184 Days as an American Prisoner

Nearly three months passed before the four of us were allowed on to the concrete patio. Bags were pulled over our heads, we were handcuffed, and then we were taken from the tower, and moved into the deepest section of the prison. When the bags came off, we were surrounded by five layers of wall, coils of barbed wire, and about 25 guards. Other groups of prisoners tended to shuffle around when they were brought outside, but we raced across the concrete like small boys released for recess. We held push-up contests and counted bodyweight squats. Then we tied my shirt around a sandal and used it as a football for a game of jackpot.

Before the guards marched us back to our cells, another prisoner and I planted our feet a few yards apart and began pretending to be characters from the anime series Dragon Ball Z. We yelled and hooted and gathered imaginary energy in our hands to fire at one another. The scene was ridiculous. Four alleged enemies of the state surrounded by enough guards to contain a riot, and the most serious dispute on the patio was who had won a footrace. We were outside for perhaps ten minutes, but even though the sky was overcast, the sunlight felt extraordinary. So did the grit from the concrete under my bare feet.

For some reason, our treatment improved after that. The guards asked us about Dragon Ball Z—which, it turned out, was very popular in Venezuela—and other TV shows, and this gave us something normal to talk about. For a few minutes, we were not being asked about intelligence agencies, invented plots, or the government’s version of how and why we were taken into custody. We were chatting about a cartoon. It sounds trivial now, but in prison, it mattered. During an interrogation, banal facts—where you’ve travelled, who you know, which languages you speak, where you work and who for—all became evidence of whatever predetermined story the interrogator was trying to corroborate. A conversation about Dragon Ball Z was not like this at all. It just gave the guards a reference they understood and turned us all back into human beings who enjoyed the same show.

What was I doing here? I had not passed through Venezuelan immigration or any other recognised port of entry. In November 2024, I was a 32-year-old graduate of UC Berkeley Law and a former US Air Force airborne cryptologic linguist. While I was travelling in the Colombian border region with a man I was dating, corrupt Venezuelan officials spirited us across the border and placed us in government custody. I was later charged with terrorism, financing terrorism, treason against Venezuela, and espionage. This was in the months after the country’s disputed July 2024 election, when several other Americans were also detained.

Once inside the prison, I rarely left my six-by-five-foot cell. When I did, I was usually handcuffed with a bag over my head. The prison guards decided when I could move, eat, sleep, or speak to anyone outside. They woke us at all hours. We had access to almost no reliable information. The information that did reach us arrived in fragments as rumours were passed along to us by the same guards who controlled everything else. Sometimes they planted this information themselves and manipulated language to manipulate perception. A protest was misconduct. A medical need was malingering. Anger was proof that the prisoner was dangerous. Once they assigned you a role, almost anything you did or said could be used to confirm it.