-Nosotros no humillamos a ningún hombre. Preferimos matarlo –dice Wilmer José Brizuela Vera.
-And what other things do to those who disobey the rules that you have imposed, Wilmito?
Before giving the answer, it stretches in the plastic chair.She breathes deeply, raises her arms and the belly inflates and while the air is slowly lowered by her thick hands to posing them on the square table.It is Wednesday, April 30, 2014 and we are in the common areas of the Minimum of Tocuyito, the penalty located on the outskirts of the city of Valencia, the third most important in Venezuela, capital of the state of Carabobo, where Wilmer José Brizuela Vera Vera, The Goldo, as he also calls his trusted people, has been transferred after a riot in the other penalprisoners he had led for eight years.When he finally places his fingers on the surface of the table, he says:
-We don't give them shots on the back, but where I hit them.I am not all day giving orders.People die in jail for the imposed routine.So you don't want, unfortunately you have to comply with the rules.
And these are the rules.
***
It is Monday, December 16, 2013 and I go to the Ciudad Bolívar prison to visit Brizuela, the maximum leader of the prison.Outside the prison nobody knows him as Wilmer, but as Wilmito.
I have asked the taxi driver to leave me three blocks from the prison, at the corner of San Francisco Avenue, in front of a Romar commercial store. Bicycles with wicker baskets in front of the handlebar form two symmetrical rows at the entrance. At three in the afternoon there are no customers inside the premises. No one walks on the side of the front and the cars circulate with polarized glass and the air conditioning on. Ciudad Bolívar is at this time an aluminum plate on which a gelatinous sun is reflected. Only those who need or obligation walk at that time through the lonely streets that surround one of the most dangerous penalties in the country. Vista Hermosa, the sector where it is located, does not honor its name. It is actually a middle class property coming unless, composed of broken streets and houses of one or two floors, with platabanda roofs, high and pointed gates and chipped walls. Many of the homes that rise on the side of the street that lead to the prison do not receive a hand of paint. When in the sixties of the twentieth century the city expanded from the banks of the Orinoco River, this urbanization, as the middle class sectors in Venezuela - call against the popular class neighborhoods - became the preferred site of The new families. The rapid growth of the sector ended up surrounding the prison, built years before, in 1951, in that area far removed from the historic center.
They were, of course, other times. The State maintained control of prisons and it was inconceivable that an inmate had an AR-15 rifle, 9 mm guns or a trimmed shotgun. Today, as it has rained for several days, the holes in the streets are overflowed with pestilent waters. The vehicles reduce the march not to burst the front train. The sidewalks are raised and the homes that are on the sidewalk contrary to that of the prison have their stoopy facades. These neighbors live in front of a place where shots are heard every day and where the prisoners every so often throw men sewn by bullets, as happened in August 2011, when Marlon Guevara left at the door, after a Right for prison control. The main gate of the prison, green, where I will enter within minutes, is also stoking, although today it is not a set for visits. But that does not matter. The prisoners decide who enters and when he can do it. While we fixed our first appointment, Wilmito told me on the phone: "You get to the entrance door and from there call me to send it to look."
Minutes later, blows are heard on the green gate.A guard approaches, opens a tiny door and I see the head of a young man.Although at that time I do not know him, with the months I will know that he is called Juan Carlos Hernández, and he is one of Wilmito's trusted people.The man looks to the left, then to the right, until he looks at him in me.
-Do you are looking for Wilmer?
"Yes," I
"He comes with the boss," says Juan Carlos Hernández, addressing the guards.
One of the officers leaves the conversation he had with his colleagues and heads to a romas corner iron table that completes the scenery of La Garita.There is hardly any space to place your hands because everything is occupied by a file that contains, alphabetically ordered, the identity cards of the visitors.I give my document and he in turn extends a card that identifies me.He walked to the gate and, before entering, he shakes Juan Carlos's hand.And this is how I reach a state within another state: a state that Wilmer José Brizuela Vera, Wilmito, the most feared Pran in Venezuela, has dominated with a strong hand for eight years.
