I left Venezuela in 2009, and when I returned in 2017, it felt like stepping into a different world. Prices had rocketed, hope for a better future had faded, and the infrastructure of what was once one of Latin America’s most promising nations was crumbling.
That year, I began the project Días Eternos [Eternal Days], driven by my need to explore one of the root causes of the crisis in my country: the perpetual breakdown of the penitentiary system. This is evident in the flawed ways criminals are sentenced, crimes are investigated and minorities are judged. This is one of the final images I took after two years visiting prisons and detention centres.
The photograph was taken in December 2018 in the Ana María Campos II prison in Maracaibo, near the Colombian border. The women were preparing the net for volleyball, one of their regular activities. Although they have access to provisions such as food, clothing, a bed, sports, and computer training programmes in this prison, overall conditions remain dire, with frequent shortages of water and electricity.
Nearly two thirds (62%) of Venezuela’s total prison population is held in detention centres, where conditions are severe – overcrowded, shortages of food, water and medical care, and often women having to mix in with male detainees. Some of the women I spoke to that day said they felt guilty that they had escaped the inhumane conditions of the detention centres by being transferred to a state prison.
But in many ways life in the prisons is harsher. Women cannot have visitors or make phone calls. The prison enforces the government’s “reformation of the new woman” motto, requiring inmates to participate in military-style rituals, including saluting and reciting “Independence and socialist fatherland. We will live, and we will win. Chávez lives, and the fight continues.”
Women represent only 7.8% of the total prison population, yet they endure some of the worst conditions. Nearly all incarcerated women in Venezuela are mothers, adding the emotional toll of separation from their children to their suffering. Venezuelan law allows children to stay with their mothers until the age of three, but many prisons, including Ana María Campos II, lack maternity wards or facilities for them to be together, leading to countless family separations. As women in Venezuela are often the primary breadwinners, their imprisonment leaves children without the love of their mothers and crucial economic support.
This project looks at how the justice system across Latin America disproportionately affects the region’s poorest and most vulnerable people. What began in Venezuela has since expanded to Guatemala and El Salvador, where I have also visited prisons to document the conditions for women. I aim to continue working across the continent. Justice is not only fractured in my country – it is lost across the region.