Replacing gang violence with rugby in Venezuela
Twickenham Stadium recently hosted visitors from The Alcatraz Project, founded by Santa Teresa Rum, Venezuela’s oldest and one of the few surviving privately owned businesses.
Twickenham Stadium recently hosted visitors from The Alcatraz Project, founded by Santa Teresa Rum, Venezuela’s oldest and one of the few surviving privately owned businesses.
Unrest in Venezuela has seen gang warfare, lawlessness and violence, and the hacienda on which the distillery was based was repeatedly coming under attack. When some of the perpetrators were caught, the distillery owners decided that, rather than handing them over for likely execution, they would start a programme using the values of rugby. By training these men, they hoped to offer some stability and ultimately employment prospects.
No fewer than eight national team players in Venezuela began playing rugby via the Alcatraz Project and the recent visit was the first time that any of them had set foot on the pitch at Twickenham, which was an emotional experience. They presented the stadium with a Venezuelan national rugby shirt, Alberto Vollmer, who heads the project, handed it over to be displayed in the World Rugby Museum.
Over the years, Project Alcatraz has helped achieve a 90% reduction in the homicide rate in Revenga, in a decade, also helping to put paid to 11 criminal gangs without the use of violence, and recruiting over 200 young men. Internationally, the project has received more than 10 awards for its work and has served as a case of study in universities like Harvard.
Another route for reintegration into society is the Penitentiary Rugby Programme, an initiative that started in 2013 using rugby, its values and psychological support as a tool to help more than 1,000 prisoners in 36 prisons, including 22 male and 14 female prisons. This project was also introduced in Spain in 2023 with the inmates in a Madrid prison playing rugby and following Alcatraz values. After the party’s Twickenham visit, they travelled on to meet representatives of the Spanish Government in Madrid.
Among the RFU hosts were Community Relations Officer, Chris Donnelly, Nick Langley, Public Affairs and International Relations Manager, Luciano Dodero from Twickenham Experience and Carmen Reguiera from Finance, the latter two being Spanish-speaking.
Carmen said: “We heard from one of the project members who now works for the Venezuela rugby team, whose father was one of the original criminals involved. It was amazing, an eye opener to the danger they lived in, but also the way this scheme has helped to take people out of crime and reduced homicides in the hacienda from 167 per thousand to six per thousand “
Lord Addington (Chairman of Commons & Lords Rugby) was also there and presented the Venezuelan visitors with a wooden shield, carved by prisoners on the Isle of Wight, where a training programme is running. Inspector Jon McLoughlin of the Metropolitan Police also discussed the community projects that the RFU undertakes in the area alongside the Safer Neighbourhoods Teams.
