The Venezuelan Observatory of Prisons (OVP) denounced this Wednesday that the detainees held in a prison in the state of Zulia (west), most of them foreign, are hungry and they receive insufficient and “poor quality” food rations.
According to a statement from the NGO, at the “Winnie Mandela New Man Training Center”, where there are currently 120 inmates -more than 70 of them Colombians or with other nationalities-, “the food rations they receive are three tablespoons per person and this, as is evident, does not support them”.
Given this reality, the text continues, it is the Venezuelans confined in jail who help foreignerssharing some of the food that their visitors manage to enter the prison.
The detainees denounced that inside the prison there are “a business with food” that the custodians manage and that forces family members to pay in dollars to enter food, always according to the OVP.
“They give us three tablespoons of beans or rice, a little bit of some kind of salad with cassava or yams, an arepa without filling or with grated beets, but the food is of very poor quality,” said one of the inmates, quoted in the letter, in which his identity was kept anonymous.
In addition, the inmates reported that those in charge of prison security they charge them in dollars in exchange for conjugal visits, phone calls or to allow the entry of medications.
Last July, the OVP denounced that the hygiene and infrastructure conditions of the penitentiary centers in Venezuela are “precarious” and that, furthermore, there is a “serious eating problem”, especially since 2018, when they began to register deaths from malnutrition and tuberculosis.
(With information from EFE)
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