‘Welcome to hell’: Venezuela’s most notorious torture chamber
When Villca Fernández arrived at Venezuela’s notorious El Helicoide prison in 2016, the staff made no effort to conceal its gruesome workings.
“An officer greeted me, rubbing his hands together, saying, ‘Welcome to Hell’,” said Fernández, an activist who spent two-and-a-half years locked up at El Helicoide after leading protests against the government. “It is a sinister place, with only one way in and one way out.”
A vast, brutalist spiral, bulging out of a hilltop in Caracas, the building was designed during the 1950s oil boom to be the world’s first drive-in shopping mall, a symbol of modernity in a burgeoning economic power. Instead, it has become an emblem of the country’s repressive present: the socialist dictatorship’s most feared torture chamber.
In the past few days, dozens of family members of inmates have flocked to the prison, holding evening vigils outside in one of the few flickers of public dissent since the US captured President Nicolás Maduro. 
The gatherings began on January 8 when the government pledged to release an “important number” of political prisoners.
The government said more than 400 prisoners had been let go across the country by Tuesday afternoon, though rights groups were only able to verify about 60 releases. On Sunday, Foro Penal, a Caracas-based NGO, said 804 political prisoners were behind bars across the country.
“These people have been forcibly disappeared,” said Francis Quiñones, the mother of an imprisoned military officer accused of taking part in a 2020 failed operation to oust Maduro, who travelled from the country’s interior to join the vigil.
“We don’t know if they are really there — we have no proof of life.”
The building, named for its swirling shape, was conceived under military dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez, who sought to convert booming oil revenues into showpiece construction projects and infrastructure.
“It represented a concept of modernity and progress, where essentially a mountain was carved to make way for the building,” said one Venezuelan architect who declined to give their name in a climate of repression. “There’s no comparable structure of its scope in the country.”
Lisa Blackmore, who co-edited a book on El Helicoide, said it was planned as “a supersized strip mall that afforded people access to foreign goods, movie theatres, a bowling alley, hotel and exhibition of Venezuela’s emerging industrial might”.
But in the decades after Pérez Jiménez’s ousting in 1958, the structure remained an unfinished concrete burrow of ramps and tunnels, looming over the centre of Caracas as slums began to sprawl around it.
With just one entry point for cars and all other entrances unfinished, it was “ideal to become an urban fortress”, Blackmore said. The intelligence forces took it over in the mid-1980s.
During the 14-year presidency of Hugo Chávez, who launched the country’s socialist ‘Bolivarian Revolution’ after taking office in 1999, it became a headquarters for his Bolivarian National Intelligence Service, formed in 2010 to replace the old regime’s intelligence forces.
Under Maduro, who assumed the presidency upon Chávez’s death from cancer in 2013, El Helicoide’s role as a detention centre expanded, with hundreds of suspected dissidents locked up there following waves of nationwide anti-government demonstrations.
“From that optimistic, outward-looking style of architecture, we have a building that became inward-facing and about prohibiting access in a way that couldn’t be more dramatic,” Blackmore said.
Stories of its brutality quickly spread.
“The very mention of El Helicoide gives rise to a sense of fear and terror,” said Alex Neve, a member of the UN Human Rights Council’s fact-finding mission on Venezuela. “Many corners of the complex became dedicated places of cruel punishment and indescribable suffering, and prisoners have even been held in stairwells in the complex, where they are forced to sleep on the stairs.” 
Survivors paint a chilling picture of a prison where at least one detainee died, according to rights groups.
During his imprisonment from January 2016 to June 2018, Fernández saw inmates tortured in novel ways, including by electrocution of their genitals and suffocation with plastic bags filled with tear gas. He says he was suspended from his wrist from a metal grate for weeks.
“I was left hanging there for a month, without rights, without the possibility of using the bathroom, without the possibility of washing myself, without the possibility of being properly fed,” he said.
Fernández, who now lives in the US, said he can still hear the screams of fellow inmates. “The sound of the guards’ keys still torments me, because every time the keys jingled it meant an officer was coming to take someone out of a cell” to be tortured, he said.
Six senior executives of Citgo, a US-based subsidiary of Venezuela’s state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela SA, were held in El Helicoide at different times during their detention in Venezuela. They were released as part of a prisoner exchange in 2022.
Among the first released from El Helicoide on Thursday were former presidential candidate Enrique Márquez, and Biagio Pilieri, an ex-lawmaker with close ties to the democratic opposition’s main leader María Corina Machado. Representatives for both men said they were unable to give statements for the moment, under conditions of their release.
“They were taken out of El Helicoide headquarters in dark vehicles,” said Marino Alvarado, a member of local human rights watchdog Provea. “Unfortunately, the government continues to lack transparency.”
On Monday morning, María Jiménez stood outside El Helicoide, brandishing a sign with a photograph of her son, Jonathan Carrillo, a journalist who was detained at the Maiquetía airport three years ago and accused of terrorism and illegal migration.
“My son spent three years here at El Helicoide,” Jiménez said, before he was transferred last year to another jail in Yare. “I only learned about that transfer when I came in to visit one day. I am here to support the other families as I await his release.”
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