***
A Pran is the leader of the inmates.It is a term coined in prison jargon and arrived in Venezuela from Puerto Rico.Apart from these inaccuracies, yes, as a very musical and easy to remember name for inmates and street people.Who mentions that word- "Pran"- in front of others knows that they will understand it because it refers, even in the extended field of Caribbean guasa, to the person who has the power.
Those who arrive at the prison led by Wilmito enter a territory without rules where the only necessary commandment to survive is not to demonstrate that the other is feared and adapt in the best way to the unexpected.
The Ciudad Bolívar prison rises in an immense land.The administrative area is separated from the pavilions where prisoners live, which can be seen from the window where I now look.The sun begins to wear and the penalty acquires an ocher tone, reinforced by the peach color of the painting of the walls.On the main facade of the pavilions of the prisoners there are two painted faces.On the right, Nelson Mandela.On the left, Wilmito.The two images are locked in an oval that distanced the windows of an airplane.Next to Mandela's face there is a phrase: "You cannot judge a nation for the way that treats its most illustrious citizens, but by the treatment provided to the most marginalized, their prisoners."And next to Wilmito: "Don't let four walls steal your smile."While I point those phrases in my notebook, someone approaches me on the side.It is Wilmito, who stands in front of me and extends my hand.
-Are you going to stay tonight?Because if so, we fix a room.
***
Wilmer José Brizuela Vera was born in Ciudad Bolívar on March 20, 1982. You should not get carried away by the impression caused by the photos that it frequently hangs on its Facebook profile.Sometimes he is fatter, sometimes less, so it is not easy to recognize it in the first view.In December 2013, when I first saw him, he weighed 93 kilos, and he is not a tall man: he measures a meter sixty -five.He walks with the semi -absert legs, one foot pointing to one side, the other towards the other.Sometimes, when he uses cholas, he drags his feet, but he is an agile man and precious to be a great lover."My only vice is women," he usually says.
For prisoners, anyway, these games are a party.Watched by the National Guard, which is bet in the entrances and exits of the stands and surrounds each stadium point, the baseball game is the excuse to meet their family and children in the stands.Vidalina knows well.It is also the way she has to support that kind of government program that her child repeats the journalists who have visited him, and that could be summarized in four commandments: nothing to walk in the no halls, we must respectFamily members visiting the prison, do not steal from colleagues and some sport must be practiced.Perhaps for that reason, the prisoners take these championships as if it were a professional tournament.
***
Being still a child, Wilmito began to practice boxing although his mother opposed.The head of that passion was his grandfather Cándido Vera, a former boxer and professional fighter, with whom he watched the boxing programs that television broadcast- the historical fights of Ray Sugar Leonard with Marvin Hagler or Tommy Hearns- in the eighties.One day, while looking at one of those fights, Wilmito told him that he wanted to learn.
"You're fucking me," the grandfather replied.
"No," Wilmer replied.
The grandfather got up from the chair and put himself in combat position: the bent legs, the elbows attached to the ribs, the steps forward and back, one, two, one, two.From then on, and more or less improvised and rustic, the grandfather trained the grandson in the principles of boxing.Five months later, Wilmito asked to enroll in an academy.He was 13 years old.Ciudad Bolívar then had two world champions- the brothers Ernesto and Crisanto Spain- who attributed the power of their fists to the mangoes they ate and a legendary school, the Boris Planchart gym, directed by coach Ángel Salaverría.Cándido Vera took an afternoon.Salaverría and Vera greeted themselves without special deference.When Vera told him the reason for the visit, Salaverría faced Wilmito, and held a brief dialogue:
-You want to learn?
-Yes.
-Do you want to be someone?
-Yes.
The coach was silent, looking into his eyes.Then, he told him a phrase that today, almost twenty years later, Wilmito is able to recite by heart: "You need to have a warrior heart, an eagle view and steel fists."
