced the situation currently being experienced in the country’s detention centers.
The research team of the organization coordinated by Nieto Palma registered the death of 22 prisoners from tuberculosis. Investigators recorded cases of torture against 88 women and 144 men.
Overcrowding on the rise
The organization has monitored the situation in the preventive detention centers of Venezuela for almost 4 years. It reported that some 38,318 people were arrested in 2019, and 19,268 (50.3%) remained in detention at the end of the year. 17,800 of them were men, 1,305 were women, and 140 were teenagers. 12 were indigenous, and 11 people belong to the LGBTI community. The added capacity of the preventive detention centers covered in the study stood at 6,448 inmates.
The 2019 annual report of Una Ventana a la Libertad (A Window to Freedom, UVL) details that the five states with the most detainees in preventive detentions centers are Zulia, Capital District, Anzoátegui, Lara, and Nueva Esparta.
You can download the full report in spanish HERE.
