For helping prove that Maduro lost the 2024 election, Jesús Armas spent more than a year in Venezuela’s most-feared prison. He’s lucky it wasn’t more.
When the socialist leader Nicolás Maduro was detained, crowds of political prisoners across the country shouted in triumph: “Down with the dictatorship!” Inside the infamous prison known as El Helicoide, activist Jesús Armas felt as if the regime that had abducted and tortured him might finally be faltering.
It wasn’t. Maduro is gone, American oil investment is returning to Venezuela, and yet the machinery of coercion remains intact.
In the months after the 2024 presidential vote, Maduro’s government imprisoned more than 2,000 Venezuelans in a sweeping crackdown. Armas was among those hunted. His offense was helping document electoral results that the regime refused to publish.
The opposition to the socialist regime, led by now-Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado despite her exclusion from the ballot, understood that an election under dictatorship would never be a fair fight. So it devised a broad plan to collect as many tally sheets as possible and publish them online. Armas oversaw gathering tallies in Libertador—Caracas’ largest borough, which represented roughly 10 percent of the national vote. He knew the regime was already tracking him.
Then election day arrived: July 28, 2024. Maduro captured only about 30 percent of the ballots, at least according to the evidence published by Armas and thousands of other activists. The opposition candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, won nearly 70 percent. Nevertheless, the electoral authority declared Maduro the victor with about 52 percent of the vote and promptly unleashed a harsh crackdown on everyone involved in the effort to monitor the results.
Armas and his collaborators went underground—shuttling from one safe house to another across Caracas, changing locations weekly, spending as little time outside as possible. It was an excruciating way to live.
By late 2024, Armas had spent five months moving through borrowed apartments and friends’ spare rooms. He was worn down by the impossibility of leading a normal life. Days later, he decided to emerge from hiding. He visited a café to sip a drink and work on his laptop. He expected to meet a friend. He sent a few messages indicating his location and waited. A long stretch passed. The friend, usually punctual, never showed up. When Armas tried to message again, the messages failed to go through. Something felt off.
The delay felt ominous. He packed his belongings, stepped outside, and headed for his car. As he opened the door, a silhouette appeared, and a masked man in black raised a submachine gun. Seven more assailants emerged from two unmarked SUVs. None of the captors bore identification. “This was no ordinary kidnapping,” Armas recalls. They shoved him into a vehicle, hooded him, and put him in handcuffs.
Jesús Armas Endures 4 Days of Torture
Blindfolded, he tried to make sense of the route by feeling every twist and turn: the jerks of narrow streets, the sudden smoothness of a highway, a slow climb up a hill.
They delivered him to Quinta La Arenosa, a house in a hillside residential area of southern Caracas, tucked behind private streets and successive security checkpoints. The mansion occupied a full corner lot. Its white walls and stern entrance suggested a residence once owned by a wealthy family.
La Arenosa was part of a clandestine network of houses where intelligence agencies tortured political dissidents, a pattern documented by the United Nations.
Still hooded, Armas was led inside. When his captors finally removed the hood, he found himself in a kitchen. There, almost immediately, they pulled a plastic bag over his head and tightened it until he felt as if he were drowning. “That struck me as macabre,” Armas says. “They were torturing me in the kitchen of a family home.” It would not be the last time.
He spent four days in La Arenosa. The interrogations were relentless.
Morning, afternoon, and again in the dead of night, when his captors awakened him and pressed the same questions while he remained disoriented. They tortured him repeatedly, threatened his family, and demanded to know where opposition leader Machado was hiding and what her movement planned next. Armas says he gave them nothing.
During those four days, as the guards moved Armas through the house in handcuffs, he began to understand the building’s layout. Upstairs were the agents’ living quarters, with bunks, bags, and clothing stacked as if the men were stationed there for weeks. Another room housed weapons and equipment, and an office seemed to be compiling the case against him. Through a bathroom window, he caught sight of a sign bearing an address: “Ramal 2, Colinas de Santa Mónica.” That’s how he figured out where he was.
After four days, they prepared to move Armas out of La Arenosa. Then the man in charge appeared. He allowed Armas to take his daily asthma medication—something he had been denied since arriving—and gave him a few minutes to wash. Then he made his offer. “Tell us where the other activists are,” he said. “Tell us what they are planning. Cooperate, and this can end here. No one will hurt you. You can go free. You can return to your ordinary life, reunite with your family, and resume your life.”
For Armas, there was nothing to weigh. Any personal relief from cooperation would pale beside the larger cause of Venezuelan freedom. He refused. The man erupted in rage. And then his captors chose to move him to an even worse place.
