CARACAS, Venezuela — Jesús Armas spent 14 months inside El Helicoide, a notorious prison built on top of a massive rock in the center of the capital Caracas.
One of the things that struck him the most about the place was the lack of sunlight, and the excess of artificial lighting.
For weeks at a time, the activist was held in a small room with no windows, where he was allowed no contact with the outside world. Armas said the prison wardens never switched off the lights.
"There was always artificial light, always," Armas said, during a rally outside the prison, which has become synonymous with torture. "That makes you feel really anxious and kind of paranoid."
As Venezuela starts a slow and uncertain transition to democracy, politicians here are looking at ways to dismantle a repressive system — that jailed thousands of dissidents on trumped up charges.
And a debate has emerged over what to do with El Helicoide, an imposing prison in the center of the Caracas that was initially meant to be a futuristic shopping mall, but was left unfinished.
Venezuela's acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, has proposed turning the towering site into a sports complex that could be used by police officers and residents of two nearby shanty towns.
But opposition leaders have described the proposal as an effort to erase the crimes committed in the prison, where inmates were often isolated for months at a time, and tortured by agents seeking information on the activities of opposition activists.
"I think that El Helicoide should be a museum," said Armas, who was released from the prison in January, following a U.S. raid on Caracas that led to the arrest of former President Nicolás Maduro.
"We should never forget what happened here."
While many prisons in Venezuela became known as torture sites, El Helicoide stands out for its imposing architecture — and its unexpected descent into darkness.
The building was constructed in the 1950s as a shopping mall for wealthy Venezuelans, in a country whose economy was booming thanks to its up-and-coming oil industry.
It has seven levels that are built in between wide ramps that spiral around a massive rock. From a distance it looks like a flying saucer.
The wide ramps are lined with parking spots that face spaces meant to be offices or shops.
"It is really the first … drive in a mall," said Celeste Olalquiaga, a cultural historian who published a book about El Helicoide in 2018.
She said that the concrete structure, with its large, terraced levels, impressed the architects of the time.
"There was an article, I think it was in the Times that said, how is it possible that the U.S., the country that's developing commercial centers and has all these roads … never put them together and the Venezuelans did," Olalquiaga said.
But the ambitious mall was never finished.
When the dictatorship that ran Venezuela collapsed in 1958, the project lost political backing — and the loans that El Helicoide's developers depended on. By 1960, construction had ground to a halt.
While the building's famous ramps had been finished, its levels were still incomplete, with no subdivisions for offices or shops.
"Everything that implies finishes was missing," Olalquiaga said. "It didn't even have the kind of infrastructure of plumbing or electricity"
The building was abandoned, and used briefly to house flood victims.
Then in the 1980s, the government turned El Helicoide over to DISIP, the nation's intelligence police.
"The jail and torture activity began then," Olalquiaga said.
During Nicolas Maduro's rule, human rights abuses in El Helicoide intensified.
Javier Tarazona, a human rights activist, was taken there.
For months, he was kept in a 16-foot-wide cell known as "the little tiger" that he shared with two more inmates. He was only let out of the room for interrogations.
"They tried to asphyxiate me, with a bag," Tarazona recalls, adding that he was forced to take a mind-altering drug known as scopolamine by agents who wanted him to record confessions they could use against opposition leaders.
Now, prisoners are leaving El Helicoide, as the Rodríguez government implements an amnesty law that has benefited hundreds of dissidents.
In late January, when she announced the amnesty law, Rodríguez said the building would be turned into a sports complex. And in February, Venezuela's Communications Ministry posted an edited video online that showed drone footage of the building and said work on El Helicoide had begun after nearby residents were consulted.
Tarazona says the building should become a memorial center — like Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was held for more than 18 years in South Africa — so the abuses that the prisoners endured will not be forgotten.
"We need to focus on non-repetition, and generate a collective memory of what happened here," he said.
Historian Olalquiaga said that the failed shopping mall is so large it could have several uses.
Currently only the two bottom levels are used as a prison.
"The prison cells must be left as a memory place," she said. "But you cannot take the whole building for that, because it would be a disservice to communities that are around there, that need all sorts of facilities."
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