This is the third installment of a series by Luis Carlos Díaz covering cases of torture, neglect, and cruel treatment against political prisoners, based on the latest report by the UN Fact-Finding Mission. Originally published in Runrunes.
Before examining the findings below, a necessary distinction regarding language must be made. When the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission states that an act “constitutes torture,” it is not relying on a rhetorical flourish. It relies on a precise legal definition anchored in the Convention against Torture, to which Venezuela has been a State Party for over three decades: torture occurs when a public official, or someone acting with official consent or instigation, intentionally inflicts severe physical or mental pain or suffering for a specific purpose—such as extracting information, punishing, intimidating, coercing, or for discriminatory reasons.
Torture is subject to an absolute prohibition. It admits no derogations, not even during states of emergency, nor can it be justified by superior orders. This principle is enshrined in Article 46 of the Venezuelan Constitution and explicitly enacted through a dedicated special law on the books since 2013. With that standard established, let us review what the Mission documented.
The “Azul Celeste” case
In the weeks following January 3, 2026, the military counterintelligence service (DGCIM) arrested several individuals linked to a proceeding known as “Azul Celeste”—a group comprising active-duty and retired CICPC officers, alongside military personnel, accused of an alleged conspiracy to obtain and leak classified intelligence. Before their detentions were formally recognized, several detainees spent between eight and fifteen days held at La Carlota or Boleíta in a legal vacuum that constitutes, as examined in our previous piece, enforced disappearance.
It was during this period of incommunicado detention that the following acts occurred, according to direct victim accounts later shared with their families:
- State agents chained and suspended one victim by the arms for nearly three days, forced them to bear a heavy chain around their neck, and administered electric shocks to their abdomen and lower back.
- State agents suspended another detainee with bound hands for at least 24 hours to force them to unlock their phone.
In the “time machine,” detainees were held in groups of roughly 15, stripped naked, without access to sanitation, and plunged into pitch-black darkness.
- State agents repeatedly beat a man, kept him hooded, and held him chained just above the floor for prolonged periods.
- State agents suspended, severely beat, and electrocuted another individual—at times after dousing them with water to maximize electrical conductivity, tissue damage, and physical agony.
The Mission investigates and connects these accounts precisely, so they do not remain isolated anecdotes. It highlights a critical methodological finding: the close timeline of the arrests, the identical detention sites, and the reproduction of nearly carbon-copy techniques among victims who had no means of coordinating their stories point directly to a coordinated operational playbook. In short, this is an institutional pattern, not an isolated excess by rogue officers.
A “time machine” in El Rodeo
Beyond this specific case, the Mission uncovered an entire infrastructure of punishment cells across detention centers, bearing colloquial names that speak for themselves.
At Rodeo I, there is the infamous “cuarto piso” (fourth floor), where detainees were kept incommunicado for periods ranging from one week to 62 days, subjected to routine beatings, suspended by their wrists, and deliberately exposed to freezing temperatures. German national Oleg Ziesmann was sent there in retaliation for requesting a translation of an address by the Minister of the Interior that detainees were compelled to listen to. He was sprayed with tear gas and spent four days stripped of a bed or blankets, exposed to extremely cold temperatures. French citizen Camilo Castro was also held there, one of the foreign political prisoners who has most outspokenly denounced the tortures endured in Venezuela.
At Rodeo I, state authorities responded with forced feeding: strapping the individual to a gurney with handcuffs and restraints to force a nasogastric or orogastric tube down their throat.
Also at Rodeo I, several released detainees independently and consistently described—despite being released at different times without contact—a punishment cell known as “la máquina del tiempo” (the time machine). It is, quite literally, an underground water tank sealed with a hatch featuring only a narrow slit through which guards pass food and water once a day. Detainees—held in groups of roughly 15, stripped naked, without access to sanitation, and plunged into pitch-black darkness—spent periods ranging from several days up to three months inside. As survivors explained, the moniker refers directly to the absolute disorientation and total loss of any sense of time produced by being buried alive in the dark (paragraph 348).
At Fuerte Guaicaipuro, a military prison located in Valles del Tuy, the Mission documented cells built inside subterranean pits where guards, particularly at night, doused inmates with cold water or urinated directly on them. Food was served only two to three times a week; in some instances, prisoners were forced to dip their bare hands into latrines before eating without utensils, or were fed rations deliberately contaminated with fecal matter. Within the same facility lay another site known as “La Luciérnaga” (The Firefly)—a cramped cell under continuous, 24-hour artificial lighting where detainees were kept stripped, secured in excruciating stress positions, suspended, whipped, drenched with ice water in the early hours of the morning, and left exposed to rodents and insects (paragraph 350).
Resisting and retaliation
A final dimension documented with surgical care is what transpired when detainees resisted using the only instrument left to them: their own bodies.
Investigators corroborated at least three distinct hunger strikes (two at Rodeo I, one at Fuerte Guaicaipuro) staged to contest arbitrary detention or decry cruel treatment. In at least six instances at Rodeo I, state authorities responded with forced feeding: strapping the individual to a gurney with handcuffs and restraints to force a nasogastric or orogastric tube down their throat, tearing internal tissue, while sometimes forcing other inmates to watch to deter them from joining the protest (paragraph 354).
Here, the Mission draws an essential distinction often blurred in public discourse: tube-feeding is not automatically torture when it addresses an authentic medical necessity, preserves human life, and is administered with dignity by independent medical personnel. The violation arises when it is weaponized violently, without demonstrated clinical need, and deployed strictly for punitive control and intimidation. That is precisely what was documented at Rodeo I.
Weighing the corroborating testimonies, the identical execution across unconnected victims, and the recurring practices observed across different facilities, the Mission concluded that reasonable grounds exist to believe these acts constitute torture, not individual lapses. For anyone following this situation today, this remains the most vital fact: these findings do not recount events from a decade ago. They document reality between 2025 and 2026, under the interim administration installed after January 3.
