Tag: crackdown

CARACAS: Since September, Venezuela has deployed thousands of security force members to wrest control of seven prisons from the hands of powerful gangs -- finding caches of guns, drugs, swimming pools, and restaurants -- even a zoo.The facilities -- which sometimes resembled luxury retreats for gang bosses rather than places of detention -- were shuttered and their 9,000-odd inmates moved to other, already overcrowded prisons.While justice minister Remigio Ceballos has triumphantly declared a death blow to gangs that have for years run the prisons with impunity, observers denounce...