Julie Turkewitz
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
They take some metal from the beds.
And cut themselves and using their own blood, write on the sheets messages like, we are not criminals, we are migrants.
And they hang these sheets everywhere.
from what they called the piping in the cells.
Exactly.
I don't think that they believed they had any other options.
And this was something.
But what happens next is an even bigger rebellion.
In May, there's a guard search of one of the cells.
And during this search, officials beat...
A man so badly that he is bleeding from head to toe, according to Luis.
And this sets off so much anger that some of the inmates dislodge metal parts from their bed and use the metal parts to open cell doors.
And for a moment, some of these men have this taste of something like freedom.
Then, of course, they immediately realize that they are completely outmatched by the guards.
Luis tells us they retreat into their cells and that is when the guards begin going cell by cell and really punishing the guards.
The men shooting them at point blank with what they call rubber bullets in the hand, in the head, in the leg.
My photographer colleague traveled around Venezuela photographing these men.
And you can see one of them has this gash down the front of his face that he said was caused by a rubber bullet that ricocheted off of his forehead.
Okay.
There is another man who said that he was shot in the thigh with a rubber bullet and has this really sort of gnarly welt in his thigh that we documented.