CARACAS, May 17 (IPS) - By Tuesday, 59 children, including a six- month-old baby, and 267 adults had spent 48 hours as hostages of rioting prisoners in the La Pica penitentiary in Venezuela, 500 km east of Caracas, while around 1,000 inmates of other prisons simultaneously declared a hunger strike.

The protesting prisoners are demanding the effective application of laws that provide for probation, work programmes, house arrest, early release, community service instead of jail sentences, expanded visiting rights, work release, improved sanitary conditions, and faster processing of cases in a country where around half of all inmates are still awaiting trial.

Dozens of family members of prisoners in La Pica - which houses 600 inmates, including 40 women - declared themselves hostages Sunday while forcing the rest of the visitors to remain in the jail, which is under the control of prison gangs armed with knives, firearms and even grenades, according to witnesses.

"Most of the prisoners are armed and refuse to surrender, and the risk of violence is very high," said Juan Richard, a public prosecutor who visited the facility. "There are around 20 children with diarrhoea and vomiting," he added.

The director of Venezuela's penitentiary system, Ehrling Rojas, made an emergency visit to La Pica, where he began to negotiate the release of the children. "A large number of the visiting family members do not want to be in the prison, and are being held against their will," he reported.

Rojas did not rule out the possibility that the riot was triggered by "external factors.

He said authorities were investigating the fact that the hostage- taking coincided with the theft of weapons from a National Guard (militarised police) garrison near the Yare prison 30 km east of Caracas, where it was discovered last weekend that eight rifles, 16 submachine guns and several revolvers had been stolen.

Serving time in Yare on terrorism charges is Felipe Rodríguez, known as "El Cuervo" (The Crow), a fierce opponent of President Hugo Chávez.

But Minister of Justice and the Interior Jesse Chacón ruled out any link between El Cuervo and the theft of weapons, which he blamed on armed bands that hold up armoured trucks carrying money.

He also said some of the weapons were recovered in searches that have been carried out.

In the meantime, inmates in five different penitentiaries in this South American country have gone on hunger strikes, protesting the severely unsanitary and dangerous prison conditions, denials of parole by probation committees, and humiliations and abuses to which they say their visiting family members are subjected.

Prison "searches are useless if there is no system to classify prisoners, and the violence cannot be eradicated without work programmes, resocialisation and efforts to fight idleness and fill up prisoners' free time," said Humberto Prado, with the non- governmental Venezuelan Prison Observatory.

An average of four inmates die every three days in Venezuela's 32 penitentiaries, which hold a total of 19,400 prisoners.

In 2003, the last year for which complete statistics are available, 402 prisoners died - one every 22 hours - and 1,428 were injured, half of them by firearms, according to the Venezuelan Programme for Education and Action on Human Rights (PROVEA), a leading local NGO.

Prisoners "are killing each other, and the situation is extremely serious. Visitors have been killed, and the people who have been taken hostage in La Pica are in grave danger," Carlos Nieto, with another Venezuelan NGO, A Window to Freedom, told IPS.

Prado said "The violence could be defused if investigations were carried out to determine who is smuggling weapons into the prisons, or allowing them to be smuggled in, if the overcrowding were eased, and if the ever-unfulfilled promises of providing work opportunities to fight idleness were finally lived up to.

A presidential commission was set up in November 2004 in yet another attempt to overhaul Venezuela's prison system, "but the results of its work, and the impact on the prisons, have not been made public," said Nieto.

Among the reforms that authorities have focused on in recent years are the construction of new prisons to replace dilapidated facilities, speeding up the painfully slow pace of justice, and improving the process of selection and hiring of guards.

"It is inconceivable that 400 inmates a year are killed, compared to less than 20 a year in (neighbouring) Colombia, which has a prison population of 75,000," he added.

Even in a region where jail conditions are generally poor, Venezuela stands out for the high level of prison violence.

A 1997 report by the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch, "Punishment Before Trial: Prison Conditions in Venezuela", stated that "Although known for their overcrowding, physical decay, and corruption, Venezuela's prisons are most notorious for their extreme violence.

In an earlier interview, Prado had told IPS that "Riots, hunger strikes and self-inflicted cuts, fights and feuds, prison mafias, and even torture by guards are the main factors in deaths of people serving sentences or awaiting trial in the prisons.

When Rojas requested that the prisoners in La Pica free a sick child, they said they would do so in exchange for the release of one of the inmates.

The National Guard has stepped up security outside the prisons where inmates are rioting or holding hunger strikes, while civilian officials are negotiating supplies of water and food in La Pica and Vista Hermosa (a facility in southeastern Venezuela) in exchange for the release of hostages.

While the negotiations continue, the armed forces have not been sent into the prisons, in order to avoid clashes and probable bloodshed, reported the commanders of units that have been deployed around the jails. (END/2005)