During his three years backpacking across the Americas, from Haiti and Honduras to Bolivia and Uruguay, James Luckey visited nearly every country. In early December, he set out from a budget hotel in the Brazilian Amazon to check off one of his final destinations: Mount Roraima, a two-billion-year-old tabletop mountain in Venezuela, one of South America’s most spectacular—and troubled—nations.
But just hours after crossing into the border town of Santa Elena de Uairén, his plans fell apart. The 28-year-old New Yorker was stopped at a military checkpoint and seized by counter-intelligence agents in ski masks, who appeared to suspect him of being a spy. Instead of beginning the breathtaking multi-day trek up the 2,810-meter tepui, Luckey was detained and put on the first of several flights that eventually landed him at the headquarters of Venezuela’s feared General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (DGCIM) in Caracas, over 1,000 kilometers away.
There, Luckey says he was placed in solitary confinement, forced to sleep on a concrete slab, deprived of food, and repeatedly beaten before being transferred to another notorious location: El Rodeo, an overcrowded prison near the capital.
Luckey recalled fearing for his life as he was led into the penitentiary in chains and forced to his knees. “Oh yeah, they’re gonna execute me here,” he remembers thinking before having his head forcibly shaved.
After a month sleeping on a flea-infested mattress in El Rodeo, Luckey was released and flown out of Venezuela on January 13, ten days after the U.S. upended Venezuela’s political landscape by capturing its president, Nicolás Maduro, in a nighttime raid.
The American traveler is one of about 700 political prisoners whom human rights groups say have emerged from Venezuelan prisons since the U.S. operation, including citizens of Argentina, France, Israel, Italy, and Spain.
Many of those former inmates are still too afraid of reprisals to publicly discuss their ordeals or are barred from doing so by conditional release rules. But others, including Luckey, have started speaking out, highlighting the brutal treatment faced by dissidents or perceived enemies of Maduro’s authoritarian regime.
Some former prisoners have described being beaten with baseball bats or suffocated with plastic bags in attempts to extract information.
“It was hell,” said Yerwin Torrealba, a youth leader from the mid-western state of Yaracuy, who was released on January 12 after over a year behind bars in San Felipe.
Torrealba was captured by heavily armed, masked men in December 2024, as Maduro’s security forces hunted down those who dared question his disputed claim to have won that year’s presidential election. The 26-year-old activist for Edmundo González—the candidate widely believed to have defeated Maduro—was accused of offenses including terrorism, treason, and organized crime.
For those alleged crimes, Torrealba said he was held in a filthy cell with about 60 common prisoners. “The conditions were the worst imaginable … There wasn’t even space to walk around,” said the activist, who is a member of Vente Venezuela, the movement led by Nobel laureate María Corina Machado.
In April 2025, Torrealba said he nearly died after guards repeatedly denied him treatment for agonizing abdominal pain. When he was finally rushed to a hospital, he had to undergo emergency surgery.He had to undergo emergency surgery for acute appendicitis. Less than twelve hours after the operation, a police commander ordered the patient back to jail. “This is what the regime does: anyone they see as a threat… they try to silence in this way,” Torrealba said.
Many imprisoned under Maduro have emerged with physical and psychological scars. Torrealba said that whenever he heard a loud noise in the morning, it transported him back to the early morning stand-up counts conducted by prison officers.
Viral footage of another released prisoner, Óscar Castañeda, showed him struggling to walk and unable to recognize his family after seventeen months inside Venezuela’s most infamous political prison, El Helicoide.
Jesús Armas, a prominent opposition politician also held there, said he was not physically abused in El Helicoide but that the psychological mistreatment was extreme. He claimed one fellow prisoner, Alfredo Díaz, died after a heart attack and being denied medical care. Hoping to “break” Armas, guards would take him for questioning at 2 p.m. and again at 2 or 3 a.m. “There were weeks and weeks of these interrogations,” he said.
But Armas’s worst days came after he was captured by unidentified men at a Caracas cafe in December 2024. He recalled spending five days handcuffed and blindfolded in a chair, being repeatedly suffocated as his captors tried to extract information about the activities of Machado and her ally, Juan Pablo Guanipa.
“They tortured me, they… put a plastic bag over my face to stop me breathing,” recalled Armas, who said he found the strength to endure by reminding himself his struggle was more important than his life.
