A dark, cramped cell, with dirty gray walls, no windows, with barely six people crammed into it, but sometimes three times as many. The cockroaches run through a prisoner’s body. Showers are every three days with bottled water drawn from the toilet, and the droppings are kept in a plastic bag, the same one that the food is served in (inmates call it the “little boat”). Sometimes they burn bits of paper in one of the few lamps to cover up the stench. In the background, the torture of a detainee can be heard, whose screams were recorded by another detainee with a mobile phone, who managed to get the audio document outside. Then, through a dark corridor, you arrive at a wall with 30 names (activists, journalists and even dancers) and the horror stories they suffered and who managed to tell them, in the largest torture center in Venezuela, a building that It was conceived as a luxury shopping mall in Caracas in the late 1950s and now houses the headquarters of Sebin (the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service). According to the Foro Penal Association, there are currently about 70 political prisoners at the center, with about 300 across the country. Humanitarian organizations estimate that 15,000 people have passed through the helicoid’s dark cells in the form of the Tower of Babel on a hilltop in the Venezuelan capital.
These uncomfortable scenes can be experienced for about 15 minutes in the virtual experience Realidad Helicoide, an initiative of the NGO Voces de la Memoria, presented in Madrid this Monday 26th, the International Day Against Torture, by its creator and director Víctor Navarro Happened five months in one of those dungeons at the age of just 22, now he is 27 and faces charges of “treason” and “terrorism”. Talking about torture in the abstract is easy, feeling it is another matter. For example, a Sebin agent guides the contestant into the torture room, which ranges from asphyxiation to electrocution to drowning and rape, using virtual glasses and controls to help them move around the venue. “I heard a rape because the cell we were in upstairs turned out to be the brigade office. In other words, you could hear everything very clearly and you could hear how they tortured her or how they applied electricity, how they beat her and then raped her. All of us who were there heard him say no. And I’m sure it wasn’t just one,” says Angelis Quiroz, one of the 30 victims who contributed their testimony to the virtual document, in one of the audio testimonies.
Victor Navarro, in Madrid. Jaime Villanueva
“A friend told me about virtual reality and I was blown away. He gave me a case with the Anne Frank case and I thought about doing the same thing with the Helicoid,” says Navarro, who says they enlisted the help of psychologists and trauma specialists, among others, to recreate the experience. “I think it’s important to make these abuses visible because the Nicolás Maduro regime continues to torture in Venezuela, there are still political prisoners,” says Navarro, who, when arrested in 2018 and reported missing for four days was worked with street youth. and prepared his dissertation on journalism. The regime accused him of collusion with the Americans because he received a scholarship to study in the United States and attended some events at the embassy in Caracas. “We were ready to die. I got out of prison because I took part in the first uprising that took place in El Helicoide (in 2018) due to the prison conditions, thanks to a political negotiation between the government and the opposition parties. Maduro said that if they recognized him as president when the elections were illegal, he would release political prisoners,” he recalls, although the torture is not over for him, who now lives in exile in Argentina as a political refugee, because he cannot return to his country. “The torture doesn’t stop when you leave,” and even less so, as in his case, when he continues to have part of his family in Venezuela.
The experience is a cry for help to uncover the drama of Chavismo reprisals. They want to present it to the European Parliament and trust that the Spanish Presidency of the European Union (which starts on July 1st) and the EU-CELAC summit (on July 17th and 18th in Brussels) will serve as a sounding board for their cause become . “Spain is an important part of decision-making from Europe to Latin America,” Navarro explains the presentation of the work in the Spanish capital, which has so far only been shown in human rights forums. “We want to show that you cannot sit down to have a conversation with Maduro unless you do justice to those who have been arbitrarily and wrongly detained. Human rights have no political color,” he emphasizes. Just this week, the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced that it was reopening investigations into human rights violations in Venezuela that could amount to crimes against humanity. The Maduro regime is not virtual reality and Víctor Navarro was not the only prisoner.
Follow all international information on Facebook and Twitteror in our weekly newsletter.
Join EL PAÍS to follow all the news and read without restrictions.
subscribe to