Venezuelan Prison Messages Travel Home on Wrappers, Laundry, and Hope

In a small apartment near Caracas, Adriana Briceño holds onto a chocolate wrapper with a note from her son to Ángel Godoy, who is held in El Helicoide. The BBC reported that their makeshift mail system highlights a bigger debate about prisoner releases, memory, and the future.

El Helicoide and the Geography of Fear

Briceño holds the wrapper as if it were a receipt. At first, it looks like trash—the kind of thing that gets stuck to the bottom of a bag. But the blue ink is still clear. The BBC reported that her son wrote it for his father while Ángel Godoy was imprisoned in Venezuela’s notorious El Helicoide jail.

“Daddy, take this to sweeten things a little,” the wrapper reads. “We love you.”

A child’s words are trying to carry an adult’s hope.

The problem is that El Helicoide has always been more than just a prison. Built in the 1950s as a luxury shopping center, it was never finished and later taken over by Venezuela’s feared intelligence services. The BBC reported it became a symbol of government repression—a building that looked ambitious but served as a warning.

A United Nations investigation documented that people who had been arbitrarily arrested or forcibly disappeared were taken there and, in some cases, tortured, according to the BBC’s reporting. Recently released detainees like Godoy described brutal conditions in interviews with the BBC, the broadcaster reported.

Godoy is one of hundreds of political prisoners arrested under President Nicolás Maduro and held in Venezuela’s vast detention system, sometimes for years. More than 600 people have been released since U.S. forces seized Maduro in a military operation at the start of January. However, prisoners’ rights group Foro Penal says hundreds more are still behind bars, as reported by the BBC.

At home, Briceño doesn’t need a policy brief to understand what detention does to a family. She has the wrapper. Later, she has the T-shirt. Everyday things that refuse to feel ordinary.

Godoy told the BBC that before his release, he faced enforced isolation and threats aimed at his family. Not just in theory or as a metaphor, but as a form of control. When a state creates a detention system that can hold people for months without contact, it also creates another system outside the prison walls—one that changes work, housing, and spreads fear.

Briceño told BBC she was fired from her job at a state-run telecoms company after her husband’s arrest, without being given a reason, despite having worked there for 21 years. She told the BBC that being alone at home with her son made her feel so vulnerable that she decided to move. “I was terrified that people might show up and break into my home,” she told the BBC.

This is what repression looks like in everyday life. A job vanishes. A family has to move. A mother counts the days without answers.

For the first few weeks after Godoy’s arrest, Briceño did not even know where he was being held. She told the BBC it took 25 days for officials to confirm he was inside El Helicoide, and only then was she allowed to take him clothes, medicine, and bed sheets. It took even longer, 96 days, for her to be granted regular visits, she told the BBC.

So the wrapper is more than just a message. It’s a record of the time between when someone disappears and when the system finally admits where they are.

Punishment Cells Built to Break the Clock

Javier Tarazona has a way of describing arrest that strips the scene down to essentials. “They handcuffed me, beat me, insulted me, and put a balaclava on me as they put me inside a patrol car,” he told the BBC, recalling the moment he was arrested in July 2021.

He knew he was on the radar of Venezuela’s state security agencies, he told the BBC, but he still struggled to process what was happening. “The first few hours were terrible,” Tarazona told the BBC.

Those hours expanded into 1,675 days in detention—more than 4.5 years.

After his arrest, Tarazona told the BBC he was taken to a tiny punishment cell where all new prisoners were placed. It was full of rats and cockroaches and smelled “nauseating,” he said. These details matter because they remind us that a prison is still just a room, a ceiling, a corner you can’t escape.

Tarazona, head of the human rights NGO Fundaredes, came to the attention of authorities after he called for a formal investigation into alleged links between high-ranking Venezuelan government officials and guerrilla groups in neighbouring Colombia, according to the BBC. He was arrested alongside his brother, José. The pair were held with another activist in a tiny cell, the BBC reported.

The room was so small they had to take turns lying down, Tarazona told BBC, and they placed a piece of cardboard over a sewer hole as a makeshift mattress. Foro Penal says these small punishment cells, known as “little tigers,” are a common feature of the Venezuelan prison system, as reported by the BBC.

“We spent 46 days there,” Tarazona told the BBC. “Then they decided to move us to another space off the same hallway, which was a little bigger, but just as disgusting, just as depressing.”

They could not see daylight and had no way to tell whether it was day or night. Guards gave meals at irregular hours to mess with their sense of time, he told the BBC. What this does is make even the calendar feel like a privilege. Even the clock becomes contraband.