In boxing, Wilmito had talent and desire, but he lacked physical preparation. Ángel Salaverría, who died two years ago, polished those first lessons of Grandfather Cándido Vera. Wilmer arrived from school at one in the afternoon, collected a bag with a silent clothing and a water pimpina, and went by bus to the gym, where he spent four hours training until, defeated by fatigue, he returned home to Eating and sleeping. He was then enrolled in the Ernesto Sifontes Lyceum, he was in high school and was a very thin boy, of just 48 kilos. At age 14, when his coach decided that he was ready to debut in the fly category, he did not stand out by the force of his glue. But Salaverría was struck by the tranquility of his disciple. Flattened, almost inexpressive, Wilmito did not seem to be altered when they hit him. Over time, he learned to anticipate the rival's movements to dodge them. Many years later, boxing would serve to keep calm in the midst of very complex situations: how to face the theft of a bank without altering when the plan does not work as you had designed, without being able to anticipate the reactions of the other, which Is it as terrified as you?
In that first fight he faced Luis Palma, whom he won by decision of the judges. Professor Salaverría took that fray as the beginning of the career of a champion who had to chisel his patience. Wilmito saw in those years Marvin Hagler's videos, a legendary average weight champion who never stopped hitting. What would happen if he, then was a little thing, a sparrow of laundry without wings, the only and poor son of a waitress, became a new world boxing champion, like Hagler? Of the following 280 fights, he only lost three: with Gilmer Pino, José Rincón and Patrick López, a gold medalist at the 2003 Pan American Games held in the Dominican Republic. Until today Wilmito remembers them with a name and surname, and not because he has not yet assimilated the defeat, but because Patrick López came to where he would have wanted: the Olympic Games. Wilmer only lacked that step to crown a successful progression: he won the golden medal at the National Youth Games of 1997 and participated, in 1999 and 2000, of the International Battle Tournament of Carabobo, the most important event of amateur pugilism in Venezuela.
***
As president of the Criminal Judicial Circuit, Mariela Casado ratified in 2007 the first ruling of the local courts, published in October 2006, against Wilmito: ten years in prison for kidnapping Abboud.It was not the first time they saw each other, nor would it be the last one.They had met in the Vista Hermosa prison when she just premiered in her position and he was just beginning to emerge as a leader.She visited the prison to know the demands of the prisoners and he was the one who transmitted the requests.With how little they talked, Casado developed the profile of a cunning, amoral and sinister man, much more easily to express that the rest of her classmates.Several of the prisoners who went to court confirmed his presumptions when, in the recess of the hearings, he was entrusted to survive within the prison, the weekly tax had to be obeyed and paying without fail.
***
It is already night, but the music, deafening, continues.Now it is almost eight and Wilmito reiterates the invitation:
-If you want you can fall to sleep.I fix a room and tomorrow we continue.
But I don't accept staying, because I'm afraid.
The man delivers the weapon and leaves, kicking the air.During my first visit I had seen several men about the platabanda of the pavilions, but I assumed that up there, while the afternoon fell, they were distracted seeing towards the horizon, or looked for the fresh breeze that, at the asphalt level, barely feels.But not.Those inmates who transgress the rules imposed by the Pran are punished for days.And they can't go down until they are authorized.
Wilmito finishes playing and walks towards us.One of the bodyguards offers you a chair.He almost throws himself on her in the effort to recover the normal pace of the pulsations.He looks quite tired.A few minutes later, he invites me to go to his room.
"That scene that you presencies, of the boy who stole her cell phone, is one of the ways we have to impose the discipline," he says, once we settle in the room.
-But here in Vista Hermosa worse things happened?
-As which?–Wilmito asks, reclining in a plastic chair.
The sweat shirt rests on the seat back.
***
On December 28, 2009, at lunchtime, Wilmito collapsed between bite and bite.He had just bothered with an inmate who "had eaten a light."That expression means in prison jargon a lack of the rules imposed by the inmates and is worthy of a punishment proportional to that "crime."Wilmito was transferred to the Santa Ana Polyclinic of Ciudad Bolívar, and would wake up again twelve days later, lying in a bed and wondering what had happened to him.He had uploaded blood pressure with sufficient power to generate a cerebral edema that with the days was giving in the basis of diuretic and steroid injections.
