ON THE outside, the San Antonio prison on Margarita Island looks like any other Venezuelan penitentiary. Soldiers in green fatigues stand at its gates. Sharpshooters squint from watchtowers. Guards cast menacing glances at visitors before searching them at the entrance.
But once inside, the prison for more than 2000 Venezuelans and foreigners, held largely for drug trafficking, looks more like a Hugh Hefner-inspired fleshpot than a stockade for toughened smugglers.
Bikini-clad female visitors frolic under the Caribbean sun in an outdoor pool. Marijuana smoke flavours the air. Reggaeton booms from a club filled with grinding couples. Paintings of the Playboy logo adorn the pool hall. Inmates and their guests jostle to place bets at the prison's raucous cockfighting arena.
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Jesus Guevara with his girlfriend Claudia Brito at the San Antonio prison. Photo: The New York Times
''The Venezuelan prisoners here run the show, and that makes life inside a bit easier for us all,'' said Fernando Acosta, 58, a Mexican pilot jailed since 2007. His cell mate, a Congolese businessman, had hired him to fly a Gulfstream jet that prosecutors accuse them of planning to use for smuggling cocaine to West Africa.
It is not uncommon for armed inmates to exercise a certain degree of autonomy in Venezuela's prisons. Prisoners with BlackBerrys and laptops have arranged drug deals, abductions and murders from their cells, police say, a legacy of decades of overcrowding, corruption and insufficient guards.
But San Antonio prison, renowned on Margarita Island as a relatively tranquil place where even visitors can go for sinful weekend partying, is in a class of its own.
Some inmates walk the prison grounds grasping assault rifles.
''I was in the army for 10 years; I've played with guns all my life,'' said Paul Makin, 33, a Briton arrested in Porlamar for cocaine smuggling in 2009. ''I've seen some guns in here that I've never seen before.''
Inmates say they owe their unusual privileges to fellow prisoner Teofilo Rodriguez, 40, a drug trafficker who controls the arsenal that awes Makin. Rodriguez is the inmates' leader - a ''pran'' as alpha prisoners are called. He also goes by the moniker ''El Conejo'' (The Rabbit), which explains the proliferation of the pran's trademark throughout the prison: paintings of the Playboy logo.
Venezuela's government recognises the problems within its prisons, where fighting between gangs controlled by prans like Rodriguez contributes to a high number of killings. Human rights researchers found that 476 prisoners - about 1 per cent of the prison population of 44,520 - were killed last year alone.
''The state has lost control of the prisons in Venezuela,'' said Carlos Nieto, director of Window to Freedom, which documents rights violations in the prisons.
At weekends, the ambience inside, bursting with spouses, romantic partners and some who simply show up looking for diversion, almost resembles the island's beach resorts.
Prisoners barbecue meat while sipping whisky poolside. In some cells, equipped with air conditioning and TV satellite dishes, inmates relax with wives or girlfriends. The children of some inmates swim in one of the prison's four pools.
Prisoners boast that they built these perks themselves, with their own money. And while San Antonio can hardly be considered safe - a grenade attack in the infirmary killed seven last year - the inmates argue that compared with other Venezuelan jails, peace often prevails here.
''Our prison is a model institution,'' said Ivan Penalver, 33, a convicted murderer who preaches at the prison's evangelical Christian church.
In parts of the prison, there is even something approaching everyday life.
''I find it hard to explain what life is like in here,'' said Nadezhda Klinaeva, 32, a Russian serving a drug trafficking sentence in the women's annex. ''This is the strangest place I've ever been.''
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