Lavish, bloodthirsty life of Venezuela’s ‘mega gangs’ who build baseball stadiums in jail – World News

Far away from the brutal street wars and hanging corpses that plague the streets of Venezuela, a band of bandits relax on the field of a brightly-lit baseball stadium.

In the vast complex behind them reportedly lies a disco hall and indoor swimming pool. But this is no country club for the nation’s criminal elite – rather, it is the inner walls of the Aragua Penitentiary Center.

The images of the stadium, said to be better constructed than many of Venezuela’s professional sports venues, lay bare the unchecked power of the ‘megabandas’ – or ‘mega gangs’ .

While the rest of the country sinks into poverty and battles the Covid-19 crisis, cartels have seized on the uncertainty, bribing young children with food baskets to turn them into new recruits.

Fighting for territory and ruling with an iron fist, the megabandas have expanded their operations into drug trafficking, extortion and kidnapping, shocking communities with horrific videos that show a boy as young as 13 being executed with a machete.

And, as proven by the name of the Tren de Aragua prison gang that adorns the baseball stadium’s walls, even the threat of incarceration is no barrier to their rampant rise.

Breeding ground for killers

Venezuela’s overcrowded prison system had become a breeding ground for gangs, whose members are able to enjoy a life of luxury denied to its millions of impoverished citizens.

The pimped up Aragua complex, which lies at the northern tip of the country, is one of its most notorious jails.

Originally built to hold 750 inmates, it is said to now house 7,000 criminals, according to Vice News.

The failing justice system has allowed prisons to be run like ‘mini cities’, with one island complex said to have boasted cells with air-conditioning and satellite dishes.

Instead of containing Venezuela’s criminal underbelly, they have effectively become cartel headquarters, with leaders from the biggest gangs – such as El Coqui and Los 70 del Valle – able to run operations from inside.

“Many gang leaders met their most trusted men in jail,” Luis Cedeño, a sociologist and the director of NGO Paz Activa, told local media site Caracas Chronicles.

“After being released, they applied the same system, with the same leader heading the operation and a group of lieutenants, known as ‘luceros’ or ‘gariteros’, serving as watchmen. In fact, many of these gangs, such as the Tren de Aragua, are managed from inside a penitentiary.”

However, despite the extravagances criminals enjoy behind bars, gang rivalries and the impact of the pandemic have also made Venezuela’s prisons a hotbed for deadly riots.

Last May, a rebellion at Llanos penitentiary left at least 40 dead and 50 injured, including a warden mauled by a hand grenade attack.

The outbreak was sparked by a ban on visits from relatives during the coronavirus outbreak, depriving prisoners of food parcels on which they had come to rely.

Inmates claimed guards were taking what little food was left for themselves, forcing them to resort to eating stray animals, with a 26-year-old prisoner telling Reuters : “We live among the s*** and the trash.”

Murdering teenagers with machetes

Such violence has seen Venezuela become one of the world’s bloodiest countries, with a murder rate of 45.6 per 100,000 residents in 2020, according to the nonprofit Venezuelan Observatory of Violence.

Seizing on the collapse of the police force in the capital, Caracas, in the early 2000s, megabandas were able to buy or steal high-tech weaponry that has allowed them to grow and vastly outnumber law enforcement.

Brutal clashes between gangs and police are commonplace, with one skirmish in January seeing 23 killed in a shootout in Caracas.

However, the most sickening crimes are reserved for revenge killings amongst the cartels themselves.

In 2018, a 13-year-old boy was filmed being bound and gagged, before a machete-wielding thug cut off his ears and killed him with a machete.

The gruesome abduction and murder was filmed and shared online, in what is believed to be a chilling warning to opposition groups.

In scenes that increasingly mirror the bloodthirsty tactics of Mexican cartels, bodies across Venezuela are left mutilated, hanging from bridges or even beheaded in an unflinching battle for dominance.

Often, violence is also used against innocent civilians to boost coffers through kidnapping and extortion.

One gang leader explained to Reuters how his men would stalk victims for days before abducting them, demanding ransoms of up to $10,000 to be paid within 24 hours.

He said his gang killed about 10 of its dozens of kidnapping victims in one year – simply because families did not pay on time.

Recruiting starving children

The cartels have been the main benefactors of Venezuela’s deepening economic crisis, which has seen more than 5 million residents flee the country.

Since the financial collapse began in 2013, shocking reports have even claimed animals were stolen from the Zulia Metropolitan Zoological Park in the north-western city of Maracaibo – to be eaten by desperate locals.

The situation has allowed gangs, who traditionally lure young recruits with displays of wealth and luxury on social media, to instead snare new members by bribing hungry children with food packages.

“This is a new phenomenon because it’s something that we never had in this country, crimes committed because of hunger,” Roberto Briceño León, director of the Venezuelan Observatory for Violence, told the Miami Herald.

The pandemic has only worsened the plight of ordinary residents, who are unable to escape the country due to Covid-19 restrictions.

Venezuela’s official figures show 188,000 cases of coronavirus and 1,987 deaths, though critics say the actual figure is likely higher due to limited testing.

In bizarre scenes, members of a gang loyal to President Nicolás Maduro’s socialist regime were last year seen enforcing punishments against those who flouted lockdown measures.

Brutal footage showed two men lined up against a wall in Caracus before being beaten with baseball bats – for the crime of not wearing face masks.

The attackers were members of ‘Colectivos’, paramilitary groups supportive of the left-wing government, but who are similarly embroiled in the illegal activities of the megabandas.

As the pandemic and economic depression ravage Venezuela, the United Nations this week pledged to provide food packages to nearly 200,000 schoolchildren gripped by hunger.

Yet the megabandas continue to offer a dark allure to those seeking a quick escape from a life of poverty.