The Inmates Are Running Venezuela’s Prisons. Theyve Created Autonomous Micro- Dictatorships.

The inmates have overtaken many prisons in Venezuela. They’re armed with heavy weapons and grenades. The prisons are governed by criminal gangs led by a pran or kingpin who strictly enforces the thug code by which all prisoners must abide or they will be shot in various body parts. It’s too dangerous for Venezuelan troops to enter so they patrol the perimeter and train their rifles on any inmate who tries to leave. The prisoners have formed functional independent societies with open air bazaars offering everything from Coca-Cola to cocaine.

01:00 - Several days a week, they welcome their girlfriends, wives, children, and extended families for visits, birthday parties and even festivals. “La Causa,” a new documentary from 29 year old filmmaker, Andrés Figueredo Thomson, is a raw look at life inside what at the time of filming was the country’s largest prison. The film explores the structure of its self-organized society where dissenters and those deemed social radicals were treated harshly and LGBT inmates were cast out and forced to live on the roof of a building. Figueredo Thomson started capturing remarkable footage in the prison in 2010 as the socialist strongman president, Hugo Chavez, dismantled democratic institutions and seized control of private businesses. The year after Figueredo Thomson began production on “La Causa,” Chavez declared his stepfather an enemy of the state, forcing his family to flee to the US.

01:58 - But he continued filming on return trips to Venezuela over the following eight years. Senior year in high school was the first time I entered a prison. The experience was incredibly, incredibly, just overwhelming, seeing inmates with weapons, with grenades, the smell, seeing literally excrement coming from the walls, just the amount of open sores everywhere, absolutely deplorable conditions. It felt almost like a war zone, like post-apocalyptic thing, to see the children… children going in and out of the prison. The underbelly of crime in Venezuela, being around guns, being around crack.

02:33 - That guy that was selling crack and cocaine with the baby in his arms. You filmed this over the course of eight years. How did you start going into prisons in Venezuela when you were a senior in high school? I met this guy who was in the documentary, Gilber Carbo, he’s a politician guy. Me and my brother had an NGO and we used to build recreational parks in the slums. And he told me the story of when he was a kingpin and how he had transformed himself.

03:13 - I was 17, and I told him, man, I want to do a documentary about this. I even had to make a fake ID to be able to get into the prison. How did you ingratiate yourself in this community that they were willing to let you film them? They always knew what was going on and they were okay with it. Because I think there’s also that element of pride, in some sense, of being in that world or of wanting to show their life. But it was really interesting to see inside the power vacuum that they had filled.

03:47 - Before these kingpins came to power, it used to be like no man’s land. And there used to be a lot more blood baths. With kingpins there was more selective violence. It was more like Hammurabi Code type of, an eye for an eye, type of thing. But you could leave your cell phone in the prison, and if your cell phone got lost somebody was gonna be responsible.

04:21 - It was really hard for you—I would leave my wallet or my things just in the music studio that we built and nothing would disappear in a place where it’s surrounded by thieves. So there was this type of military dictatorship code which was really weird. I’m not saying that I support it, but it was a type of system that created some type of order from the previous chaos. The pran, or kingpin, presides over a multi-tiered security apparatus that oversees an army of watchmen who roam the prison grounds and ensure inmates obey strict social codes that regulate where they can go, how they can act, and what they can say. There are certain codes that you can’t break.

05:14 - Like you can’t use the word for milk because it can also be misinterpreted. And so you have to know all of these things that, if you say them then you’re going to lose positions and your ranking. Coming new to prison, at first, you’re most likely gonna be sent to the church. And in church, they’re gonna ask you who you are, why are you here? What are you doing? Do you know anybody in here? When prisoners first arrive, they’re judged by the prison government and sorted into one of three distinct social castes, the thugs, the evangelicals, or the renegades. Almost like going into college. Like if you get into a frat or not get into a frat, depends on who you know, how cool you are, what you’ve done, type of thing.

05:49 - Like it’s interesting to see that society has it’s ways to self- organize at these different levels but it’s essentially the same thing. The thug is the people who are the freest inside the prison. The thugs can not wear a shirt. They can walk wherever they want to. They can smoke weed, or do drugs in the prison. The evangelicals, if they’re walking about they have to have a Bible in their hands and they have to wear a tie. And they’re also in charge of cleaning the prison or they’re also in charge of cooking.

06:19 - The renegades, the ones who are worst off, these are like the prisoners within prison. And it’s either because you committed a very, very horrible crime, you’re a homosexual, like a known homosexual, or you belong to a gang that was an enemy of the kingpin’s gang. In addition to preaching the word of God the evangelicals are responsible for cleaning the raw sewage and refuse that cover the grounds. They live in the church, which acts as both a place of worship and a prison within the prison. Those who violate the thug code or owe a debt can also be sent to the church.

06:55 - It’s like your last warning, type of punishment. If you’re in the church and you’re caught by the kingpin doing something, you’re either going to get shot in the hand, corporal punishment some way, or you’re gonna be sent to the renegades. You can’t get out of that. Once you do that, any prison that you go to, you have a stain that is not washable. You go to another prison or even the streets, everybody’s going to know, that guy, that guy has a stain on him. Because you were given the opportunity of the church to reform yourself, to no longer be in the world of evil and turn good.

