‘Systematic’ Human Rights Abuses in Argentina’s Prison System

The violent deaths of four inmates in Argentine prisons in the past few weeks has confirmed the ‘systematic’ violation of human rights in the country’s penal system according to human rights groups.

A new report by the Coordinating Committee against Police and Institutional Repression (CORREPI), an organisation for families of the victims of police brutality, says that the deaths of four prisoners in December exposes the violent conditions in Argentina’s jails.

CORREPI says that 33% of the 2,826 deaths linked to police brutality between 1983-2009 took place in prisons, juvenile detention centers or police holding cells.  Although a large number are attributed to suicide of fights between inmates, CORREPI says prison authorities are also culpable.

According to the group, abusive treatment in prisons occurs all over the country, but is particularly serious in the Buenos Aires province and the Western province of Mendoza.

In 2004 and 2006 the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered provisional measures to be taken to protect inmates in certain prisons across both provinces.

However despite this and the Argentine state ordering the Mendoza authorities to ensure human rights were respected in its jails in 2007, Pablo Salinas, a lawyer representing some of the plaintiffs in the Argentine prison cases before the Inter-American justice system told IPS news service that the situation has not improved.

Salinas added that only one other prison in the Americas – in  Urso Branco in the Brazilian state of Rondonia -  has ever been handed a similar order from the Inter-American Court.

In his interview with IPS, Salinas says that Boulogne Sur Mer prison in Mendoza has a capacity to house 500 inmates but there are currently 1,700 people incarcerated within its walls.  Seventeen deaths of inmates were reported at the jail in 2004.

“The prison “is built over a sewer, and inmates dip their knives in the raw sewage and then attack each other. Stab wounds become infected, sometimes causing meningitis. The entire sewer system is in a state of collapse,” he said, adding that the healthcare system within the prison was like  “something out of Dante’s Inferno.”

IPS also reports that another human rights group, the non-governmental Centre for Legal and Social Studies (CELS) has also just issued a 2009 report on human rights in Argentina which criticises prison management by local authorities in Buenos Aires province.  The report also says the provincial government has adopted prison policies that respond to societal concern over security by stiffening sentences and harsher treatment of prisoners which disregard constitutional rights.

The province’s prison population was 24,166 at the end of 2009 while the provincial government has admitted that prison capacity is no more than 17,858.