37 risk of flight and procedural hindrance, and increasing applicable penalties; (b) the Law on Fighting Corruption, Illicit Enrichment, and Investigations of Wealth (“Marcelo 127 introduced as part of the State policy for combating Quiroga Santa Cruz Law”), corruption, and which establishes a direct relationship between Criminal Code offenses and corruption and illicit enrichment and creates eight new offenses with sentences to which measures other than pretrial detention seldom apply, allows for the retroactive 128 enforcement of criminal law in corruption cases, and introduces other provisions; and 129 (c) the Law Amending the Criminal Justice System, which adds an additional five factors for determining flight risk, expands the waiting period for requesting the termination of pretrial detention, and creates a regime for the immediate treatment of in flagrante offenses that includes a definition of those offenses that is too broad and unspecific in its temporal scope. In addition to these three laws, other amendments have recently been made to the criminal justice system, involving the creation and 130 modification of offenses and the stiffening of penalties. 85. Similarly, the Venezuelan Prisons Observatory (OVP) reported that Venezuela’s Organic Code of Criminal Procedure was amended on six occasions in the years 2000, 2001, 2006, 2008, 2009 and 2012, and that instead of resolving the problems in the administration of criminal justice, those reforms have increased the incarceration rate, which rose from 58.4 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2000 to 170 in 131 2011. 86. One of the key elements in this regional trend toward the heightened use of incarceration as a social control mechanism is the increased harshness of pretrial detention and its different mechanisms. The reforms have been largely justified by the perception among certain sectors that restricting this measure to exceptional cases implies impunity; or, as is often said in the discourse of penal populism, “creates a revolving door” through which criminals emerge only a short time after their arrest, or because it is believed that certain crimes, by reason of their seriousness or frequency, should immediately lead to the incarceration of the accused. The main factor is, however, a perception of public insecurity and mistrust of the justice system. As a 127 Plurinational State of Bolivia, Law 004 of March 4, 2010. 128 This statute also provides for the nonapplicability of statutory limitations in corruption offenses, aggravating factors for the penalties imposed in corruption-related offenses, the suspension of the statutory limitation deadline in criminal actions following a declaration of contempt, and the inadmissibility of conditional suspensions of sentence and judicial pardons in corruption cases (Art. 34). 129 Plurinational State of Bolivia, Law 007 of May 18, 2010. 130 Law against Racism and All Forms of Discrimination (Law 045 of October 8, 2010), Law for the Legal Protection of Children and Adolescents (Law 054 of November 8, 2010), Pensions Law (Law 065 of December 10, 2010), Law of Development and Border Security (Law 100 of April 4, 2011), Law against the Funding of Terrorism and Separatism (Law 170 of September 9, 2011), the Constitutional Procedural Code (Law 254 of July 5, 2012), Law on the Regime for Freezing the Funds and Other Assets of Persons with Ties to Terrorism and its Funding (Law 262 of July 31, 2012), Law on Trafficking in Human Lives (Law 263 of July 31, 2012), and Law on the National Citizen Security System (Law 264 of July 31, 2012). 131 Response to the questionnaire for the IACHR’s thematic Report on Pretrial Detention in the Americas, Venezuelan Prisons Observatory, October 2, 2012.