Advised by his lawyers, Wilmito identified in that mishap the opportunity to ask the court to fulfill the rest of the penalty at home. To the brief that reasoned the petition added a medical report that certified the sufferings of it- a high blood pressure and alterations in the values of the triglycerides and the cholesterol- and presented it with the formalities due so that the audience would even be held in their bed of sick Everyone assumed that the favorable decision was a fact but it was not so. Warned by the doctors of the clinic, Judge Mariela Casado knew that Wilmito could return to jail without major inconveniences. As a governing magistrate, she asked the judge of first instance to be the case for the lack of decision. It had been a month since the fainting and Wilmito was the usual. He did and undone. He had the keys to his room, entered and left the clinic, and his relatives had stayed in the next room to accompany him. Was it possible for a prisoner to use the clinic as a hotel? Mariela Casado was wondering.
With those evidence, and perhaps with the silent pressure of Mariela Casado, the judge of the case decided that Wilmito's days as a patient had ended.He had to return to jail.
***
Judging for what Wilmito came later, he did not receive the news in a good way and warmed a revenge in two acts.The first began on Saturday, January 30, 2010, when he took a window from his room in the clinic, broke the bars and won the street with the apparent complicity of the police picket that protect him, according to the story contained in thecase files.
At the clinic the doctors knew another version.It was impossible for a man of those dimensions to escape through a window.Wilmito had come to watch on television the last game of the final series of the Venezuelan Professional Baseball League between the Lions of Caracas and the Magellan Navigators, a sporting event that paralyzes the country.These are the two teams with more followers and Wilmito, a follower of Caracas, who obtained the title that night, was among those absorbed fans.In the joy of the celebration the Pran fell asleep and did not return to his room.
When the police warned their absence, it began an almost frantic search.On February 2 they emptied a house where they assumed that he was hidden.They did not find it.They found, yes, three men and seized, according to the press, 700 7,62 caliber ammunition for a light automatic rifle.The fence narrowed so much until on February 4 Wilmito was delivered in Caracas, in a scientific police office.He had traveled 600 kilometers from Ciudad Bolívar because he believed that only in the capital of Venezuela could repair the injustice that, he believed, Judge Casado had committed against him by preventing a favorable decision.He had raised his case to Lina Ron, a government activist with solid links with President Chávez, who took him with the then director of the Scientific Police, Wilmer Flores Trossel.
Wilmito did not return to Vista Hermosa. A few days later he was transferred to the minimum of Tocuyito- the penalty where he is now- and added to his file the attempt to escape from the clinic. He had insured not only a new trial, but an increase in conviction. Far from his family and the power he had accumulated, Wilmito began to gain weight and suffer perhaps as never before inside a prison. His family, meanwhile, denounced in the local media the sufferings of him and the bad will of the married judge as the highest judicial authority by not wanting to recognize them. Two months later he returned to Ciudad Bolívar to be tried for the attempt to escape. Judge Roberto Delgado ratified in April 2010 that he had to return to the Tocuyito prison after the first hearing. A sheriff who was present told me the reaction of him when he heard the ruling. Wilmito was enraged and launched curses to everyone present in the room. “She is the culprit. Mariela Casado is guilty of this, ”he shouted. Since then, he began to plan the way of revenge on her.
***
Mariela Casado wanted to return to Valencia, where she was from.She had spent a long time facing a hostile environment that did not allow her to work comfortably.Her relatives had confessed that she didn't feel a free woman.Half of her freedom, she told, she had lost her when she received a lawyer and the other half of her was slowly losing her in her stony professional practice of her.
Wilmito's imprecations added another reason to the desire to leave the city.He was not the first threat he received, it is true, but he had already lost the strength that for five years led her to endure the pressures.He recalled how, between 2005 and 2010, he had decided to refrain from knowing any cause related to him to avoid torture to deal with Vidalina, the mother of Pran, and Maria, the grandmother, who always passed through the courts to demand anything:from alternative measures to confinement to fulfill the penalty or return of Wilmito to his city of origin.
