CARACAS, Venezuela – Jesús Armas spent 14 months inside El Helicoide, the notorious Caracas detention center built atop a massive rock in the city’s center. What he remembers most is the absence of sunlight and the constant glare of artificial lighting.
“For weeks at a time I was held in a small, windowless room with no outside contact,” Armas said during a rally outside the building. “They never turned the lights off. There was always artificial light, always. That makes you feel really anxious and kind of paranoid.”
As Venezuela moves tentatively toward a democratic transition, politicians are discussing how to dismantle parts of a repressive system that jailed thousands of dissidents on often dubious charges. Central to that debate is El Helicoide, an imposing structure that began life as an ambitious shopping mall but later became synonymous with detention and torture.
Acting president Delcy Rodríguez has proposed converting the towering site into a sports complex for police and nearby residents. The communications ministry released edited drone footage and said work had begun after consulting local communities. Rodríguez also announced an amnesty law in late January that has led to the release of hundreds of dissidents and emptied some cells at El Helicoide.
Opposition leaders, former inmates and human rights activists oppose erasing the site’s recent history. They argue the building should become a place of memory to prevent forgetting or repeating abuses that occurred there. “I think that El Helicoide should be a museum,” Armas said after his release in January, adding, “We should never forget what happened here.”
El Helicoide’s origins are strikingly different from its current reputation. Conceived in the 1950s as a futuristic shopping center for a wealthy Venezuela buoyed by oil wealth, the structure wraps seven levels around a central rock with wide, spiraling ramps. From afar, it resembles a flying saucer. Its ramps were designed to allow motorists to park facing shops and offices — what cultural historian Celeste Olalquiaga has called “the first… drive-in mall.”
But the project stalled when the dictatorship that had backed it fell in 1958. Political support and financing vanished, and by 1960 construction had halted. The ramps were largely complete, but internal finishes, plumbing and electrical infrastructure were missing. The unfinished complex was briefly used to shelter flood victims before the government transferred it in the 1980s to DISIP, the national intelligence agency. That marked the start of its use as a detention and torture center, Olalquiaga said.
Under Nicolás Maduro’s presidency, abuses at El Helicoide escalated. Human rights activists detained there describe severe mistreatment. Javier Tarazona said he spent months in a 16-foot-wide cell called “the little tiger,” shared with two other inmates and used primarily for interrogation. “They tried to asphyxiate me with a bag,” Tarazona recounted. He also says agents forced him to take scopolamine, a drug that can alter consciousness, to produce confessions for use against opposition figures.
Human rights organizations and U.N. reports have documented patterns of torture and other abuses inside facilities like El Helicoide, and for many former prisoners the building itself is a symbol of state repression.
Those calling for a memorial point to examples like Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, as models for how a place of captivity can be converted into a site of education and remembrance. “We need to focus on non-repetition, and generate a collective memory of what happened here,” Tarazona said.
Olalquiaga acknowledges the building’s size and complexity make multiple uses possible. Currently, only the two lowest levels function as a prison. “The prison cells must be left as a memory place,” she said, “but you cannot take the whole building for that, because it would be a disservice to communities around there that need all sorts of facilities.”
The debate reflects broader tensions in a country balancing justice, rehabilitation and community needs. For some survivors, any plan that treats El Helicoide as merely another public amenity risks erasing the suffering that occurred there. For local residents and officials, repurposing the structure could provide amenities and open public space in a dense, underserved area.
As prisoners are released and political space widens, the fate of El Helicoide remains unresolved. Whether it becomes a sports complex, a museum, a mixed-use facility or something else entirely, the decision will shape how Venezuelans remember — or move on from — one of the country’s most visible sites of repression.