Luckey’s ordeal was mercifully short compared to many of his Venezuelan counterparts. He said rock bottom was spending four days at the DGCIM headquarters, a former textile factory that activists say contains a torture center nicknamed The House of Dreams.
Luckey was released in January following the US invasion of Venezuela. He is pictured at his local cafe in Philadelphia.
Luckey was not held in that underground dungeon but claimed he was repeatedly beaten after physically confronting his captors. “I had gotten rowdy because I wanted some answers—and they beat me, chained me up, threw me back in the cell,” he said. “We would repeat this process over and over again throughout my entire time there… knees in the neck, slamming you to the ground… hitting me in the back of the head… Tackling me down… kicking me while I’m down, throwing me back in the cell,” he said.
In a written account of his captivity, Luckey added: “I was never fed, I was never given water… My kidneys felt like someone had stuck pins and needles in them, my eyes, like they had sand behind them and my lips like sun-dried fish scales.”
In El Rodeo, Luckey said he was subjected to lie detector tests and interrogations lasting up to sixteen hours. “It was spy stuff… ‘Am I in cooperation with any sort of foreign intelligence agency? Am I in Venezuela to disrupt their economy, to disrupt their political system?’… All these different types of things… over and over and over again.”
After returning to the US, the American traveler discovered a series of maps had been drawn into his journal, which he suspects were planted there to frame him for gathering intelligence on sensitive locations.
Luckey says he believes maps had been drawn in his journals to suggest he had been gathering information about sensitive installations in Venezuela.
Luckey said he only found out for sure what had happened to Maduro as he flew to safety in Curaçao with a group of US officials, ten days after…Venezuela’s president was removed from power.
Speaking from New Jersey, Luckey said he hoped to draw as much attention as possible to the situation of those still imprisoned in Venezuela.
“It’s a little bittersweet,” he said, reflecting on how Maduro, who was responsible for so many unjust imprisonments, ended up jailed in New York. “I know he’s not there because of all the wrongs he’s done. He’s there because a bigger bully [Trump] went after a smaller bully [Maduro].
“You know, that’s what he deserves,” Luckey added about Maduro, who is scheduled to appear in court on Thursday to face drug trafficking charges that he denies. “But at the same time, nothing has really changed for the people who are still in prison.”
Frequently Asked Questions
FAQs US Travelers Ordeal in a Venezuelan Prison
BeginnerLevel Questions
1 What happened to the US traveler in Venezuela
A US traveler was detained in Venezuela reportedly on questionable charges and sent to a notorious prison where they were beaten shackled and endured harsh conditions
2 Why was the traveler detained
The specific charges are often unclear in these cases but travelers can be detained for alleged immigration violations accusations of espionage or on seemingly fabricated charges related to political tensions
3 What does notorious prisons mean in this context
It refers to Venezuelan prisons known for severe overcrowding violence between gangs lack of basic supplies and minimal control by authorities making them extremely dangerous
4 Is it safe for Americans to travel to Venezuela right now
No The US State Department has a Do Not Travel advisory for Venezuela due to crime civil unrest poor health infrastructure wrongful detentions and the risk of terrorism
5 What should I do if Im detained abroad
Politely ask to contact your countrys embassy or consulate immediately You have this right under international agreements Do not sign anything you dont understand and avoid discussing details without consular assistance
Advanced Practical Questions
6 What is wrongful detention and how does it apply here
Wrongful detention is when a foreign government holds someone primarily to use them as leverage for political or diplomatic concessions not for legitimate law enforcement Some cases in Venezuela are believed to fit this pattern
7 How does the US government typically respond to these situations
Response involves the US Embassy working for consular access the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs engaging in negotiations and applying diplomatic pressure Public campaigns by families are also common
8 What are the biggest risks for foreigners in Venezuelan prisons
Key risks include violence from inmates or guards contracting diseases due to unsanitary conditions malnutrition lack of medical care and psychological trauma from prolonged isolation and uncertainty
9 Can the US government just force Venezuela to release a detainee
No The US cannot operate within Venezuelan legal jurisdiction Release usually requires complex diplomacy sometimes involving prisoner swaps or other negotiated agreements which can take years
