68 Die in Inferno at Venezuela Jail. Then Police Attack the Bereaved.

VALENCIA, Venezuela — It began as a jailhouse party. It ended in carnage.

On Thursday, grieving families collected their dead after one of the worst prison fires in the country’s history claimed the lives of 68 people. The relatives searched for answers, but also offered a chilling account of what they had learned so far: The fire began after gangs running a party in an overcrowded jail fought with the guards. A hostage was taken; a fire broke out.

Dozens perished in the smoke and flames, screaming for help.

Yet the pain didn’t end there. Witnesses said that grieving relatives who had come were sprayed with tear gas by security forces who tried to disperse them.

“I’ve been living here 55 years, and it’s the first time I’ve seen something like this,” said María, whose home is near the prison, and who refused to give her last name for fear of reprisals by the police for describing the tear-gassing.

The scenes were shocking, even in Venezuela, where tragedy has become the norm.

Grocery stores are short of food and hospitals are bereft of supplies as the country’s economic meltdown hastens. President Nicolás Maduro marches toward autocracy, isolating his country from humanitarian aid and keeping opponents in jail before a presidential election in May. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled the country, seeking lives in lands where there is more hope.

Yet the fire underlined the fate of a group for whom escape was never possible: The tens of thousands of Venezuelan prisoners neglected in overcrowded cells by the very government charged with their custody.

“Put in the wider context, this country has gone broke,” said Jeremy McDermott, the co-founder of Insight Crime, a research group that has investigated prison conditions in Venezuela. “In the list of priorities, people in jail cells are not on anyone’s radar besides their loved ones. This has been a disaster waiting to happen.”

On Thursday, Judith Coromoto García, 45, waited with two other women to identify her son’s body inside the police station attached to the jail’s holding cells, where she had been waiting since 10 a.m. Coromoto had made the two-hour journey on public buses with her mother. Police said the body of the son was still on the floor of the station.

Eventually, they let her in, and she stepped toward seven bodies covered in black plastic, she said. The police pointed to one of them.

“Here he is,” they said.

“That is not my son,” she responded, wincing at the stranger below her. The government, she realized, had failed once again.

While the fire was one of the worst to strike a Venezuelan jail, it was far from the first deadly chapter for its prison system.

In 2013, 61 people died in clashes at a prison in Barquisimeto. In 2011 and 2012, dozens were killed in a series of riots that took place in a complex outside the capital, Caracas — events that prompted Venezuela to create a ministry just to handle overcrowded prisons.

Inmates’ relatives said the fire started after authorities tried to break up a party overseen by gangs — known as pranatos — that rights groups say have long operated extortion rackets with impunity within prison walls.

On Wednesday, relatives said, wives and girlfriends of the inmates were permitted conjugal visits. The party got underway, and then the trouble started.

“The police wanted to get into the jail cells, they wanted to enter by force,” said Rosa Guzmán, 40, describing the account her sister-in-law gave.

Soon a prison guard was shot and taken hostage, relatives said. Inmates threatened to kill with him a grenade unless conditions were met. Family members said police set mattresses alight, and the fire turned the jail into an inferno. Emergency workers punched holes into the jail’s walls to let the smoke disperse and the inmates escape.

The events sparked outrage. How, people asked, had holding cells meant to house only 60 inmates been allowed to pack in more than 200? Why were Venezuela’s gangs, long known to rule the roost in the country’s prisons, allowed to host a celebration within a police station?

On Thursday, the United Nations human rights office criticized the attack on the relatives. The group, long critical of abuses it says have become typical in prisons, reproached the country once more for “widespread overcrowding and dire conditions” across Venezuela’s penal system and demanded an investigation.

“These conditions, which often give rise to violence and riots, are exacerbated by judicial delays and the excessive use of pretrial detention,” the human rights office said, while urging authorities to carry out an investigation and provide reparations to the victims’ families.

Henrique Capriles, an opposition leader who has been barred from holding public office, expressed his outrage on Twitter.

“How many more times are we going to see the same horrific scenes with the country’s prisoners?” Capriles asked. The deaths show the "failure of a government that is obliged to guarantee the lives of Venezuelans.”

Responding to the criticism, Rafael Lacava, the governor of the state of Carabobo, of which Valencia is the capital, defended the government Thursday, saying that “we are, before anything, a government which guarantees human rights.”

However, the governor, who is from Maduro’s ruling party, did suggest that wrongdoing might have occurred. He said that the state government was working with the attorney general to "hold those responsible to pay for the crimes committed, both in their actions and inactions.”

The overcrowding in Venezuela’s jails is staggering even by Latin American standards. In 2015, the most recent year for which reliable figures are available, 49,644 people were incarcerated in prisons designed to hold 19,000 inmates, Insight Crime reported last year. An additional 33,000 people were held in temporary holding cells built for 5,000, it said.

The inmates include everyone from convicted murderers to political prisoners of the government and protesters who were rounded up during demonstrations against Maduro last year and are being held in military jails.

More than 6,600 people died in the country’s prisons between 1999 and 2015, Human Rights Watch reported. Last year, a mass grave holding 15 bodies was found by construction workers at a prison in the state of Guárico. In 2014, officials said more than 30 were killed in a mass-poisoning of prisoners on a hunger strike. Roberto Briceño-León, the head of the Venezuelan Violence Observatory, a nongovernmental group, said Venezuela’s reliance on temporary holding cells to keep prisoners has caused its own problems.

He said in many police stations up to a third of officers are now guarding prisoners rather than policing the streets. The facilities are not built to house people for the long term, yet some inmates remain for years.

“I’m not just talking about having no place to go to the bathroom or to sleep — they don’t have anything to eat there,” said Briceño-León. Because of the shortages, he said, “the police themselves don’t have enough food to eat.”

At a funeral home near the jail, relatives awaited the arrival of bodies Thursday. One mother named Andrea, who did not give her last name because she feared reprisals by the police, waited to take home the remains of her son.

She could not contain her anger against the police.

“I want him to be at home, and then I want to bury him properly, not like a dog,” she said. “They treated him like a dog. I lost a part of me”.

Back at the police station, the mother of Carlos Sánchez, one of the deceased, waited for word on her son. When officials called her, she knew the bad news had come. She repeated Sánchez’s name over and over.

“Carlos Sánchez?” a policewoman shouted.

A woman immediately raised her hand and yelled, “I’m his mother, yes.”

“He died,” the policewoman said.

The policewoman who delivered the news recited some names of inmates who had survived the fire and then shouted: “Look, I haven’t had any breakfast, so let’s calm down. These are the names I have, that’s it.”

Sánchez’s mother hugged her daughter and the two eventually fell to the floor, crying and asking God to hear their prayers.

Yet amid the grief, some prayers were being answered that day.

García, who had taken the bus to the jail only to have police take her to identify the body of someone who wasn’t her son, went looking for him in the jail, before ending up in an area that prisoners call “El Tigrito,” or the Little Tiger.

There, crowded with 20 other men, was her son.

“I could feel my soul coming back to my body,” she said.

Her son told her about what had happened.

“Everyone was shouting asking for help,” she recalled him saying. “Mom, that was ugly.”

The family celebrated his being alive. But there was no escape from the dangers: He remains in jail, locked up for the last two years after stealing a cellphone.

Like other survivors from the jail, he is still awaiting his trial.