07:30 - The prison’s defacto government collects a general tax known as la causa, or the cause, which it uses to purchase goods that come into the prison. If you behave, if you pay your causa, then nobody’s gonna mess with you. But if you’re outspoken, if you do things wrong, if you’re a mischief person, if you’re the debtor, if you’re like a bad person for the good living within the prison then you’re going to fare badly. The Venezuelan bolivar has been destroyed by hyperinflation, but inside, prisoners have created a market system in which they’ve established their own ad hoc currencies, bartered goods and services, and use systems of credit. The currency that was circulating outside was no longer valid inside the prison.

08:17 - There was a toilet paper shortage at some point in the country. And you could still, or adding a bottle of main product that we used to make arepas, there were shortages outside, and inside the prison you could still find them. People would go inside the prison to shop. Inmates run restaurants inside the prison’s walls, provide an alternative to the food offered by the government. Like there was this guy that I really enjoyed talking to, and it was the place that I always went to eat. He had his burger shop. His burgers were amazing.

08:41 - The prison food that the government gave them, it wasn’t nearly enough, and it was just like rice and like soggy. I got amebiasis, like amoebas, twice. It was the worst experience of my life. And the food is the least of the problems created by the government for most inmates. I saw a skeleton and it was moving, I had to do a double take— I didn’t know if it was fear or whatever. And then I looked closer and I saw it was a man who was literally dying. He was only bone and some skin hanging on his—and he had had tuberculosis for nine months.

09:13 - He was an indigenous of the Wayuu community, it’s like a native community that lives near Columbia. And he was there for stealing a watch. And he’d been in prison, I don’t know, like two or three years. And the day, supposedly, the day that we got there, me and Gilber, was the day that the guy had his freedom and we tried to take him to a hospital. And he just died the next day. Figueredo Thomson says that only about 20% of prisoners have been formally sentenced for a crime. Others languish for years awaiting trials that may never come.

10:05 - From the Free Convict group, they were 15, 12 of them hadn’t been sentenced. And a lot of them just started admitting to sentence because then the time in prison would move faster. Imagine a system in which you have to declare yourself guilty even if you’re not just so the thing moves faster. The prison population has exploded in recent years as the regime of Hugo Chavez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, has cracked down on mostly poor Venezuelans for alleged petty offenses. There was no economic opportunity. A lot of them are kids, you know, like 18 year old guy who’s part of the documentary, he doesn’t tell the story that much, but it’s the guy with the afro, Freedom, he was thrown in because he stole a cell phone, and he spent three years in a prison in the same space, being overruled by guys who had killed 15 people.

10:55 - There’s no like maximum security prison, only for political prisons, mostly. So obviously when you throw somebody into that type of position, what are you creating? This guy has to survive and he has to pay the causa to these kingpins. And he has to find a way to make a living within these prison walls. You’re essentially making him create networks of new crime and new ways in which to live. When society doesn’t pay attention to culture of rehabilitation, then that’s going to start to fester.

12:05 - The film builds to a dramatic finish as the military embarks in a campaign to retake several inmate run prisons setting up a showdown in 2016 at the prison where Figueredo Thompson shot most of his footage. Little by little, a lot of these prisons have been taken control of. The campaign presents the socialist government with both practical and moral dilemmas. Since overtaking heavily armed inmates requires mass bloodshed and inevitably, killed scores of the wrongfully incarcerated, Figueredo Thompson says officials can’t reconcile these actions with their foundational ideology which preaches compassion and the creation of a new man whose main virtues are selflessness and a commitment to justice. What they call their version of revolutionary socialism, how are you going to execute inmates if you’re supposed to believe in the new man? “El hombre nuevo—their philosophy, this is their philosophy, that Che Guevara bring in.

13:06 - You need the new man to reform, and use the prisons as a way to reeducate and et cetera, et cetera. How do you get to that point? Venezuela’s slide into authoritarianism is also deeply personal for Figueredo Thompson and his family, his stepfather, Guillermo Zuloaga, led the last independent TV station in the country after Chavez seized most media outlets. He fought escalating government harassment for years as he exposed the vast human cost of the regime’s policies. In 2010 Chavez finally had Zuloaga arrested. He had to leave the country because Chavez named him a political enemy of the revolution.

13:44 - My first year of university was in Venezuela. That was the year—right before that was the year that my stepfather had to leave, my family had to leave and I was left there alone with my younger brother, Juan. It’s really strange to see when a man that you’ve seen your entire life be a completely moral man be thrown out of his country for speaking the truth. If you didn’t question your beliefs, if you’re dogmatic about your beliefs then there’s no room for you to admit error. And I think that’s a lot of what’s happening in Venezuela is that there is no admittance of error and they’ve gone so far down a path that it’s very hard to come back from when you become too radicalized in your ideological position.

14:21 - And I think that’s something that I’ve been able to witness and to see firsthand, and it’s very saddening. “La Causa” shines a light on the decline of Venezuelan society and the human rights abuses perpetrated under Chávez and Maduro as their socialist revolution backpedals further from its promise to empower the downtrodden and celebrate the idea of the new man. But Figueredo Thomson’s film also features poignant stories of individuals who have overcome the odds to find redemption whether or not they ultimately find justice. To be able to get to this level of access, to empathy and to understanding, that was my experience. A lot of people are too afraid to go into the belly of the beast.

15:48 - And I think if you draw them a picture, starting to see things, generate empathy, and I think that’s the power of film. .