Virtual Reality Opens Doors to Venezuela’s Largest Torture Center – Latin America News Dispatch

Andes,
United Nations,
Venezuela

June 26, 2023

By
Mie Hoejris Dahl

BOGOTÁ — A foul odor of sewage permeated the overcrowded jail cell. Rays of sunshine got here by way of beneath the door. Screams and cries emanated from the cells and reverberated across the jail.

“It was fixed torture,” says former political prisoner Víctor Navarro, 27, of his time in Venezuela’s largest torture middle, El Helicoide. Now, he’s the founder and director of Voices of Memory, an NGO that created a digital actuality museum of this infamous jail.

At this time, on the United Nations Worldwide Day in Assist of Victims of Torture, Navarro and his workforce are launching a digital marketing campaign about “Realidad Helicoide.” The expertise takes customers on a tour the place they meet face-to-face with guards and political prisoners. They transfer round a jail cell, a torture room, and a museum, the place they’ll watch, contact, and hearken to the insides of El Helicoide.

Whereas international locations like Colombia and Brazil are actually normalizing relations with the Venezuelan chief Nicolás Maduro and his authorities, and as Venezuela’s 2024 presidential elections are coming nearer, arbitrary detentions and torture proceed to happen beneath the Venezuelan authorities’s watch.

Navarro desires the world to know what it’s like inside Venezuela’s main torture middle, and he desires El Helicoide and different torture facilities in Venezuela to close down.

A Torturous Hell

Main as much as my interview with Navarro, his workforce guided me by way of the digital actuality expertise of the torturous hell inside El Helicoide.

Strapping on the digital actuality headset, I entered one other world. I jumped and my legs shook as I circled and noticed the jail guard. The setting was tense, so I used to be simply startled. My complete physique was alert, my coronary heart charge elevated, and I held my breath. Caught inside a detention middle for a second, I felt the ability of this digital actuality expertise — what was an actual and haunting expertise for Navarro and different former political prisoners.

Navarro spent 130 days within the headquarters of the Bolivarian Nationwide Intelligence Service (SEBIN) within the middle of Venezuela’s capital metropolis, Caracas, accused of being the middle of a terrorist cell, financed by the US to finish the federal government of Nicolás Maduro.

He grew up proper throughout the hill that El Helicoide sits on. He comes from a low-income “Chavista” household, which means his shut relations supported the socialist beliefs of Venezuela’s former chief, Hugo Chávez. Navarro was a youth chief in Embajadores Comunitarios, an NGO that organizes instructional actions for susceptible youth in Caracas.

Navarro started questioning the Venezuelan authorities, particularly because it cracked down on college college students. Someday, his criticisms of Venezuela’s socialist authorities turned an excessive amount of for his grandmother. “It’s best to go away this home,” she instructed him. She elaborated that Chávez’s authorities had given the home to her. “For those who don’t love Chávez, you don’t love me,” Navarro remembers her saying.

He moved to a pupil residency, persevering with his social work which more and more turned targeted on serving to younger protesters with housing and different pressing wants. That stopped when he was arrested on January 24, 2018 and despatched to El Helicoide.

Contained in the seven-story spiral-shaped jail, initially presupposed to turn out to be a state-of-the-art shopping center, Navarro suffered every kind of violations.

“They put a gun in my mouth, hit me, prevented me from seeing pure mild, made me defecate within the meals trays that I had eaten from,” Navarro remembers.

“I don’t even know what’s worse, being tortured or seeing others tortured,” Navarro says. He discovered that psychological terror may be simply as tough to endure as bodily hurt.

Coming Up With the Concept

When the United Nations Reality-Discovering Mission on Venezuela reached out to Navarro to gather his testimony, he confronted once more the recollections of the torturous hell he had tried to repress.

“I’d open my eyes and see the jail. I had nightmares. I awoke at 4:30 within the morning, pondering they had been after me,” Navarro recounts struggling publish traumatic stress syndrome.

He determined to write down a e book about what had occurred. Educated as a journalist, he reached out to the opposite political prisoners to get their permission to share their tales.

All of them struggled to course of what had occurred to them and reinsert into society. “It was like, wow, I’ve to do one thing. I don’t know what,” Navarro thought.

Strolling by way of a museum in Washington D.C., he remembers pondering: “a museum.”