Mariela Casado took, yes, to leave those threats in a complaint filed before the Bolivar State Prosecutor's Office.Today her relatives think that thanks to that eagerness to document everything of her, the way to resolve the crime that moved her from the country was cleared.On June 6, 2007, as stated in her file, she had revealed that in several messages sent to her cell phones she was threatened with death.Two of them said: “Wilmel (sic), you have to fuck that Mariela Casado, the judge of Ciudad Bolívar.I already walked the robbery (...) Still it. ”And another: “The Panas (friends) went to jail to visit Wilmito and he square everything.Fly (slope), tell the face of a mouse. ”
To her, however, it did not seem that Brizuela could be the author of that message.In fact, in 2007 she had fired several secretaries and sheriffs of the courts and any of them had even more reasons to threaten her.And Wilmito himself was responsible for calling her to clarify how he came shortly after she received those threats.Mariela Casado told a close friend, who in turn agreed to reveal this as long as she kept her identity secret, what the Pran then told her: "Doctor, I do not threaten, I act."
He didn't have to doubt his word.When on March 23, 2007, the local press released the murder of four men who had a few hours inside the prison, Wilmito called her to confirm the corridos that were heard on the street: “Over there they are saying that I killed those boys.I want you to know that I did kill them in retaliation for the death of a cousin, whom they murdered. ”He had warned the judge before his victims reached prison."They don't go alive here."And he fulfilled.The press said that one of the victims was tortured and mutilated.Wilmito's men placed their eyes and head inside glass containers.
Wilmito does not threaten.Wilmito acts.
***
The prisoners began to kill themselves for the control of the Vista Hermosa prison after Wilmito's decline. In February 2010 he assumed the control Ausberto Medrano, aka criminal child, who was part of his clan. During his leadership Frank Viamonte died, after a touch between inmates, and Ronny Rodríguez and Wilber Hernández, half an hour after having entered the prison. Criminal child escaped on October 19, 2010 and was killed by the police in a confrontation a month later. He then took control Pata’e Loro, with whom he followed the death of deaths. Eleven days after his coronation, on October 30, Miguel José Bolívar Solís, Roger Ernesto Requena García, José Wilfredo Bejarano Vargas and two other unidentified inmates, in the middle of a mutiny for the control of Vista Hermosa. And months later the government of Marlon Alirio Guevara- who in turn had replaced Pata’e Loro, transferred to another penalty- culminated tragically, riddled with more than 20 bullet impacts.
***
Mariela Casado felt that a man was following her every time she returned home from the Bolivarian University of Venezuela, an institution created by Commander Chávez to expand the educational offer.It was the month of April 2010 and the governing judge complied with some reluctance with one of the last commitments in Ciudad Bolívar.
I had reasons to feel that everyone looked at her. Although she, paradoxically, she did not fear an attack on her, she took some forecasts. She didn't always use the same vehicle, for example. Not only were Wilmito's direct signs. She then recalled that between April and December 2009 she had received text messages on her almost elegiac cell phone, which prefigured her current situation. On April 14 she wrote this: "Days will come in that justice prevails, for the moments she still has time to reconsider, take care of it." And a day later she came the following: “My steps will bathe with the blood of the wicked. There is a God who claims the righteous and is doing justice on earth. ” She three days later she read more explicit threats: “I write and erase, I look and find it elements of her to save her. I have already used everything that helped me prevent her departure. ” And then: "I could be wrong as you were wrong, Mariela, however I am fair and you must leave."
His body began to somatize all his anguish towards the beginning of June, with atrocious stitches in the belly.Without time to waste her Maria Gabriela's sister, she set an appointment with a doctor in Valencia for June.Mariela Casado doubted for a moment.To absent from the city she had to obtain permission from her superiors in Caracas.Someone should also take care of looking and bringing her school to school.Her sister tells him then:
-Anda.I look for the boys at school.
***
On June 14, 2010, Manuel Gutiérrez, sports coach of Edelca, the Electric Company of the State of Bolívar, is heading towards the house of his youngest son Christian driving a white truck, Jeep brand, Model Gran Cherokee.It's half past eight at night.Manuel lives in Puerto Ordaz, the second most important city in the Bolívar state, and the Venezuelan iron and aluminum development pole.In the trunk he has 150 tennis balls, three rackets, other sports implements and a guitar.
Christian leaves just listens to the horn of the truck with his sister Yenibel and entertain themselves by talking on the sidewalk.A cry of Yenibel interrupts the conversation.Two armed men, who had come down from a Fiat Siena, point to the group, separate them and ask Manuel to the keys to the truck.
