"El Helicoide, a brutalist complex sitting atop a hill in central Caracas, is known as one of Latin America's most notorious detention centers. Built as a shopping mall in the nineteen-fifties, the structure was taken over by Venezuela's national-intelligence services, who turned its abandoned storefronts and lavatories into makeshift prison cells. Early on Saturday afternoon, hours after American forces captured Nicolás Maduro, Amanda Monasterios sped off to El Helicoide."
"Monasterios, who is seventy-four, looked out at the capital's eerily deserted streets: caraqueños had awakened to a bombed city, where people had been called on to begin la lucha armada. She arrived at El Helicoide to find that armed men had sealed off the premises. Patrol cars guarded the entrance-and there was no way to get near the prison. "It was as if the entire national police were guarding the approaches," she said."
El Helicoide is a brutalist complex in central Caracas repurposed from a 1950s shopping mall into a detention center by Venezuela's national-intelligence services. The facility contains makeshift cells in abandoned storefronts and lavatories. After American forces captured Nicolás Maduro, Amanda Monasterios raced to El Helicoide seeking her son, Jesús Armas, a political prisoner. Monasterios encountered sealed entrances and heavy police and patrol-car presence, preventing access. Armas, an engineer and former councilman, was detained for just over a year with only occasional visits and had helped lead Edmundo González's capital campaign after María Corina Machado was barred from the 2024 election. The election was marred by fraud allegations as Armas and others organized volunteers.
Read at The New Yorker
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]