US traveller recounts brutal detention in Venezuela’s feared prisons: ‘They beat me, chained me up’

James Luckey’s ordeal sheds light on the mistreatment political prisoners faced under Nicolás Maduro There were few countries James Luckey didn’t see during three years backpacking across the Americas, from Haiti and Honduras to Bolivia and Uruguay. Early last December, he set off from a budget hotel in the Brazilian Amazon hoping to fill in one of the final gaps. Luckey’s intended destination was the two-billion-year-old tabletop mountain Mount Roraima, one of the most spectacular corners of South America’s most troubled nation, Venezuela. But within hours of crossing into the border town of Santa Elena de Uairén, that plan went up in smoke. The 28-year-old New Yorker was stopped at a military checkpoint and collared by counter-intelligence agents in ski masks who seemed to suspect he was a spy. Rather than starting the breathtaking multi-day trek up the 2,810-metre tepui, Luckey was detained and put on the first of a series of flights that would eventually land him in the headquarters of Venezuela’s feared General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence (DGCIM), more than 1,000km away in Caracas. There, Luckey says he was placed in solitary confinement, forced to