Armas Goes on Trial and Gets Sent to El Helicoide
The truck first halted at Maripérez, at the police headquarters perched on the slopes of El Ávila. There, Armas faced an initial hearing via a Zoom-linked television screen. He was denied a private attorney and could not make any phone calls. A public defender was assigned, but she knew nothing about the case, and the prosecutor offered no evidence for examination. Even so, Armas says he was charged with five crimes: treason, criminal association, terrorism, financing terrorism, and conspiring with a foreign government. Together the charges carried a potential sentence of up to 30 years in prison, the maximum allowed by Venezuelan law.
“At least they weren’t going to kill me, because I was in a public detention center,” he notes. “But when you enter a clandestine house, and the first things you hear are threats and torture, you wonder: what comes next?” For Armas, the worst was still ahead.
From Maripérez, they transferred Armas to Zona 7, a white building with green gates and a colossal banner portraying Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro across its facade. For five days, he was packed into a cramped cell with 37 other men, where hammocks hung in three tiers and those without them slept on the floor. Rats roamed in broad daylight. There was no proper bathroom; inmates relieved themselves in bags and tossed them out the window. His captors denied him food, water, and visits. He survived largely because fellow inmates—men who spoke casually of drug trafficking, murder, and domestic abuse—shared the meals their families brought.
After a few days, they moved him to El Helicoide, the nerve center of the regime’s intelligence apparatus and the country’s most infamous detention facility for political prisoners. The structure had begun as a mid-20th-century monument to Venezuelan modernity: a vast concrete spiral climbing a hillside in south-central Caracas, capped by a geodesic dome. But the mall at its heart was never finished. What architects had intended as shops and offices ended up as cells. The United Nations has reported that the complex contains rooms of torture, and political detainees have been held there incommunicado.
For the first ten months, Armas was cut off from the outside world. His family had no official confirmation of his whereabouts, only rumors. He received no visits, and no contact with inmates held elsewhere in the building. To survive, he learned to cling to a routine. The guards, in turn, worked to erase any sense of normalcy. Whenever he managed to find even a sliver of inner calm, they disrupted it: moving him to a different cell, rummaging through his belongings, confiscating anything that might help. “They were forever seeking a way to break us emotionally,” Armas recalls.
One of the few consolations was a small MP3 player, an old model that used memory cards and could not connect to the internet. Armas persuaded the guards that, because of his anxiety, music served as a form of therapy. His friends knew his taste for rock, so the initial memory card held bands like Metallica, Megadeth, Linkin Park, and Bring Me the Horizon. To obtain new tunes, he slipped tiny handwritten notes into the folds of clothes sent out for laundry.
Books became another refuge. In Letters to Olga, a diary-like work by Czech dissident and future president Václav Havel, Armas found mirrors of his own ordeal. When Armas later developed a severe respiratory infection from untreated asthma and was denied medical care, Havel’s example offered him a model. If Havel could weather recurring flu, high fevers, and medical neglect and still emerge as a leader ready to guide a democratic transition, Armas reasoned, then he could endure his health problems too.
Gradually, conditions eased a touch. Armas believes the shift owed in part to pressure from the United States on the Maduro regime. He was granted visits from his mother and father, and he had a video call with his partner, Sairam Rivas. Yet authorities issued an arrest warrant for Rivas as well. From the day Armas vanished, she had denounced his kidnapping and helped mobilize the relatives of other political prisoners to keep their cases in the public eye. For that, she was forced into exile.
Inside El Helicoide, Armas discovered that the ranks of political prisoners stretched far beyond the opposition. There were members of the ruling party, as well as police officers or intelligence agents. Some detainees were social media influencers jailed for posting material critical of the regime. El Helicoide housed a bit of everything.
One of the oddest twists occurred when Armas learned that one of his guards from La Arenosa had ended up imprisoned in El Helicoide, in the cell adjacent to his. He wasn’t alone. Several officials implicated in Armas’ kidnapping and in the abductions of other political prisoners had themselves become inmates there, fearing reprisal from the detainees they had once helped seize.
One of them tried to explain himself. Only after being beaten himself did he grasp what he had forced others to endure. Then he lifted his lip to reveal teeth shattered by torture. “In the end, we are all in the same condition, tormented by the same tormentor,” Armas says.
The Fall of Nicolás Maduro, as Seen From El Helicoide
Then came January 3, 2026. Deep in the night, Armas heard an explosion. His cell had no windows. Everything began to tremble, and for a moment no one knew what was happening. Then the power cut out, and the emergency generator kicked in. His first thought was that another transformer had failed—the kind of breakdown that had become routine in a country whose power grid had been neglected for years.
Through the bars, Armas saw guards rushing up and down the corridor, visibly frightened. He caught a glimpse of the prison director and the fear in his face, a look he never would have expected in someone so deeply involved in concealing the regime’s crimes. Prisoners began calling to one another from their cells, trying to make sense of the chaos and readying themselves for whatever might come next.
