Sawt Falasteen - A French yoga teacher's 'hell' in a Venezuelan jail

Castro, who has Chilean origins, was detained on June 26, 2025 after crossing into Venezuela from neighboring Colombia, where he lived.

His plan was to renew his Colombian visa by exiting and immediately re-entering the South American country.

But he was pounced upon by masked agents from Venezuela's intelligence services, who whisked him away to an underground prison in the oil city of Maracaibo.

His ordeal there provides an insight into conditions suffered by hundreds of dissidents over three decades of repression under ousted leader Nicolas Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chavez.

"They left me there all night, with damp walls, toilets in a deplorable state with hundreds of cockroaches and fecal matter that has built up over months," Castro recounted.

Scanning the cell, he saw "several traces of blood on the walls" and a table "with different torture instruments."

The following day he was interrogated by a military intelligence agent, who told him he "didn't buy my story of a yoga teacher building a life for himself in Colombia.

"He told me I was a spy and would spend several years in prison and that he had ways of 'opening me up' -- that that was his job," the 41-year-old said in a video interview from Paris.

- Propaganda on loop -

From Maracaibo, the tall, soft-spoken Frenchman was transferred to Caracas, first to a military intelligence detention center and then to the Rodeo 1 prison east of Caracas, where dozens of political prisoners, including several foreigners, were held.

The Toulouse native said he was initially relieved to be separated from common-law prisoners, but that his conditions in detention remained grim.

Food was scarce and the prisoners kept getting sick.

"We had constant diarrhea, throat and lung infections. We had no real toilets and got water just twice a day," he said.

Propaganda blared from loudspeakers for up to five hours.

At other times, the soundtrack was "extremely loud" folk music.

The middle of the night brought interrogation and torture sessions, he said, describing the various ways in which prison guards tried "to break us."

"They made us come out in a line, hooded and cuffed, and insulted us," he said.

The prisoners were interrogated and subjected to mock trials.

Castro was accused of being an agent of the CIA or of the US Drug Enforcement Agency and subjected to polygraph tests, during which the same set of questions was put to him for hours.

All lived in fear of being punished, which entailed being sent to a torture cell, where prisoners were beaten, "suffocated with teargas" or had a plastic bag sprayed with insecticide tied around their heads.

- Sodomized with tubes -

Some prisoners were forcibly intubated, others sodomized with tubes, he said, adding that "soldiers and (prison) directors took part in these torture sessions with a certain relish."

Castro himself escaped such methods.

He said that he had considered mutinying over lack of access to books made available by French consular services but was advised against doing so by a fellow inmate who had spent over 20 years behind bars.

"He told me: 'They will torture you. Within a minute they will have destroyed your body and within five they will have destroyed your life. Forget the books, you'll read them some day in the future'."

Castro was freed in late November after strenuous diplomatic efforts by France and flown home to Paris, where his mother had been frantically awaiting news of his fate.

Paris said Brazil and Mexico assisted in the negotiations.

Castro wants to be officially recognized as a victim by the French state.

He began telling his story last month to shine a light on the hundreds of political prisoners still behind bars in Venezuela.

Despite all his "bad memories" he said he hopes to return one day to a country to which he now feels "inextricably tied."

I.Yassin--SF-PST