Spiritual Life and the Rationalization of Violence: The State Within the State and the Evangelical order in a Venezuelan Prison

• In Event: Precariedad y mundos carcelarios en América Latina I (Venezuela y Bolivia)

Abstract

On August 20th 2012, a clash between two prison gangs left 25 dead and 43 wounded inside the Yare I prison complex, one of the most notorious prisons in Venezuela. Behind this riot is the story of the transformation of religious structures inside Yare, including their relationship to other forces that govern the prison from within. It is my theory that in Yare, a social order has emerged from the utter lack of administration of justice on behalf of the State, which in turn has created an autonomous order where evangelicals function as a branch of a secular (inmate) power that delegates certain forms of punishment to the “church”.

Drawing from a two-year ethnographic fieldwork and elements from sociological and political theory, this paper offers an account of the significant changes in prison religious life in the last decade, suggesting the existence of a complex political rationale regulating violence. The paper is based on extensive interviews with pastor-inmates and other evangelical figures inside and outside of prison, who have granted me unprecedented access in order to map the social structures and practices pertaining to the spiritual life of inmates, while simultaneously revealing power structures in a precarious penal system. As such, this paper describes the emerging social structures of a prison where a “State-outside-the-State” emerges to rationalize social structures administering force and violence.

Author

• Luis Duno-Gottberg, Rice University