What Will Become of Venezuela’s Political Prisoners?
El Helicoide, a brutalist hilltop compound in central Caracas, is known as one of Latin America’s most notorious detention centers. Built as a shopping mall in the 1950s, the structure was taken over by Venezuela’s national intelligence services, who transformed its abandoned storefronts and toilets into makeshift prison cells.
Early Saturday afternoon, hours after Nicolás Maduro was captured by U.S. forces, Amanda Monasterios fled to El Helicoide. His son, Jesús Armas, a prominent opposition leader, was among the political prisoners held inside. Monasterios, seventy-four years old, looks at the strangely deserted streets of the capital: caraqueños had woken up in a bombed town, where people had been called to start the lucha armada. She arrived in El Helicoide and found that armed men had cordoned off the area. Patrol cars guarded the entrance and there was no way to approach the prison. “It was like the entire national police force was guarding the area,” she said.
His son had been in detention for just over a year, during which time Monasterios had only been allowed to see him occasionally. Holding a bag of homemade food, she was ready to get out of her car and look for a way into El Helicoide, but a companion advised her not to do so. “Don’t do it,” the person implored her. “We will come back on Wednesday.”
An engineer by training, Armas made a foray into politics as a student and was later elected as a Caracas city councilor. He has worked to address the city’s crumbling infrastructure, but it is his work in the 2024 general election that has caught the regime’s attention. After authorities banned María Corina Machado, the opposition leader, from entering the race, she appointed a retired diplomat named Edmundo González to run in her place. Armas helped run González’s campaign in the capital.
The election was mired in fraud: Armas, with others, mobilized hundreds of volunteers to observe the vote and keep printed tallies from each voting machine. As the polls closed, Maduro was quick to declare victory – a claim the opposition forcefully disputed, demonstrating that González had won a landslide victory. The regime has never released a complete vote count. Instead, authorities engaged in a vicious crusade to suppress anyone who dared challenge the result.
On the morning of December 10, 2024, Armas was kidnapped from a cafeteria in eastern Caracas. It took nearly a week – and a sustained public campaign – to find him. Saimar Rivas, Armas’ partner and longtime civil rights activist, told me he was taken to a clandestine site run by the SEBINthe Venezuelan intelligence agency. “There he was tortured, asphyxiated with plastic bags and questioned about the fate of Edmundo, María Corina and other opposition leaders,” Rivas said. “They offered him the opportunity to become an informant, but he refused.”
There followed a ten-month period of isolation in El Helicoide, where Armas was not allowed any visitors. He became one of approximately two thousand Venezuelans detained following the elections; many of them are still behind bars today. “All leaders involved in the elections are either in detention, in exile, or in hiding,” Rivas said.
From the start, Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against Maduro raised many questions about the fate of Venezuelan political prisoners. In the detention centers, rumors are spreading that an American intervention would trigger a wave of killings. Family members feared that their loved ones would be held hostage or disappear at the hands of the regime. “I haven’t slept in a year,” Monasterios said. Stories abounded of missing prisoners and relatives who were never able to see their loved ones again. Now people fear that detainees could be used as human shields.
Trump’s silence on the subject has only sparked more doubts. In public, the President had rarely mentioned political prisoners. His speech on Venezuela focused almost entirely on the country’s oil resources and what the United States stood to gain from them. In the eyes of many Venezuelans, his support for Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s number two, was proof of his contempt for Venezuelan democracy. “The fact that Delcy was sworn in as president is, in itself, a blatant violation of our sovereignty,” Rivas said. “And doing it under American supervision amounts to doubling this violation. »
