CARACAS: A northwestern Venezuelan prison was evacuated on Friday after a violent brawl left 16 people dead, authorities said.
"We completed the evacuation of Maracaibo National Prison with joy, hope, support and recognition from the people of Zulia," Prisons Minister Iris Varela wrote on Twitter.
The process began on Wednesday after Monday's bloody clashes at the facility also known as Sabaneta jail in Maracaibo.
Local news reports gave gruesome details of the state of the bodies following the confrontation, which lasted several hours. Some of the bodies were said to have been dismembered.
Authorities evacuated about 3,700 prisoners from the overflowing jail -- its official capacity was just 750. They also evacuated more than 200 relatives, including 56 children, who were visiting when the violence took place.
The inmates were transferred to nearby detention facilities, according to local media.
Since 2011, Caracas has implemented a plan to "humanize prisons" by improving prisoners' living conditions, disarming them and expediting their trials, policies that have continued under late president Hugo Chavez's successor Nicolas Maduro.
But Venezuelan prisons still face episodes of violence and are often controlled by heavily armed gangs of prisoners.
The overcrowded prisons also suffer from problems of poor sanitation. Although the jails have an infrastructure built to hold only 14,000 inmates, it supports about 50,000, government figures show.
According to the Venezuelan Prison Observatory, 591 inmates died in the country's 34 jails last year while another 1,132 were injured. That compares to 560 deaths and 1,457 injured in 2011.
A riot in the country's Uribana prison in January claimed 58 lives, including that of a priest.
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