by BELEN FERNANDEZ
PHOTO/ Eduardo Fuentes
The second paragraph of a January 27 article in Venezuelan daily El Universal entitled “Riot leaves at least 7 dead and 17 wounded in La Planta” announces that “a little after 9 this morning, inmates in the La Planta prison, mainly in cell blocks 1, 2 and 3, initiated a shootout. Meanwhile the National Guard responded with shots from above.” The fact that the Caracas prison inmates have obtained materials with which to initiate a shootout suggests that the National Guard, tasked with prison security, may have had more to do with the scene than simply responding from above—something additionally suggested by the reaction of prisoners’ wives outside the complex to the arrival of more troops:
“More than 60 members of the National Guard deployed around the penitentiary with antiriot gear but the inmates’ wives would not permit them to enter the premises and instead threw rocks at [them] while screaming ‘Assassins of the people’ and ‘You will not go in.’”
The El Universal article also describes the evacuation of part of the Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV) building due to proximity to the shootout, although it fails to propose such proximities as a potential way to get rid once and for all of the media outlet, whose role in the 2002 coup against Chávez the government had cited as one reason not to renew its broadcast license. As for ways to get rid of other sectors of the Latin American population, Maria Luisa Borjas—former chief of internal affairs for the Honduran police force —commented in a November 2009 interview that “in Honduras being young is a crime.”
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