“I Saw Death as Hope”: A Former Detainee’s Account from Inside Venezuela’s El Helicoide Intelligence Prison

2026-03-02 - 23:18

For years, El Helicoide has ceased to be known as an unfinished architectural landmark and instead become a symbol of fear. In Venezuela and beyond its borders, the name no longer evokes a failed commercial project but rather repeated allegations of torture and degrading treatment against detainees. The building, located in western Caracas, was originally conceived in the 1950s as a modern shopping and business complex. Over decades it changed hands: state security forces began using the site in the 1980s and by the early 2010s it had become the headquarters and detention facility of Venezuela’s Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN), the country’s main intelligence agency. Under the administrations of Presidents Hugo Chávez and later Nicolás Maduro, the facility became notorious as a detention site for political prisoners and a focus of human rights abuse allegations. Inside its dark corridors and improvised cells, Antony Vegas says he endured years of humiliation. Vegas was arrested in 2014 in connection with the murder of Robert Serra, a lawmaker from the ruling Socialist Party (PSUV) who was killed earlier that year. He recalls the day of his arrest clearly. On the afternoon of October 4, plainclothes SEBIN officers — hooded and armed — detained him in Caracas, an event he says changed the course of his life. Aerial view of El Helicoide in western Caracas, a spiral-shaped complex that now serves as the headquarters and detention center of Venezuela’s intelligence police, SEBIN | EFE / FILE PHOTO “They told me, ‘Get on the ground or I’ll kill you,’ with a gun pointed at my face,” Vegas said in an exclusive interview with El Diario. “They hooded me and put me in a car. It wasn’t just me — everyone who was there. People were running, terrified. They fired several shots into the air.” Blindfolded, he says he was taken to the facility without knowing where he was being held or why he had been detained. “I didn’t know I was in El Helicoide. I had no idea what I was about to begin living through,” he said. “Since 2014, my life changed completely. I didn’t realize I was inside one of the country’s most symbolic structures.” Before his arrest, Vegas — born in the Andean state of Mérida and raised in Caracas, specifically in Cota 905, a neighborhood long associated with armed gang violence — says he had already experienced a turbulent upbringing shaped by insecurity and crime, a reality that extended into his adulthood. In previous interviews, he has said that those early experiences, along with his encounters with other detainees during his imprisonment, led him to reassess his life, pursue academic training and later engage more actively in public life with what he describes as greater social awareness. “It’s unfortunate that all of this had to happen,” he said. “A series of misfortunes to reach this point of awareness.” He recalls in detail what he says happened during his first hours inside the detention center. The First Hours Inside For Vegas, what he describes as a cycle of physical torture began the very day he arrived. He says officers struck him in the face while he remained handcuffed. With his head covered and his hands tied, he recalls being pushed against walls and dragged into a room, where the hood was removed only to be replaced with newspaper and adhesive tape wrapped tightly around his eyes. He was then forced to kneel. “There was an extremely thin mat — I could feel the hardness of the floor,” Vegas told El Diario. “There are no words to describe that moment. I stayed like that for what felt like five to ten eternal minutes. I could hear laughter. I can only imagine what they were watching, how they were preparing while someone is kneeling there blindfolded.” He says that at one point he heard someone tell him: “When you want to speak, move your hands.” Moments later, according to his account, a plastic bag was placed over his head. Vegas describes being immobilized by several men. He says two held him in place and forced his body backward as if applying leverage, while another pressed down on his back. Someone behind him repeatedly tightened the bag around his head. “Not even three seconds passed before I started moving my hands desperately,” he said. “That phrase — ‘when you want to speak, move your hands’ — is tattooed in my memory. I was moving my hands, but they acted with brute, uncontrolled force. They didn’t want to stop.” He says he began losing consciousness but could still feel the pressure of the bag around his neck and the growing panic as he struggled to breathe. “I can say it now without it affecting me: I urinated on myself,” he said. “I lost control of my body, my mind — even my sense of self. When I lost control of my spirit, they dehumanized me. That word has meaning. I experienced it firsthand.” In 2018, Antony Vegas — a political prisoner who had been granted full release seven months earlier but remained in detention — began a “huelga de sangre,” or self-harm protest, at El Helicoide to demand that the court order be enforced. In the image, he holds the court document granting his full release, with visible cuts on his body from the protest Vegas says that during that episode, death felt like the only possible escape. “I saw death as hope,” he said. From Physical Abuse to Psychological Torture Vegas says that after several minutes of suffocation with the plastic bag, he lost consciousness. He recalls that it was only then that the officers stopped. According to his account, what followed was verbal humiliation. “I was unconscious, but I could feel everything. I knew everything. I knew I was unconscious, but somehow I was still aware,” he said. “When they let me go, they started mocking me. They said, ‘Look, this guy wet himself,’ and then someone said, ‘Let’s cut off his ears.’ I felt indescribable panic.” Still blindfolded and, as he describes it, “at their mercy,” Vegas says he felt an object pass along his ears. “I swear I felt them cut my ear,” he said. “For a long time, I thought I no longer had an ear. I felt what seemed like blood running down my neck — I felt the warmth. Imagine the level of psychological manipulation they pushed me to.” Similar accounts — in which detainees believed their ears were being cut — have been reported by other former prisoners held at the facility, according to human rights testimonies gathered over the years. Vegas also alleges that officers threatened to sexually assault him with a stick during the same episode. “I think it’s necessary to say it, even if it’s embarrassing,” he said. “They pulled my pants down and, with a broomstick, started saying, ‘We’re going to rape this guy.’ Fortunately, it didn’t happen. They touched me, but the act itself did not occur. I don’t know if I would have had the strength to talk about it if it had.” He added that he believes sexual abuse occurred inside the facility, including against male detainees. Vegas says that during interrogations, officers also threatened to sexually assault his daughter, who was between eight and nine years old at the time, and told him that his partner was being held in the same building. “It’s an emotional bomb,” he said. “They walk past the cells not to check on your health or see if you’re okay. They tell you your family is upstairs. Imagining that your mother or your partner is being held there — that’s torment.” Life in “El Tigrito”: Isolation and Survival After several hours of torture, Vegas says he was taken to what he describes as the most notorious cell in the complex, known among detainees as “El Tigrito.” According to human rights reports and testimony from former prisoners, this space is used for punishment and isolation. The cell, Vegas says, is extremely small — so cramped that if a person crouches, their knees press against the walls. The facility at El Helicoide has been documented by rights organisations and UN investigators as a place of prolonged incommunicado detention and cruel conditions. Detainees report severe overcrowding, lack of basic sanitation, no natural light or ventilation, and extreme restrictions on movement. Vegas described El Tigrito in stark terms. “That cell isn’t horrific because of how small it is,” he said. “It’s because you are forced to ‘self-torture’ — doing your physical needs on top of yourself, unable to eat, unable to see anyone. They drive you to fight with yourself.” Vegas says he spent more than 20 days in that cell before being transferred to an area where he could interact with other detainees, including people held for political reasons. Those prisoners, he says, helped him recover — at first he could barely move. “I couldn’t move for a long time, I was coughing up blood, I felt broken inside, and no doctor ever treated me,” he told El Diario. “Other inmates, including some held for political causes, ended up helping me — cleaning me, giving me food, because I didn’t even have a way to feed myself at that point, and I didn’t have visits.” Over time, he made contact with several detainees held for political reasons, such as opposition lawmaker Gilberto Sojo, whom Vegas says he saw sleeping standing up in a cell where common prisoners and political detainees were held together. Video still of Antony Vegas. File image A Sentence Served — and a Self-Harm Protest Shortly after his arrest, Vegas was convicted of illegal weapons possession and resisting authority — but not of Robert Serra’s murder. He says he was tried in a special court that handles terrorism-related cases. Vegas told El Diario that he pleaded guilty to those charges only after what he describes as intense torture and threats against his daughter. “I admitted the charges because I was forced to,” he said. “They threatened to rape my daughter. Under that kind of threat, anyone would admit to anything. I admitted to resisting authority and illegal possession of a weapon. When I appeared in court, no one mentioned Robert Serra. No one mentioned politics. In fact, the judge asked me, ‘What are you doing in a terrorism court with these charges?’” He was sentenced to two years, nine months, 22 days and 12 hours. Yet he remained behind bars for five years. “The state kidnapped me for two and a half additional years,” he said. Vegas also said he did not have a private defense attorney representing him. During a period when, according to his account, the physical torture subsided, he began studying. He says he learned English from American detainees who were being held in the facility and completed three years of academic studies through distance learning with the support of 12 teachers. When his release date arrived, he says the order was not carried out. Despite having a court-issued release document, he remained detained for six additional months. It was after a visit