Lastly, when the pandemic hit, Navarro discovered himself locked in his home in Buenos Aires. Glued to his display in digital conferences, it occurred to him that the museum needs to be executed just about.

A Collaborative Challenge

In displaying the world what life is like in Venezuela’s largest torture middle, Navarro desires to transcend telling simply his personal story.

Explaining why he collaborated with 30 different political prisoners to create a digital actuality expertise of El Helicoide, Navarro says, “We wish to give individuals the possibility to enter the place nobody can. To stay by way of the issues they’re hiding, that they need nobody to see.”

Victims remembered completely different elements of the jail and stuffed the gaps in one another’s reminiscence. “It was essential to indicate that every sufferer has a special expertise,” Navarro says.

Specifically, he insisted on together with the experiences of feminine political prisoners, who’re normally situated in a special a part of El Helicoide. Considered one of them is Sairam Rivas, 29, a pupil chief from the Central College of Venezuela, the place she is ending her diploma in social work.

Rivas was detained in El Helicoide for 5 months after being accused of instigation to disobey legal guidelines, conspiring, and utilizing minors to commit crimes — a consequence of main peaceable youth protests in opposition to the federal government.

Rivas has been a part of reconstructing what El Helicoide is like, a course of that helped her work by way of trauma and construct group with different former political prisoners.

By means of a digital actuality headset, customers can stroll by way of elements of El Helicoide, Venezuela’s largest torture middle. Credit score: Voices of Reminiscence

“There’s a necessity for this,” Rivas says concerning the digital actuality expertise.

By leveraging know-how and innovation, and immediately participating the person, the expertise will help create consciousness about what’s occurring in Venezuela, attain choice makers, and stop a historical past of human rights violations from repeating itself, she argues.

A brochure concerning the digital actuality expertise reads: “Once we speak about reminiscence, we take into consideration the previous. However this can be a house that talks concerning the current.”

Extra Related Than Ever

In September final yr, a United Nations Independent International Fact-Finding Mission discovered causes to imagine that Venezuelan authorities dedicated crimes in opposition to humanity.

The Chair of the Mission, Marta Valiñas, says that “a few of these practices are nonetheless ongoing.” The truth is, the Worldwide Felony Courtroom opened its first-ever investigation within the Americas, in Venezuela.

Navarro talking on the Oslo Freedom Discussion board, with a map of the world’s authoritarian regimes behind him. Credit score; Oslo Freedom Discussion board

Forward of main elections in October this yr and presidential elections deliberate for 2024, free and truthful elections in Venezuela are doubtful, with social leaders, journalists, and opposition politicians locked up in torture facilities.

On July 30 final yr, Venezuelan President Maduro introduced that no person may enter El Helicoide. Worldwide organizations and native NGOs object to not with the ability to entry the jail. “It makes our work actually laborious,” says Humberto Prado, director of the Venezuelan Observatory of Prisons, a neighborhood NGO that advocates for the rights of Venezuelan prisoners. The group releases regular reports about situations in Venezuelan prisons. One thing Prado says is turning into more and more tough as the federal government restricts entry. “The consequence is opacity about these detention facilities,” he says.

It’s exactly when Maduro’s authorities is attempting to cover what’s happening in El Helicoide that Navarro and his workforce launch their expertise, the place “you’ll be able to stay by way of what they’re hiding, what they don’t need anyone to see,” Navarro explains.

At this time, there are greater than 280 political prisoners in Venezuela, based on Foro Penal, a Venezuelan NGO providing professional bono authorized providers to people who find themselves arbitrarily detained, like Navarro, Rivas, and different members within the digital actuality expertise had been. Final week, a U.S. delegation arrived in Caracas to pursue the discharge of at the very least 4 U.S. prisoners who, based on U.S. officers, are wrongly detained in Venezuela. Extra instances stay unresolved regardless of strain from worldwide human rights teams, like that of Javier Tarazona, a human rights defender who has been detained in El Helicoide for 724 days.

Situations in Venezuelan prisons are dreadful. In 2022, the Observatory of Venezuelan Prisons reported that prisons had been overpopulated by more than 160 percent. Prado tells that each bodily and psychological torture are widespread in Venezuelan prisons.

Because the digital actuality expertise launches at present, hopes are excessive. “The aim is to shut El Helicoide and different torture facilities in Venezuela as soon as and for all,” Navarro concludes.