Venezuela: the moment before

I recall that the women were returning from an evangelical play, one that was also attended by the men. Evangelicals are the only ones who are genuinely concerned for these people. They go to the correctional facilities to perform plays for them, usually with an uplifting ending and conveying a message of forgiveness, self-respect, self-love, etc. They give them food and pray with them. At exactly that moment, they had finished with the play and were returning to the prison.

I was heading towards the cell with a guard. That is where I took the photograph, at the entrance to the facility.

It is a photograph which represents many things and allows one to understand the context of the prison. They are women deprived of freedom. It is a photograph that allows one to clearly understand where I am, who the women are, and the context and circumstances they are in. You can see there are many women crowded into the cell; you can observe that the place is ominous and dark, and that air only circulates through the small holes in the door.

I started the Días Eternos (Eternal Days) project in Venezuela in 2017. I left my country in 2009, and when I returned, I saw that it had deteriorated significantly and that prices had increased tremendously. Infrastructure was in poor condition, and the spirit of the people had declined. I decided then to launch a project focused on the fundamental causes of the crisis in my country, and it was precisely at that moment that I met a Venezuelan reporter who worked for Una ventana a la libertad (A Window to Freedom), a non-profit organisation which advocates for the rights of incarcerated people.

She told me that the situation for these women is deplorable. They do not receive any kind of assistance from the state: no food, no water, no medical attention. And there are women who become pregnant in prison because they are detained together with men. Then, she took me to see a prison facility, and my first visit confirmed everything she had told me.

I arrived at a small cell with 11 women inside, among them a 21-year-old who was eight-months pregnant. Before, these women had shared a cell with men. The police system does not recognise the identity of trans women, so they are detained with the men, which puts them at risk of rape and sexual abuse. The facility’s makeshift washroom occupies the space of what was previously a parking lot. There were four cardboard walls and a small pot that did not have any kind of drainage but was filled and emptied by hand. The women had to bathe there next to the bathroom; they did not have showers.

These women spent months—even years—in prison, and they had not met their lawyer, had not seen their children, and had no food or water, etc. They also did not know when they would be able to get out or if they were ever going to get out. They all belonged to the lower social classes.

In Venezuela, if you come from the middle or upper social classes, you will never go to prison. It is the same if you work for the government. Justice in my country is lost. My work documents the fundamental causes of the crisis in Venezuela. The justice system does not function equally for everyone.

In fact, it mainly affects the most disadvantaged people.

My work also documents pre-trial detention, a process that can take years due to the procedural delay which exists in my country. This delay causes overcrowding in prisons which in turn leads to violence, diseases such as tuberculosis or HIV/AIDS, malnutrition, etc.

For this project, I visited 15 jails and two state prisons between 2017 and 2019. I interviewed about 150 women and created a database in which I recorded their age, name, and reason for imprisonment.

Unfortunately, when I finished and published my work, nothing happened. There was no palpable change. I firmly believe that my work as a photographer should have an impact. I am not only interested in publishing a story; I want all the work I do to have a real effect. Because nothing happened when I worked on this project in Venezuela, I decided to expand it to all of Latin America. I worked in El Salvador for four months in 2021, inside and outside prisons. While there, I not only concentrated on prisons, but also on how gangs are, to a certain extent, a type of prison, both metaphorical and real. These are organised crime groups, the kind that you cannot leave once you join. Leaving them is punishable by death. Women do not get out.

If we do a brief comparison between Venezuelan and Salvadoran prisons, we see that they are the same. Women stripped of their freedom are from the lower and middle classes. They have received little to no education, and they come from environments involving poverty and violence. Many of the women I interviewed who are gang members do not know any other family context beyond the gang because their parents are also members.

With my work inside the prison, I focused on recording the day-to-day routine of the women—the same thing I did in Venezuela. But I also discovered that in El Salvador, one of the main reasons for these women’s detention was the illegality of abortion, which is considered aggravated homicide and is punishable by 30 years of imprisonment. There are still 18 women deprived of liberty because of this law. Abortion does not only occur voluntarily but also involuntarily. Some of the women told me that upon regaining consciousness after passing out, they were handcuffed to a hospital bed for having “murdered” their daughter or son. The situation in the country concerning women’s rights is quite violent.