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Investigations Interview

Uruguay: The straw that broke the camel’s back

Riots provoked changes in prison.

The Executive Power of Uruguay remitted the Bill on the Organisation of the National Prison System to the parliament. This bill aims to transform the National Institute of Rehabilitation (INR, Instituto Nacional de Rehabilitación), the body that governs prisons, into a decentralised entity that is accountable to the Ministry of Education and Culture in order to stress the importance of psychological, social, and educational intervention for persons deprived of liberty. If it is approved, this new organisation would come into force in February 2021.

After several years of being on hold, the bill comes into effect following a particularly violent riot that took place recently at Santiago Vásquez Penitentiary (formerly Comcar). A similar incident, notorious for its brutality, occurred in 2002 in Liberty Prison where both leaders of the rebellion destroyed facilities and murdered fellow prisoners who opposed them.

Prison Insider has recently translated an investigation initially published in Spanish. See below to read the English version.

Juan Miguel Petit wrote that the place had experienced “an incident expressly condemned by international law and comparable to torture.”

On 29 June, more than 30 prisoners in Santiago Vásquez spearheaded a riot and took three police guards hostage. After arduous negotiations, the prisoners surrendered and released the guards more than ten hours later. The rebels, who demanded a ransom of $150,000 for the hostages, complained about the rodents, the miserable food, and the fleeting duration of family visits in Unit 12 of Comcar, one of the most complicated units of the prison.

“We are asking that the few rights we have here be respected,” said a spokesperson for the prisoners lodged in Unit 12. “That bread and milk, if ready by 10, be distributed at 10; that visits, as is the case in other units, last several hours. Like it isn’t enough that we live in a place of punishment and deprivation of liberty, we live surrounded by rats,” he continued in his account to the press.

Eduardo Bonomi, the Minister of Home Affairs, ordered an investigation into the riot, stating that the demands of the prisoners were unclear. Even so, they were unsurprising. In his 2017 report, Juan Miguel Petit, the Parliamentary Commissioner of the Prison System, wrote that the place had experienced “an incident expressly condemned by international law and comparable to torture.”

Juan Miguel Petit has also spoken his mind on the matter.

This recent riot has promoted the bill for the transformation of the prison system to the Ministry of Education and Culture. If the bill is passed, the following measures will be implemented: a ‘support framework’ with rehabilitation work that influences the wellbeing of the prisoners, additionally encouraging their participation in various activities. There will also be an organisation that reviews the “proposals and concerns regarding daily coexistence” in the prisons.

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