The sprawling, spiral-shaped building in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, was supposed to be the world’s first drive-through shopping mall, back in the 1950s.
But decades later, the towering facility, known as El Helicoide, stands as the headquarters of the country’s state repression system, a prison that human rights groups have described as a “torture center,” and a symbol of the past decade of authoritarian rule under the ousted President Nicolás Maduro.
The news on Thursday that Venezuela’s government had begun to release political prisoners from two notorious jails, including El Helicoide, sent detainees’ family members rushing to the site, which rights organizations say holds dozens of political prisoners.
The releases offer the first gesture of possible change under a new interim government, after U.S. troops captured Mr. Maduro on Saturday and President Trump said the new authorities would accede to Washington’s demands. While Mr. Trump has been publicly focused largely on the country’s oil, not democratic opening, on Tuesday he said, apparently referencing El Helicoide, “they have a torture chamber in the middle of Caracas that they’re closing up.”
But Venezuelan authorities didn’t announce a closure. Instead, Jorge Rodríguez, the head of the country’s National Assembly, said that “an important number” of people — both Venezuelans and foreign nationals — would be released. Venezuela’s interim authorities had released nine prisoners as of Friday afternoon.
“I believe every prisoner released deserves a celebration,” said Víctor Navarro, 30, who was imprisoned in El Helicoide for six months in 2018. “But I cannot celebrate until everyone is free.”
During his detention, Mr. Navarro said, he was held in a 13-by-13 foot cell with 16 other men, including minors, journalists, human rights defenders and students who had protested against Mr. Maduro’s government. He said authorities “put a gun in my mouth, beat my face many times and kicked me.”
The history of El Helicoide goes back 70 years, to the Venezuelan military ruler Marcos Pérez Jiménez, who ordered it built as a shopping mall to project an image of modernity and prosperity fueled by the country’s oil riches.
El Helicoide “is not only unique in Latin America, it’s also a really important architectural site in the Americas,” said Lisa Blackmore, a professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia who co-edited the book “Downward Spiral: El Helicoide’s Descent from Mall to Prison.”
The building is two and a half miles of reinforced concrete wrapped around a hill in Caracas. Ms. Blackmore said it was “designed to be a place where people could freely move around.”
But when Mr. Pérez Jiménez was overthrown in 1958, the unfinished building stood empty for years.
In the 1980s, the government started to transfer some state agencies to El Helicoide, including the intelligence services, now known as SEBIN, which rights groups have accused of numerous human rights violations. Under Mr. Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, the detention center became the focus of international scrutiny.
In 2012, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ordered Venezuela to end the “inhumane and degrading” conditions in which detainees were held at the facility.
But when huge anti-government protests rocked the country in 2014, soon after Mr. Maduro entered office, some of the over 3,000 people arrested were taken to El Helicoide.
A decade later, Mr. Maduro jailed thousands of people who protested his contested victory claim in the 2024 presidential election, and in recent months he had stepped up arbitrary detentions amid escalating tensions with the United States.
El Helicoide was a primary site for detaining high-profile dissidents. Prisoners wait days, weeks, even months to appear before court. Most, according to prisoners’ rights groups, are charged with crimes such as incitement of hate, conspiring to overthrow the government or terrorism, simply for exercising basic political rights.
In 2023, the United Nations’ independent fact-finding mission investigated the 2021 death of General Raúl Isaías Baduel at El Helicoide and found “reasonable grounds to believe” he died as “a direct result of the denial of adequate medical attention.” It also mentioned the “continued existence of torture rooms” there.
In December, Alfredo Díaz, a 55-year-old opposition leader and former governor, also died there.
Francisco Cox, a former member of the U.N. fact-finding mission in Venezuela, said in an interview in September that El Helicoide “is brutal.”
He said the U.N. team was unable to enter the facility but based its findings on the testimony of nearly 500 people, including former detainees and officers. The report detailed “extremely” unsanitary conditions, sexual violence against women prisoners and torture such as electric shocks, asphyxiation and stress positions.
And if the courts issued release orders, Mr. Cox said they were often not carried out, sometimes because Mr. Maduro or Diosdado Cabello, the interior minister who oversees intelligence agencies in the country, intervened.
Mr. Navarro, the former detainee, grew up and lived in a house near El Helicoide. H was eventually released and soon left the country.
“The possibility of El Helicoide being closed — that torture center being shut down — is what gives me a sense of relief,” he said. “El Helicoide changed my life. I will never be the same.”
Genevieve Glatsky contributed reporting.
James Wagner covers news and culture in Latin America for The Times. He is based in Mexico City.
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