Marlon Medina, Moreno, Peliteñido, is one of the robbers and who now drives the vehicle that goes back to Ciudad Bolívar.He feels happy because he will soon have 5,000 bolivars in his pocket that had offered Alias El Pucho, the head of the operation, for looking for the truck that the pattern needs.The patron also tells the Goldo Wilmer- so, with an intercalated element- or Wilmito.The employer is determined to kill Judge Mariela married in four more days and for the mission he has commissioned a car.
***
At half past eleven on Thursday, June 18, the Pucho, whose real name is Luis Ramón Acosta, is summoned by aka the blind in the parking lot of Bingo Calypso.The blind is the great coordinator of the operation that is about to begin, and remains in contact with Wilmito by telephone, according to the voluminous accusation that prosecutors wrote to impute the crime they would soon commit.
Upon arriving, the Pucho greets two other people whom he only knows for his nicknames: the girl and the minor.
"Let's kill a lady," says the blind man.
The blind man asks El Pucho to drive the Cherokee truck and take these two people as companions.He, meanwhile, goes up to another vehicle that he will make of Lazarillo to drive them to the site where the girl, whose real name is Edgar Silva Rondón, will come down from the vehicle and meet the order.
At half past twelve at noon Professor María Gabriela Casado lights her Toyota Yaris Color Negro, that sometimes her sister uses to move to the Bolivarian University of Venezuela, and drives to Nuestra Señora de las Nieves school, located at the crossroadsof Jesús Soto and Táchira avenues.It is a strategic site because it is located in front of the airport and is one of the express roads that leads to the departure of Ciudad Bolívar.Noon traffic is dense because at that time everyone is looking for their children.At 12:45 she leaves her with her nephews and stops in a fast food restaurant to buy lunch.It wouldn't take long there.Shortly after one they get home.The boys get out of the car and run to play the bell so that the grandfather, Héctor Casado, opens the door.When one spends a lot of time exposed to the wet heat of Ciudad Bolívar only causes him to run and place in front of an air conditioning duct.
The red box is forgotten in the car, full of fried papites, with a yellow -painted letter on one of the faces.Before entering the house, María Gabriela Casado serves a neighbor, named Pedro Pérez, who comes to give her good news.It is a matter of days to fix a sewage boat that is affecting both her house and the residence of the married family.Almost at the same time that this conversation occurs, the blind man called the girl.
-This is the woman.
***
Wilmito does not threaten, Wilmito complies.
Two days after my second visit to the Vista Hermosa prison, on Thursday, January 9, 2014, Wilmito attends the penultimate audience of the long trial followed by the murder of Professor María Gabriela Casado.I remember that he spoke on the phone to coordinate the transfer to Valencia on a bus, where the trial was filed.Some would wear roasted meat.Others, the drink.The definitive conviction arrives three weeks later: 14 years and ten months as an accomplice not necessary in aggravated robbery of the automotive vehicle, sicariato and association to commit crimes.El Pucho corresponded 16 years and ten days.
Before leaving for that view I asked Wilmito for Dr. Casado.We are in his room with the air conditioning on at its maximum speed.When he listens to questions away from the script of the character he is building, the Pran stretches and takes his time.It is a necessary pause to prepare answers adjusted to the image of the leader he wishes to project.On this occasion, however, he seems slightly annoying.Without raising his voice, as if he suddenly felt the need to demonstrate without poses who he is, he responds to me with the first idea that comes to mind.
-If I would have wanted to kill Mariela Casado, I would have done it.I am not mistaken.I knew where she washed her clothes, when she was traveling to Caracas.Many times they called me from her when they had her in front of her to ask me what they did with her.And I never acted against her.I decided to admit my responsibility for the relevance of the case and because I had the lost fight against the most powerful judge of the Bolívar state.
After the murder of his sister, Mariela Casado left Venezuela with an unknown direction and with the imperative objective of forgetting that she once exercised as a lawyer and judge.Her relatives are prohibited from revealing where she is for fear, now, to make an attack.