Around 3 a.m., as Armas laced up his shoes, another prisoner began singing the national anthem. He did not yet know what was happening, but he found himself joining in. Soon the inmates were shouting, “Down with the dictatorship!” A rumor spread among them, carried by a guard: American forces had captured Maduro. “We started jumping like a bunch of kids,” Armas recalls.
What followed was the most anxious stretch Armas had experienced in prison. He had previously tempered his expectations, telling himself his confinement would stretch out for a long time, that patience would be essential, and that years behind bars could be in his future. Now the horizon seemed within reach, and sleep became harder to come by.
A fellow inmate lent Armas his books. Among them was Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom. Reading it, he recognized a familiar logic in the petty absurdities of prison life. “I don’t want to compare myself to Mandela,” Armas says, “but if he could endure that for 20 years, I can hold out for 20 more days.” In one scene, a guard mistakes The Law of Torts for “The Law of Torches” and treats it as evidence of sabotage. El Helicoide operated in a similar, bewildering way. Guards blocked Henry Kissinger’s Leadership because they claimed they didn’t know English, and another prisoner was denied a Spanish edition of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War on the presumption that it sounded dangerous.
On the morning of February 8, Armas began to sense a shift. Each day he was allowed roughly five minutes in the cell of Luis Tarbay, who had coordinated the international teams of the opposition’s presidential campaign and was held alone. That morning Tarbay was gone, though his bags remained. “They’re going to release him,” Armas thought. He walked away with a sense of quiet happiness.
Later that day, Armas was brought to the visiting room where his mother had come to see him. They spoke for over an hour when the director of El Helicoide cut the visit short. “Stand up. Come with me. Don’t turn around, and don’t say anything to anyone,” he commanded. The director told Armas they were taking him for a medical checkup.
Freedom for Armas, but Venezuela Is Still in Peril Under Delcy Rodriguez
The officers placed Armas and his mother in a vehicle and drove them straight home. They were not allowed to leave on their own. Outside El Helicoide, relatives of political prisoners and activists had gathered to protest, waiting for every detainee’s release.
Minutes after reaching home, Armas received a call from an activist urging him to head to Plaza Madariaga, a small public square near his residence where a celebration of the prisoners’ release was taking shape. The gathering was itself a defiant challenge to the regime, but many believed it necessary. Armas, inspired by Havel, felt the same.
Then Juan Pablo Guanipa called. Guanipa, a close ally of María Corina Machado and a prominent opponent who had gone into hiding with Armas after the vote, had been arrested months later in May 2025 after spending time underground. Armas did not know that Guanipa, who had also endured confinement, had been released that day.
Guanipa invited him to join for dinner, but Armas declined. It was his first day outside, and he longed to return to his parents’ home.
That very night, three SUVs intercepted Guanipa. Armed agents from the secret police sprang out and seized him. For hours, no one could locate the man. It later emerged that he had been placed under house arrest. At the very least, Armas thought, Guanipa would be with his family.
On his first night back, Armas spent hours on the phone with friends in Venezuela and across the region. By dawn, calls from Europe began to come in, and he stayed awake for them all. In the early hours, he rose to use the bathroom and, through the window, watched the sunrise.
The sight overwhelmed him. A sunrise is something one assumes will always be there. “I thought about all the sunrises I had missed, and all the mornings I took sunrises for granted,” he tells Reason.
Yet Venezuela’s political trajectory remained uncertain. The Trump administration backed Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, as interim president, and it backed talks meant to yield concrete steps toward a power transfer. María Corina Machado and her closest allies, however, had largely been excluded from those discussions.
The regime’s ongoing treatment of political prisoners underscored the limits of any opening. Although hundreds have been released, more than 400 political prisoners remain behind bars, according to the Venezuelan human rights group Justicia, Encuentro y Perdón. Political detainees have also continued to die in state custody.
Release does not automatically bring full freedom. Perkins Rocha, Machado’s attorney, spent roughly 17 months in El Helicoide before his release in February. He remains under house arrest with an ankle monitor.
Delcy Rodríguez has replaced roughly 40 percent of Maduro’s cabinet, while preserving essential segments of the coercive apparatus. Diosdado Cabello remains interior minister, overseeing the nation’s police and intelligence services. The United States still offers a reward of up to $25 million for information that leads to his arrest on federal drug-trafficking charges. Yet in July, Cabello was photographed greeting Gen. Francis Donovan, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, and John Barrett, Washington’s chargé d’affaires in Caracas.
Armas is no longer confined to a windowless cell, but he insists that “deep down, nothing has changed.” The individuals who ordered his kidnapping still hold power, wielding it as they always have—arbitrarily, and with a flagrant disregard for human rights.