Both Tarazona and Godoy deny committing any of the crimes they were accused of and say they never received proper legal representation after they were detained, according to the BBC. Tarazona told the BBC he was denied the right to hire his own lawyer and was only allowed to see a court-appointed one seven months after he was imprisoned, despite facing charges including treason, terrorism, and incitement to hatred. During his 1,675 days in detention, he told the BBC, he saw a lawyer fewer than five times.

Godoy was charged with terrorism, hate crimes, and incitement to armed action, but he told the BBC he never saw the case file against him and never knew who his defence lawyer was, despite being held for over a year.

A detention system isn’t just bars and locks. It’s also about withheld paperwork. It’s about the feeling that the rules can change without warning.

A New Name for an Old Place

For Godoy, the biggest strain was not the conditions but separation from loved ones. “The torture of not knowing where your family members are, how they are, because they cut you off, they isolate you from the world,” he told the BBC.

He said he was detained without warning outside his home by a large group of security officials, then held without contact with his family for 96 days. “I have to assume the aim is to break you,” he told BBC.

After more than three months, Godoy told the BBC that a prison staff member said authorities might let his wife call him—but only if she agreed to reduce her activity on social media and in the press. The choice was clear: speak less, and you might hear his voice; speak more, and you might lose contact completely.

Tarazona told the BBC that pressure also reached his family. “In the middle of an interrogation, an official said: ‘Do you know this woman?’” he told the BBC. The official was holding a photo of Tarazona’s 70-year-old mother, whom authorities had arrested. Tarazona told BBC the man issued a threat: “Give me the video I’m asking for, or your mother will go to jail.”

Authorities wanted Tarazona to agree to be recorded, accusing other activists of committing crimes, he told the BBC. “I always refused,” he told the BBC. “I always refused because I knew my mother would overcome that ordeal.” Hours later, she was released, he told the BBC.

Another burden stayed with him. His brother was not part of the NGO Tarazona had been running, he told the BBC. He had been driving him on the day of the arrest. “I felt a great deal of guilt,” Tarazona told the BBC. “My brother kept telling me that because of my fight, he was paying for something that wasn’t his responsibility. And that was a burden.”

Then, back at the family home, Briceño holds up an old T-shirt with sentences scrawled in pen. The BBC reported that the family sent notes to Godoy on sweet wrappers, and he replied by writing on dirty laundry taken out of the jail.

“Adriana, you are the most beautiful woman in the world,” the shirt reads. There is also a message to his son: “Go and excel in your classes, okay?”

“Ways of sending messages like this emerged in El Helicoide,” Godoy told the BBC. “They served as a bridge between many prisoners and their families.”

Even after he was allowed visits, those secret messages still mattered, the BBC reported. Because a visit can be monitored, a wrapper can be folded into a pocket. A shirt can pass as ordinary until you read it.

In January, Venezuela’s interim president Delcy Rodríguez told parliament that El Helicoide would be turned into a social, sports, and cultural centre for police families and surrounding communities, according to the BBC. Some rights groups have described this move as an attempt to whitewash the facility’s past, the BBC reported.

This is the policy debate now. It’s not just about who gets released, when, and under what conditions. It’s also about what a country does with the buildings that once held its fear.

Tarazona told the BBC he has not allowed the experience to make him angry. After guards discovered a book and letters he had been writing, he was placed in an isolation cell as punishment, the BBC reported. “I found light in that ordeal and from that pain,” he told the BBC. “I found an opportunity to reflect and work on forgiveness.” He said he left convinced Venezuelans need reconciliation and to come together again, because “this situation we are living through is a tragedy, a trans-generational trauma,” he told the BBC.

Godoy’s appeal lands in the same place, even after what he describes. “After all that abuse, after all that cruelty, after all that evil, it seems unbelievable that I’m asking people, that I’m asking my fellow political prisoners, too, to get that out of here, out of our hearts,” he told BBC. He asked for “every trace of hatred, of resentment, of bitterness, of discontent,” he told BBC. Then he pushed the thought further. “Let the country’s interests come first, regardless of political party or ambition,” he told the BBC. “Let us move forward without hatred, resentment, or bitterness to build that wonderful Venezuela,” he told the BBC.

Briceño still keeps the wrapper. Crinkled. Saved. Refusing to disappear. In Latin America, where many institutions have asked people to forget to move on, a small piece of paper can become a quiet act of resistance. Not a slogan. A record.

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