At the heart of the crisis of the old Venezuelan state lay the corruption of the judiciary. Many people hoped that the election of Chávez would remedy this glaring problem, and the government itself was pledged to reform. One of the tasks of the Constitutional Assembly was to draft the legal clauses of the new constitution, and it established a Judicial Emergency Commission to examine the state of the existing provisions, and to evaluate the work of the judges and the members of the Supreme Court.
The commission was presided over by Manuel Quijada, a lawyer and a Chávez supporter who had been a member of the Patriotic Front set up in 1989 in the aftermath of the Caracazo. Long an advocate of an alliance between soldiers and civilians, Quijada was a veteran of the attempted military coups of 1962.
In September 1999, his commission revealed that at least half the country’s 1,200 judges were guilty of corruption or incompetence, and suggested that they should be sacked. Checking through the files of the National Judges Council (the organisation responsible for investigating complaints against the judiciary), the commission discovered that 4,000 complaints had been made in the past ten years against judges and prosecutors.
The corruption and incompetence of the judicial system have been known about for years, and many of the complaints about it concerned its failure to mount trials to bring corrupt politicians and bankers to justice. One member of the commission, Carlos Tablante, denounced ‘the judicial power in Venezuela’ as ‘a refuge of illegality, vagrancy and corruption’, and he recalled a particular instance when a group of corrupt judges had heard charges against two dozen bankers accused of causing a scandalous banking crash in 1994 that had ‘nearly bankrupted the financial system’. In spite of public outrage, the charges against the bankers had been dropped.
What now made the situation so serious and explosive was the fact that most of those held in prison – some 23,000 people – had never been brought to trial. The appalling state of Venezuela’s prisons – even by the standards of Latin America – had been well known for years, and the dreadful conditions had frequently sparked off large-scale riots. More than 500 prisoners were killed in 1998. Chávez was pledged to make things better. Judicial reform had been high on his list of priorities; now prison reform would have to be tackled as well.
Chávez issued a new penal code by decree in July, as he was entitled to do while waiting for the exact wording of the new constitution. The decree was designed to modernise the judicial system, and to give suspects the presumption of innocence and the guarantee of a swift trial.
The publication of the decree inevitably encouraged prisoners to think that something might soon be done, and in September riots broke out at a number of prisons throughout the country. A dozen prisoners were killed. At one prison outside Caracas, the National Guard were sent in with tanks to restore order.
In the first week of October, the Constitutional Assembly declared a ‘prisons emergency’ that proved to be an impressive example of government on the hoof. Chávez announced on his Sunday morning radio programme on October 3 that teams of judges and prosecutors, together with human rights activists and priests, had gone into four of the country’s most dangerous prisons to try to speed up prosecution and sentencing. He said he wanted to accelerate justice for prisoners awaiting trial, and to speed up the implementation of the new penal code. He thought many people could be released immediately because of the length of time they had already served, while the prison teams hoped to clear 6,000 cases of prisoners awaiting trial by the end of the year. A day-release scheme was promoted to enable prisoners to work outside the prison during the day.
Chávez said he also hoped that the prisons would be able to begin to segregate prisoners awaiting trial according to the crimes they were accused of committing. In many prisons, people accused of being pickpockets shared cells with murder suspects. He told his radio audience that the National Guard had spent the weekend searching the prisons for weapons. He said it was the usual custom for prison guards to confiscate them – and then sell them back to the prisoners.
The crisis in the prisons refocused attention on the reform of the judiciary. Judges in Venezuela had traditionally been appointed by the majority party in Congress, as were the members of the Supreme Court. While a quarter of the Supreme Court members held permanent positions, the rest lacked any independence and could be dismissed at will. These members were at their most vulnerable when they tried to take action against politicians or their business partners, or moved against the presidents of powerful commercial concerns. Corruption charges against President Lusinchi had been held up by the Supreme Court for years. Recommendations by an investigating magistrate that he should be put on trial were simply ignored. One Supreme Court justice had resigned in protest in 1992, and a group of intellectuals had urged other members of the court to do the same, but nothing ever happened, and the Lusinchi case faded away.
Quijada’s Judicial Emergency Commission drafted several legal clauses for the new constitution and suggested new procedures for the selection and training of judges. The new ways of supervising their activity that it recommended were similar to those of the United States. One suggestion was for candidates for the Supreme Court to face public hearings. While some hostile critics argued that these reforms would take years to take effect, most people agreed that the advances made would eventually prove beneficial. Yet it was not until 2004, with the enlargement of the Supreme Court, that the government was finally able to make the necessary changes.