"At 16, I Endured Pistol Whipping and Humiliation in a Venezuelan Jail – 'Devil' Guards Said I Was in Hell"

DYLAN Canache was just 16-years-old when he was thrown into Nicolas Maduro’s notorious torture prison.

Inside El Helicoide, a huge guard loomed over the teen, demanding: “Do you know where you are?”

Dylan was 5ft tall and 16 years old when he was captured by Maduro’s secret police Credit: Dylan Canache The teen was tortured in El Helicoide, a prison for political prisoners in Caracas Credit: Dylan Canache

“I’m the devil, and you’re in hell,” he barked.

Dylan told The Sun how he spent six months being beaten and abused in a hellhole jail, where he was forced to defecate in dinner trays.

His was protesting the dictator who had driven his country to the brink of starvation.

Dylan first joined protests against Venezuela’s regime aged 12 after seeing the miles-long lines in Caracas of people trying to get bread and .

For years, he marched the streets of Caracas with his childhood friends, desperately trying to force change.

“There was hope in the protests,” he said, but “they felt like war.”

He said: “They shot us with live ammunition, used tear bombs, which they had adapted to make them do more damage. They increased the water pressure in these huge tanks that we called ‘whales’.”

Many were killed in the brutal crackdown on dissent, which came to a head in 2017 when security services infiltrated protest groups.

At a meeting to organise a protest when he was 16, Dylan saw the first of his friends being beaten and thrown into an unmarked white van. He knew he would be next, and ran for his life.

He hid, laying low for days and trying to make escape plans. But he says he was tricked into coming out of his mum’s house by a message sent from the phone of his best friend.

She had agreed to wait outside in a taxi to help him escape Caracas. He rapidly packed a bag and came out to meet her.

Dylan said: “I saw her, I hugged her, and the moment I hugged her, she said ‘forgive me’. When she said those words masked men leapt out of the van in unmarked uniforms with long guns. A white van pulled up next to us and they threw me in, yelling insults.”

The men interrogated Dylan, accusing him of , and shouted wild accusations in his face.

Dylan wearing a mask to protect for tear gas Credit: Dylan Canache The teen at a protest in 2017 Credit: Dylan Canache

His captors taunted him, asking if he knew where he was being taken.

“The driver pointed at me with his gun, and told me I was going to my death,” Dylan said.

He says the men beat him repeatedly with their guns, bombarding him with questions and allegations.

He believed that they were going to kill him, but says what happened next was worse.

Dylan was taken to Maduro’s notorious torture centre, El Helicoide.

After being told he was in hell, the teen says he was taken to a room and beaten as guards tried to force him to read a false confession on camera.

The script he had been handed claimed that he was a terrorist funded by an opposition leader, which he says was made up.

Dylan said: “I didn’t know how to react – they were such serious claims, and so outrageous. To put it into context I was 16, just 5ft tall, I weighed just 50kg, I couldn’t be a terrorist. I was a child.”

When he refused to read the faked confession, he was beaten, Dylan said.

“They started to beat me in the ribs, again and again,” he added.

He refused to read the statement five times before guards dragged him to a cell.

Dylan said: “As they took me to the cell, they told me they were going to rape me, that a man was going to rape me. I was terrified. I was in a state of complete panic.”

Dylan was tracked down by the secret police and held in a hellhole jail for six months as a political prisoner Credit: Dylan Canache Dylan, now 24 and living in Spain Credit: Dylan Canache

The cell, designed for no more than four people, had been packed with 16 political prisoners, many of them also like Dylan.

Maduro’s regime always denied that any children were in the El Helicoide torture centre – but Dylan says he knew of at least six.

The cell was dark with one small lamp, and prisoners were never allowed out to see natural light, Dylan says.

For at least a week, no fresh drinking water was handed out, with inmates surviving on tiny amounts of dirty water.

On the rare occasions Dylan and the others left their cells, they would be dragged away and tortured, he said.

Prisoners tried to keep track of the days by the schedule of their meals, often “rotten food and raw chicken”.

He said: “Mentally it was brutal. We lost all sense of time, and didn’t know if it was the day or the night. The only way we could tell was the order of the meals.

“The breakfast was one thing, the lunch another and the dinner another. But the dinner was the same as the breakfast. So many times we’d during the day, they’d bring us the dinner and we’d think it was breakfast.

“And there were long stretches of time where we were given no food at all.”

There was a small bathroom area in the corner of the cell, but no running water or working toilet.

Dylan and the others were forced to relieve themselves in “in the trays in which they brought us the food” and urinate in bottles.

“After eating, we would do our business there, and seal them with plastic bags,” he said.

Waste wasn’t taken away, so “mountains of trays full of excrement, with bottles and bottles full of urine” piled up in the cell.

The smell was overwhelming, Dylan said, and the cell was littered with cockroaches.

Guards would play cruel tricks on the prisoners, telling them to pack their things for release.

Dylan said: “They would tell us, ‘Tomorrow you’re being freed’. And we’d pack. But then the next day, we would realise they had just been making fun of us.”

Dylan feared he would die in El Helicoide.

He said: “People say that hope is the last thing you lose. But I lost hope in El Helicoide. I reached a point where I thought I was never going to get out of there.”

One night, a guard burst into the cell, waving his gun.

Dylan said: “He was shouting that he wanted to kill us, that we were all terrorists and that we should all be dead. Then he drew his weapon, stuck it inside the cell and pulled the trigger right on a cellmate’s chest.

“When he pulled the trigger the gun was not loaded, but we went into a complete panic because we had no idea what else this person might do.”

Dylan was not released directly from El Helicoide, but first transferred to a juvenile detention centre, where he received “special treatment” – which was intense forced exercise.

He said: “I was only there 15 days, but it was 15 days where they woke me up every day and beat me with a broomstick on my ribs.

“It was 15 days in which they forced me to eat excessive amounts of food to claim that I was being fed. They forced me to do absurd amounts of exercise.

“There was brainwashing. For example, when you did a squat you had to shout, ‘Chávez lives,’ when you bent down. And when you stood up, ‘‘The struggle continues’.”

He had not been allowed to see his parents for the entire six months he was detained.

“They were completely destroyed,” Dylan said.

“It was very hard for them. My mum stopped eating, she fell into a deep . And when my father tried to come and visit me, they beat him as well.”

When he was released, Dylan fled to with his mum, but said he’ll “never truly feel safe”.

He said: “It’s brutal because the blows heal. They hit you, and you heal. But when they torture you psychologically, the psychological wounds do not heal.

“That gave me anxiety, depression – I still deal with that every day. Those of us who tell our stories will never truly be free. The psychological scars don’t fade.

“We’ll never be normal people in Venezuela, we’ll carry this mark on us as political prisoners for the rest of our lives.”

Dylan, now 24, is desperate to return to his country, and still carries hope that one day it will be safe for him to return.

But he said the regime needs to change and he can’t face being tortured again.

“I would rather they kill me than send me back to El Helicoide,” he said.

“If tomorrow they came and tried to capture me, I’d want them to kill me. I can’t go back there.”