An individual standing close to Times Square in New York City wears a digital actuality headset screening an immersive expertise of the circumstances at Venezuela’s El Helicoide jail, on Sept. 19, 2023. Protesters gathered to demand the discharge of political prisoners and the closure of the detention heart over allegations of torture.

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An individual standing close to Times Square in New York City wears a digital actuality headset screening an immersive expertise of the circumstances at Venezuela’s El Helicoide jail, on Sept. 19, 2023. Protesters gathered to demand the discharge of political prisoners and the closure of the detention heart over allegations of torture.

Stefan Jeremiah/AP

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — After being tortured and brutalized throughout 129 days at El Helicoide, Venezuela’s most infamous jail for dissidents, human rights activist Víctor Navarro was decided to reveal its horrors to the world.

He wrote a e-book, nevertheless it did not seize the true insanity of El Helicoide — which is Spanish for helicoid, named for its helix design.

But then Navarro took a virtual reality tour of the home of Holocaust sufferer Anne Frank. Although viewing it in Argentina, it made him really feel like he was proper within the secret annex in Amsterdam the place Frank hid from the Nazis for 25 months earlier than she was captured and despatched to a focus camp, the place she died of typhus.

Víctor Navarro, a Venezuelan former political prisoner and developer of the “Helicoide Reality” venture, exhibits the digital actuality tour simulating the circumstances during which the prisoners stay within the jail, throughout an interview with AFP in Buenos Aires on July 27, 2023.

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Víctor Navarro, a Venezuelan former political prisoner and developer of the “Helicoide Reality” venture, exhibits the digital actuality tour simulating the circumstances during which the prisoners stay within the jail, throughout an interview with AFP in Buenos Aires on July 27, 2023.

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“It was really moving,” Navarro tells NPR. “So, I decided: This is what I’m going to do.”

After working with 3D graphic designers and interviewing 30 former Venezuelan political prisoners, Navarro put collectively a digital actuality tour of El Helicoide. Then, he hit the street, VR headsets in hand, to coach audiences within the U.S, Europe and Latin America concerning the rising repression of Venezuela’s authoritarian regime.

Navarro, 28, lives in Argentina the place he has refugee standing. Ex-inmates that he interviewed for the venture have been largely inside Venezuela.

It’s an intense expertise. With Navarro narrating (in Spanish, with an English model additionally obtainable), viewers are led into Helicoide’s darkish, cramped, underground cells which might be fouled by human feces. Flies buzz, water drips, cockroaches scurry away.

Víctor Navarro exhibits on his laptop computer a part of the digital actuality tour of Venezuela’s El Helicoide jail.

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Víctor Navarro exhibits on his laptop computer a part of the digital actuality tour of Venezuela’s El Helicoide jail.

Luis Robayo/AFP through Getty Images

Then comes the accounts of former inmates. One tells of being handcuffed and shoved inside a tiny, isolation cell the place he might barely transfer. Another describes virtually suffocating when a guard pulled a plastic bag over his head.

A display screen seize from the digital actuality expertise created by Venezuelan former political prisoner Víctor Navarro.

Víctor Navarro/Screenshot by NPR

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Víctor Navarro/Screenshot by NPR

A display screen seize from the digital actuality expertise created by Venezuelan former political prisoner Víctor Navarro.

Víctor Navarro/Screenshot by NPR

“That’s when the real torture began,” the previous inmate says. “I don’t know how many times I fainted.”

There’s even sound, which Navarro says was secretly recorded by one other prisoner on his cellphone, of a detainee screaming as guards shock him with electrical energy.

“The idea of doing something through virtual reality was spectacular,” says Antony Vegas, an opposition activist who was detained on the Helicoide for 5 years and labored on the venture with Navarro after he was launched. “It’s a way to teach what torture at El Helicoide is really like.”

One fan is Javier Corrales, a Venezuela knowledgeable at Amherst College in Massachusetts who, alongside along with his college students, took the VR tour of the Helicoide throughout Navarro’s current go to to the campus.

