Inside a Venezuelan Political Prison: False Identities and Kangaroo Courts

Not long after I spent 11 days in a bare-bones clinic attached to the prison, where staff struggled to provide even ibuprofen, inmates across from my cell told me the loose sheet outside my door carried a new name: Jhon Piamond. I could see the same kind of sheets outside other cells, but the angle prevented me from seeing my own.

The name sounded invented: Jhon was a Venezuelan spelling of John, and Piamond was simply Diamond with its first letter changed.

During bed checks, guards called for Jhon Piamond and waited for me to respond.

“Who the hell is Jhon Piamond?” I asked.

No one explained the name. The guards did not appear confused about who I was, and the other Americans held with me knew my identity. Yet the institution could still put an invented name outside my cell and treat it as official.

This was not ordinary intake confusion. We were at Rodeo Uno, Venezuela’s only maximum-security prison, a place whose electrical system ran through jury-rigged exposed copper wiring. Rodeo Uno held Venezuelans and foreign nationals whose detention was entangled with politics and diplomacy. At that point, I had not yet been formally charged. Nearly four months into my detention, authorities imposed the same one-size-fits-all accusations I saw used against foreign prisoners regardless of nationality or arrival date: terrorism, financing terrorism, espionage, and treason against Venezuela. The paperwork and proceedings inside gave us little reliable information about whether we would leave. The formal process could create the appearance of movement without changing our status.

Twenty-eight days later, on January 31, 2025, four of the six Americans held at Rodeo Uno were released. Two more were brought from another prison in Caracas, replacing me and another Rodeo Uno prisoner on the six-person release list. I was moved from the fourth-floor area known as Gringolandia to a floor with Venezuelan prisoners. People across from me told me the paper outside my cell now said “Joseph St. Clair.”

No official announced a correction or acknowledged that the former identity had been false. The prison stopped calling me Jhon Piamond. Later, foreign prisoners arrived under what I understood to be their real names.

I inferred that the false names had served a concealment function. Once the released Americans could tell the United States government who remained inside, the fiction had lost much of its value. I cannot prove that was the institution’s reasoning. I can say the practice changed when the political circumstances changed.

On March 7, the prison assembled roughly 150 detainees, first men and later women, from many countries. We spoke different languages. We wore blue uniforms and handcuffs. Masked guards carrying rifles moved through the room. We sat on small folding chairs while officials occupied a cheap folding table that looked better suited to a garage poker game than a court.

A lawyer addressed the room in rapid Spanish. I raised my hand and told him to slow down because many of us were not native speakers. He did.

When he finished, I asked two questions.

“What’s my name?”

He could not answer.

“What country am I from?”

He could not answer that either.

I asked how he could represent me without knowing either fact.

The problem was larger than one unprepared lawyer. Whatever officials called the event, it was a kangaroo court. Authorities presented blanket evidence drawn from a case years earlier and reused it for each batch of prisoners, rather than connect any person to an individual accusation. The presiding judge, Carlos Enrique Liendo Acosta, made the lawlessness explicit. When prisoners invoked international law, consular access, and international agreements, he laughed and said they did not matter. Neither did our rights. We would go through the process anyway.

When a prisoner asked a question, an armed guard stepped directly in front of him. The intimidation was obvious. But after I asked my questions and was not immediately punished, other prisoners began asking questions too. Officials eventually cut the session short.

Then nothing happened.

We received no ruling, sentence, deportation order, written disposition, or announced next step. We returned to our cells with the same status we had before.

The proceeding still had an effect. It consumed a day and gave us material to analyze for weeks. Did the lawyer’s arrival mean our cases were moving? Did the judge’s appearance signal deportation? Were releases approaching? Official silence turned every detail into evidence.

I came to think of that effect as breadcrumbing. The proceeding offered a sign of apparent movement, enough to renew hope and speculation, without providing useful information or surrendering control. I don’t know whether that psychological effect was intended. But a proceeding that changed nothing could still occupy prisoners long after it ended.

The reliable signals were quieter and more material.

Before the January 31 release, I watched the treatment of the Americans housed with me change. They received substantially more food. They were taken onto the patio for the first time. Medical staff checked them more often, especially the older men.

A similar pattern began about a week before May 14, the date I had been told I would leave. Staff fed me more, took me outside for sunlight, increased my clinic visits, and quietly provided insect repellent because I had been covered in bites.

Those changes required resources and altered routines. They were not promises or courtroom theater. They were the clearest signs that someone expected to transfer a living person whose physical condition would soon be visible outside the prison. My release did not occur on May 14, but I left on May 20.

By then I trusted an extra serving of food more than a judge. A cell label could be fiction. A kangaroo court could produce weeks of hope and no legal result. Food, sunlight, and medical attention were signs that the institution was preparing to act.

The court told us nothing. The food did.