VALENCIA, Venezuela — Like most jails in Venezuela, the one attached to the police station in the northern city of Valencia was packed beyond capacity. Built to house roughly 60 inmates, it contained about 200.
Simmering anger fueled a riot there Wednesday morning: A prison guard, wounded by a knife, was taken hostage. Inmates threatened to kill him with a grenade unless their demands were met. Others set mattresses alight.
The fire turned the jail into an inferno. Emergency workers punched holes in the walls to let the smoke disperse and the inmates escape.
But by nightfall, 66 men and two women — who were evidently at the jail to visit loved ones — were dead and scores were injured. Police fired tear gas and rubber bullets at grieving relatives and rights advocates who gathered outside the jail overnight demanding information.
Late Thursday morning, a policewoman came outside and spoke to relatives demanding answers. She had a small sheet of paper in her hands.
“Carlos Sánchez?’’ she shouted.
A woman immediately raised her hand and yelled, “I’m his mother, yes.’’
“He died,’’ the policewoman said.
The mother started crying. She said her son had less than a year on his sentence.
The policewoman recited some names of inmates who had survived the fire and then shouted: “Look, I haven’t had any breakfast, so let’s calm down. These are the names I have, that’s it.’’
With Venezuela in an economic collapse even worse than the Great Depression and its public health system in free fall, inmates throughout the country are going hungry. Protests are on the rise. Weapons and drug smuggling are prevalent, as is bribery of guards and of the heavily armed groups who hold sway over cellblocks.
Other marks of the unprecedented crisis include hyperinflation, extreme shortages of food and medicine, constant electrical blackouts, thousands of children dying of malnutrition, rampant crime in every province and looting and rioting in the streets.
The fire was one of the worst disasters in the history of Venezuela’s prisons and its toll surpassed the 61 who died in clashes at a prison in Barquisimeto in 2013.
Inmates’ relatives said Thursday that they had been told the fire started after authorities tried to break up a party overseen by gangs — known as pranatos — that have paid off or intimidated the prison staff to permit drugs, alcohol, and sex. On Wednesday, they said, wives and girlfriends were permitted to visit their loved ones at the prison.
María, 56, who lives around the block from the jail and who insisted that her surname not be used because she fears reprisal, described the jail as a chaotic mess.
On weekends, she said, a truck delivers ice and food for the parties overseen by the gangs, and prostitutes regularly enter and leave the police station attached to the jail.
The Venezuelan Prisons Observatory said it had warned for a long time about the untenable situation at police station jails, where detainees are often kept far longer than the 48-hour holding period mandated by law after an initial arrest.
Being part of a police station, the jail was a place meant to hold inmates for short periods of time after arrest, said Jeremy McDermott, cofounder of Insight Crime, a research group which has studied Venezuela’s prison system.
The Venezuelan Program of Education-Action in Human Rights, known by its acronym PROVEA, is one of the main humanitarian organizations in the country. It said on its Twitter account that the “indolence’’ of the government had contributed to the death toll.
