CARACAS — Jesús Armas spent 14 months inside El Helicoide, a notorious detention center built atop a massive rock in central Caracas. He recalls the absence of sunlight and the constant artificial lighting. Held for weeks in a small, windowless room with no contact with the outside, Armas said the lights were never switched off. “There was always artificial light, always,” he told a rally outside the prison, adding that the effect made him anxious and paranoid.
As Venezuela edges toward a tentative transition, politicians are debating how to dismantle the repressive systems that jailed thousands of dissidents. Central to that discussion is El Helicoide — a striking, unfinished structure that began life in the 1950s as an ambitious shopping mall and was later repurposed as the headquarters of the nation’s intelligence service. Its towering ramps and terraced levels, built around the rock, give it a flying-saucer look; its vast spaces were meant for offices and shops, with the ramps functioning like drive-in mall lanes.
The mall project stalled after the dictatorship that backed it collapsed in 1958, leaving the concrete shell without finishes, plumbing or electricity. The building was briefly used to shelter flood victims before the government handed it to DISIP, the intelligence police, in the 1980s. Olalquiaga, a cultural historian who wrote about El Helicoide, says the conversion to a detention site marked the start of its association with imprisonment and abuse.
Under Nicolás Maduro, human rights abuses at El Helicoide intensified. Detainees recount isolation, harsh interrogations and torture. Human rights activist Javier Tarazona described being confined to a 16-foot cell called “the little tiger” with two others, allowed out only for interrogations. He says agents tried to asphyxiate him with a bag and forced him to take scopolamine to elicit recordings they could use against opposition figures.
Now, amid an amnesty law that has freed hundreds of dissidents, the government of acting president Delcy Rodríguez has proposed repurposing the site as a sports complex for police and nearby residents. The communications ministry posted edited drone footage and said work had begun after consulting local communities.
Opposition leaders and former detainees reject turning El Helicoide into recreational space as an attempt to erase or whitewash the abuses that occurred there. Armas and others say the building should become a museum or memorial so the suffering and political repression are not forgotten. “We should never forget what happened here,” Armas said. Tarazona suggested a center like Robben Island in South Africa to preserve collective memory and guard against repetition.
Historians and activists argue for a compromise: preserve the cells and detention areas as a memory site while adapting other, unused portions of the building to serve the surrounding communities. Only the two lower levels are currently used as a prison, and the structure’s size could accommodate multiple functions. “The prison cells must be left as a memory place,” Celeste Olalquiaga said, “but you cannot take the whole building for that, because it would be a disservice to communities that are around there, that need all sorts of facilities.”
The debate over El Helicoide captures larger tensions in Venezuela’s transition: how to confront past abuses, ensure accountability and build public institutions that serve citizens — not silence them. Decisions about the iconic building will test whether the country can balance remembrance and justice with community needs as it seeks a new democratic path.