from one of his sons that he decided to stage what he calls a “huelga de sangre” (a self-harm protest in which he deliberately cut himself to draw blood) to demand his release. “One visit in particular — my son told me, ‘Dad, let’s go home,’” he recalled. “When they started locking the cell doors again, I grabbed a scalpel and began cutting myself. I told the commissioner that for every half hour I remained there, I would keep cutting myself. I am a free man.” Vegas says the self-harm protest lasted about three hours. He cut himself on multiple parts of his body. Scars remain visible, and he says fellow inmates managed to photograph the injuries with a cellphone inside the prison. In the days that followed, he carried out another protest by sewing his mouth shut, remaining that way for a week. He says he received no medical attention in either instance. “They expected me to die, and I realized I was the one losing,” he said. “Then they changed their strategy. I hadn’t seen my son in three or four months, and they suddenly allowed him to visit. He saw me in that condition. I was emaciated.” Days later, following unrest among political detainees inside El Helicoide, Vegas was transferred to Tocuyito prison, a large penitentiary in Carabobo state in central Venezuela. Unlike the intelligence facility in Caracas, Tocuyito, he says, operated under a different internal order — one historically dominated by inmate gang leaders known in Venezuela as “pranes.” “Why did I stay there four months?” he said. “Because if you go to ask for your release document in a prison like that, and it’s not there, you can lose your life. They can kill you. That’s why I didn’t approach it. Until one day I decided to take the risk.” According to Vegas, his release order had been issued two years earlier. It was only after he inquired about it, despite the risk, that he was freed — far from his home in Caracas. Voices United in Denouncing Torture Vegas’s account aligns with those of other former detainees who were held at El Helicoide. One such figure is Villca Fernández, a Venezuelan student leader and activist recognized internationally as a prisoner of conscience. Fernández was arrested by SEBIN agents in 2016 after being accused of conspiring against the government and was held at El Helicoide, where he and others reported being subjected to cruel treatment, including torture and prolonged incommunicado confinement. He was later released and went into exile in Peru. Fernández has since continued to denounce abuses inside the intelligence facility. More recently, he has publicly warned that he faces a deportation order in the United States, raising concerns among rights advocates that a forced return to Venezuela could expose him to renewed persecution. File photo of Villca Fernández during his time in Peru, where he called for the release of political prisoners in Venezuela. Photo: El Comercio (Peru) Vegas recalls seeing Fernández suspended by his hands on multiple occasions, a practice he says was ordered because, in officials’ view, Fernández was the detainee who protested most frequently on behalf of other inmates. “I remember clearly seeing him hung,” Vegas told El Diario. “The order was to hang Villca because he protested the most, defended the most, spoke for everyone else.” He acknowledged that torture varied depending on a person’s perceived political status, but he emphasized that civilian detainees without political profiles — like himself — often endured the most severe treatment. “Most of the altercations I saw there, protests by students and activists, marked me deeply,” he said. “They witnessed the torture applied to prisoners who arrived daily — not necessarily students or political detainees — but they were human beings. If I had arrived with a student profile, maybe I wouldn’t have been tortured the way I was.” The Amnesty Law After facing all these traumatic experiences, Vegas went into exile in Colombia. He fled after being accused by the Venezuelan Public Prosecutor’s Office in mid-July 2024 — just weeks before the July 28 presidential election — of allegedly attempting to “assassinate” lawmaker Inacio Da Costa in the parking lot of the Central University of Venezuela (UCV). During his escape to the Colombian border, he said a friend told him, “welcome to freedom,” marking what he considers his final escape from the regime that pursued him anew. Vegas has been openly critical of Venezuela’s new Amnesty Law, passed by the National Assembly in February 2026 following the January 3 capture of former President Nicolás Maduro. While the law has already resulted, according to government figures, in the release of thousands of people or the lifting of restrictions such as house arrest and periodic court appearances, rights groups say its narrow definitions exclude many political prisoners and that large numbers of detainees remain either in custody or subject to ongoing judicial conditions after release. “I’m terrified because [the amnesty] is being reopened at their convenience, conditioned by them to save many people who tortured, raped and murdered at El Helicoide,” he said. This content includes translation, adaptation and contextualization performed using the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT. The material was supervised, reviewed and edited by José Gregorio Silva, Editorial Coordinator at El Diario, and the editorial team. Learn more about our AI use policy here.