Five months after the Guanare massacre, relatives of inmates demand Justice

A group of relatives of the inmates who died on May 1, 2020, in the “Los Llanos Penitentiary Center” (Cepella), in Guanare, Portuguesa State, raised their voices and accused the military authorities of murder, overturning the official version which indicated that the deaths were the consequence of a jailbreak which led to a shooting between the prisoners and the guards.

The events took place on Friday, May 1, 2020, and left 47 people dead and 75 injured.

The riot that began after one o’clock in the afternoon and ended around eleven o’clock at night revealed the unsanitary conditions, overcrowding, lack of food, and infectious contagious diseases that affect those deprived of liberty in this prison and became the catalyst for the protest carried out by the inmates.

Relatives and public officials indicated that the “negative leader” of the prison organized the protest to demand better conditions of detention. According to the relatives’ account, in a section known as “La Fosa”, the leader forced the inmates to move towards the perimeter fence, which was later brought down to let the relatives access the building and deliver some food.

Brigadier General Gherson Chacón Paz, Head of the Bolivarian National Guard Detachment in Portuguesa was in charge of the operation. Some family members accused the General of not allowing them to examine the bodies of the executed inmates.

They stated that they recognized the dead through pictures. These pictures only showed the face, in order to hide the deplorable state in which the bodies were left after the massacre.

Some of the relatives were informed that the authorities had ordered the creation of a mass grave to bury the bodies. According to them, General Chacón Paz announced the delivery of the coffins, but access to the bodies remained restricted.

They were executed for demanding food

Four of the inmates on the list of 47 killed in the massacre were from Lara State, including Nelson Alfonso Carreño Valenzuela, Víctor Daniel Cordero Leal, and José Patiño Leandro.

As soon as she found out about the massacre, Patiño’s mother Adriana Leandro went to Guanare to begin the paperwork and thus be able to recover her son’s body. “I wanted to see my son alive, but now he is dead,” she said amid her pain. “The Cepella inmates were subjected to a massacre, so we want to deny to the media that there was no jailbreak attempt at any time,” she added.

The story of Patiños’s mother is not the only one; Three other women had to travel for two hours, from Barquisimeto to Guanare, to recover the bodies that had been in the Guanare morgue for more than 48 hours and in a state of decomposition.

One of them was the body of Nelson Alfonso Carreño Valenzuela, who was buried as soon as he arrived in Barquisimeto because he was denied a funeral due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Marline Hernández, a relative of Daniel Alberto Hernández Hurtado, another of the victims of the Guanare prison massacre, reiterated that some prisoners were protesting on Friday, May 1, against the impossibility of receiving food from their families. As she points out, it was in the middle of the protest that the officials began shooting at the prisoners.

“We saw with anxiety, anguish, worry, and pain how those prisoners were murdered in such a cruel, cold, and ruthless way. It was horrible, ”Hernández said.

Some relatives of the victims of this massacre commented that most of the bodies of the dead prisoners were decomposed and were thus handed over to their relatives, and those who were not identified were reportedly buried in mass graves.

According to police reports, other inmates were injured by bullets and grenade shards. At least 30 of the 47 dead prisoners were recognized by their relatives.

The Venezuelan Observatory on Prisons (OVP) demanded an immediate, exhaustive, and impartial investigation establish the veracity of the facts.

Hunger and disease in Venezuela prisons

The Cepella prison held more than 2,000 inmates in terrible conditions, according to the NGO Una Ventana a la Libertad.

Carolina Girón, director at the Venezuelan Observatory on Prisons, pointed out that this facility had an overpopulation of 333 percent, with an installed capacity of 750 people, but with a population of around 2,500 prisoners.

All the deaths registered during the incident belonged to the prisoner population, and no fatality was reported among the authorities of the prison that were on duty at the time of the events.

Víctor Calderón, the father of Miguel Eduardo Calderón Camacho, prosecuted for aggravated robbery, and one of the 47 deceased, indicated that the reaction of the authorities was “unbelievable”. “They were killed at close range, what they did was a massacre,” he denounced.

Calderón explained that on the same day of the riot he received a call from the authorities of the prison, so he was able to enter the building in the morning and recognize his son’s body through photographs that were shown to him on a computer. He asked for Justice and hopes that the incident does not go unpunished.

The relatives of the murdered inmates traveled from Barinas, Lara, Trujillo, and Yaracuy to recover the bodies, amidst mobility restrictions due to quarantine and fuel shortages.

They indicated that the cost of bringing the corpses to their state of origin ranged between 150 and 400 dollars.

“We had to borrow money from family and friends, we sold or pawned our belongings to pay for funeral expenses,” said Adriana Leandro, José Patiño’s mother.

According to the Venezuelan Observatory on Prisons, the Cepella penitentiary was finally emptied on May 16, and the prisoners were distributed to other facilities throughout the country.

According to information published on the website of the Ministry of Penitentiary Service, 1,718 prisoners were transferred to prisons with a penitentiary regime, and 380 others to prisons with an open regime, for a total of 2,098 transferred inmates. Also, five inmates were transferred to a health center after being injured in the Cepella massacre.

List of the deceased inmates as published by Últimas Noticias

Translated by José Rafael Medina

Centro Gumilla & Provea