" Around January last year, the prison director bluntly told us we were bargaining chips. They told three inmates, who reported it to us." Alberto Trentini, the Venetian aid worker released along with Mario Burlò on January 12, after 423 days of detention in Venezuela, spoke about it this evening as a guest on "Che tempo che fa" (What Time Does It Mean?) on Nove. His mother, Armanda Colusso, was in the front row, looking emotional.

"We realized," he added, "that the arrest had not been validated and that many foreigners—there were 92 of us—were placed in the same wards, and they all had similar stories, some of them even being caught in transit at the Caracas airport."

Trentini spoke about the arrest: "They caught me in an area near Colombia, at a fixed checkpoint. They looked at my passport, were immediately intrigued, and asked me to stay there, not to leave. They made some phone calls, and after about an hour, military counterintelligence showed up and forced me to hand over my cell phone. They took me into a room and interrogated me for about four hours. Two days after the arrest, they took me to a nice house in Caracas, then took me to a very hot room where they gave me a lie detector test."

Then came the transfer to Rodeo 1 prison in Caracas: " I changed many cells, but they were all two meters by four, with a 'squat' that served as a latrine but also as a shower, with a faucet above ." "In each cell," he continued, "there were two of us." The cell changes "were never justified, just as no action inside the prison was justified, at least for us. They would come, tell you to get dressed, take your few belongings, and they would change your cell ."

The conditions were "very, very harsh. We had water twice a day, for showering and for the latrine, at different times, whenever they wanted. Very few books; they had confiscated my glasses, so I was in trouble; I recovered a makeshift pair that at least allowed me to see the face of the person I was interacting with, or to play chess. They were a gift I received from the Colombian boys who were detained with me. They gave me this chessboard with all the pieces made from toilet paper, soap, and water, the black ones slightly stained with coffee. This was the best gift because in the end it allowed me to play with coordinates, with the cell facing me."

"I haven't experienced any physical abuse," she continues. "They usually reserved it for people they suspected of having committed something. I know of people who have experienced it, but fortunately, in my case, it wasn't . However, I think there was psychological abuse, the very fact of never knowing when it would end, of not being able to get legal assistance in itself. We used to write with a small piece of wall, we could write on the wall and keep track of the days. I always knew what day it was, but I didn't know when Easter Sunday was."

(Unioneonline/D)

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