“There are plenty of talks and exhibits about human rights violations, political prisoners and torture, but nothing like this,” Corrales says. “And there is nothing as portable and as vivid as this technology can produce.”

One of Corrales’ college students, Giulia Miotto, stated the expertise left her shaking and sweating. In a category paper she wrote: “I truly hope that this virtual reality experience of El Helicoide is able to help drive its closure. In the meantime, it is devastating that these atrocities are ongoing.”

The Venezuelan authorities didn’t reply to NPR’s requests for remark. But in 2022 it “categorically rejected” a U.N. report that described the widespread torture of political prisoners within the nation’s jails.

Ironically, the Helicoide was as soon as a symbol of Venezuela’s progress amid an oil growth.

A view of Venezuela’s intelligence police headquarters, referred to as el Helicoide, in Caracas, Venezuela, 2018. It was the identical yr that Navarro was introduced there.

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A view of Venezuela’s intelligence police headquarters, referred to as el Helicoide, in Caracas, Venezuela, 2018. It was the identical yr that Navarro was introduced there.

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Construction started within the Fifties beneath dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez. It was designed to be a luxurious shopping center and conference heart. Its spiral design suggests a spaceship and drew praise from artist Salvador Dalí and poet Pablo Neruda.

However, Jiménez was pressured out in 1958, and successive governments misplaced curiosity within the advanced, which remained unfinished. At one level within the Nineteen Seventies, the constructing stuffed up with squatters. Eventually, components of El Helicoide have been occupied by the state intelligence service, which added jail cells within the backside flooring.

Navarro arrived there in 2018 when he was arrested for participating in huge protests towards President Nicolás Maduro, who throughout 11 years in energy has led Venezuela into its worst financial disaster in historical past. Police officers burst into Navarro’s dwelling, put a shotgun to his head, and led him off to El Helicoide.

“That’s when the hell began,” he says in his NPR interview.

Navarro was slapped, kicked, thrown to the ground. He recollects a guard placing three bullets into his pistol then inserting it in Navarro’s mouth, although he did not pull the set off. But he says it was even worse listening to the screams of fellow prisoners who have been being tortured in close by cells. He had been falsely accused of conspiring towards the Maduro regime however after 4 months behind bars was all of the sudden launched.

He is one among almost 16,000 dissidents who’ve been imprisoned in Venezuela since 2014, which could be the highest variety of political prisoners in Latin America, says Alfredo Romero, who heads the Caracas human rights group Foro Penal (Spanish for Criminal Forum). Although most have been launched, many stay traumatized.

Andreina Baduel (second from proper) joins others to protest towards the taking of what they name political prisoners outdoors the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service constructing referred to as El Helicoide, in Caracas, Venezuela, Nov 3, 2021. Baduel is the daughter of former Defense Minister Raúl Isaías Baduel, who died in jail in 2021.

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Andreina Baduel (second from proper) joins others to protest towards the taking of what they name political prisoners outdoors the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service constructing referred to as El Helicoide, in Caracas, Venezuela, Nov 3, 2021. Baduel is the daughter of former Defense Minister Raúl Isaías Baduel, who died in jail in 2021.

Ariana Cubillos/AP

“When you get out, you are not the same person,” Navarro says.

Behind bars he misplaced 40 kilos and, as soon as at dwelling in Caracas, had recurring nightmares, could not keep in mind individuals’s names, and sensed that he was all the time being adopted. Eventually, he fled Venezuela, put collectively the VR tour, and hit the street, visiting about 20 international locations.

Meanwhile, Vegas, the previous detainee who labored with Navarro on the VR tour, is discreetly presenting it to small audiences in Caracas and hoping that he will not be rearrested for doing so. Indeed, as Maduro maneuvers for one more six-year time period in July’s presidential election, his antidemocratic crackdown continues. Romero, of Foro Penal, places the present variety of political prisoners at 264, together with 67 in El Helicoide.

That’s why Navarro continues to unfold the phrase — by digital actuality.

“We are exposing what the Venezuelan government doesn’t want people to see,” he says. “It shows the scale of the crimes they are committing.”