A 20 year old recently released political prisoner known only as “Juan” spoke to the BBC about being physically and psychologically tortured. This man is one of many people that dictator Nicolás Maduro unjustly detained after the fraudulent July 28 presidential election. Maduro insists he “won”. Juan was regularly beaten, fed rotten food and suffocated in a specially designed room about the size of a vault.
You can become a prisoner
The Venezuelan government launched a vicious persecution campaign against those who disagreed with the election. According to the U.N. it left 27 people dead and over 2,400 detained. The local non-government organization Foro Penal has confirmed about 1,800 as of early December. There were records of 23 people who were detained and disappeared.
Children were among those accused of “terrorism”. People were hunted using retrofitted apps on government supplied smartphones and directly abducted from their homes. Those who were abducted might have been forced to record “apologies” in something called “Operation Knock Knock”.
A prisoner could be put in a camp
Two “reeducation camps” are under construction, located in prisons the regime recently emptied of its inmates. Foro Penal’s Vice President Gonzalo Himiob spoke with the BBC about people who weren’t protesting but got arrested anyway simply for being in the area. “Juan” was one of them.
He happened to be running an errand when a group of hooded men intercepted him, covered his face and beat him while screaming he was a terrorist. Government officials
“planted Molotov cocktails and gasoline on me, and then took me to a detention center, where he spent several weeks in detention before being transferred to the Tocorón prison. When we arrived at Tocorón, they stripped us naked, beat us, insulted us, shouted ‘terrorists’ at us. We were forbidden to raise our faces and look at the guards, we had to lower our faces to the floor. Then they uniformed us and put us in the cells.”
A prisoner in a concentration camp
He had to share his cell with five other people.
“More than a prison, in Tocorón I felt like I was in a concentration camp. It made me think of what I have seen in movies and heard about the concentration and torture camps of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. They tortured us physically and psychologically. They didn’t let us sleep, they always came by to ask us to get up and line up. We never knew what time it was because there were no clocks. We started asking visitors the time and then with the sun’s rays we started to calculate the time as the sunlight came up the wall.”
Tocoron has “punishment cells”. You were put in there if you “dare to talk about politics or ask for a phone call to communicate with their families”. Juan was put in one cell. They were only fed once every two days. “It is a very dark cell and measures one meter by one meter. I was very hungry. I get hungry just remembering it. What kept me going was thinking about all the injustices that were happening and that someday I was going to get out of there.”
The oxygen torture was “Adolfo’s bed”, named for the first person who died in it. “It’s a dark room without much oxygen about the size of a vault. They put you in there for a few minutes until you can’t breathe and pass out or start banging on the door in desperation. They put me in there and I lasted a little over five minutes. I thought I was going to die.”
