As U.S. stress mounts, Venezuela’s international ‘hostages’ face rising uncertainty

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — Manuel Alejandro Tique used to reside in a peaceable apartment on the outskirts of Bogotá, from the place he would bike to his workplace within the heart of the town a number of instances per week. Now, he is in a most safety jail in Venezuela, the place inmates are hardly ever allowed to speak with the surface world.

“We are constantly worried about how he’s doing,” says his sister Diana Tique, who lives within the three-bedroom residence that has been the household’s residence for years.

She says that in the course of the first months of her brother’s detention, she had hassle sleeping, including that the “emotional toll” of getting him detained with out trial in a international jail has been immense.

Manuel Tique, a 32-year-old humanitarian employee, is amongst a rising variety of international nationals detained by Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian authorities as Venezuela faces financial sanctions and political isolation from the USA and Europe.

With the U.S. now amassing naval forces and even blowing up a number of boats within the southern Caribbean in an anti-narcotics mission that Maduro has described as the beginning of a possible assault on his authorities, relations of the prisoners say they face a brand new stage of uncertainty.

“I’m scared about the military pressure,” says Manuel Tique’s father, Víctor Manuel. “It might lead to freedom, but it could also mean Maduro holds these prisoners for longer.”

Venezuela’s authorities has accused most of the foreigners in its prisons of plotting to overthrow President Maduro.

However human rights teams say these prisoners are principally vacationers, enterprise individuals and humanitarian employees who had nothing to do with Venezuelan politics.

Juan Pappier, the deputy Americas director at Human Rights Watch, says that at the moment there are 89 international nationals imprisoned in Venezuelan jails, from nations that embody Colombia, Spain, Argentina, France and the Czech Republic.

Earlier this yr, Venezuela launched 10 Individuals held in its jails in alternate for greater than 200 Venezuelan migrants whom the U.S. had deported to a infamous jail in El Salvador.

Pappier says that Venezuela intensified detentions of foreigners after its presidential election in 2024 — a vote that Maduro has been broadly accused of stealing.

Dozens of nations didn’t acknowledge Maduro’s reelection final yr, with present White Home officers describing the Venezuelan president as an “illegitimate” chief who heads a “narco-terror cartel.”

“It appears that the Venezuelan regime is holding these foreigners as hostages,” Pappier says.

“Foreign governments did the right thing by condemning the electoral fraud in 2024. And in response, the Maduro regime is extorting them by holding their nationals in prison and forcing them to engage with the Maduro regime for their release.”

Manuel Tique was working for a humanitarian group referred to as the Danish Refugee Council when he traveled to Venezuela final yr. He had been requested to ship a workshop to native support teams on methods to monitor meals and medication distribution.

However Tique was arrested at a border publish whereas looking for entry into Venezuela, and was not heard from for weeks, in what quantities to a pressured disappearance, in line with human rights teams.

“We lost contact with him on Sept. 14 [of last year],” says his sister Diana Tique. “And only got news of him on Oct. 17, when Venezuelan officials spoke about him on TV.” Venezuela’s highly effective inside minister, Diosdado Cabello, accused Tique of being a mercenary who was in Venezuela to recruit fighters for an anti-government mission.

In a yr, Tique has solely been allowed to make two telephone calls. He is at the moment in a jail often called Rodeo One, the place inmates are hardly ever allowed to depart their cells.

“It’s heart-wrenching,” says his father, Víctor Manuel, “because it’s a situation that you cannot control.”

Human rights teams say that it isn’t clear what the Venezuelan authorities needs in alternate for Tique, or a few of the different foreigners in Venezuelan jails.

However some say that as Maduro’s grip on energy comes below stress, his authorities is more likely to take extra prisoners.

“It’s an act of desperation,” says David Guillaume, a nurse from Florida who spent 4 months in Rodeo One — and shared a cell with Tique, the place the 2 inmates coped with boredom and anxiousness by enjoying chess with items they made out of bathroom paper.

Guillaume says he was arrested in September of final yr after making an attempt to enter Venezuela as a vacationer.

He was freed in January, together with 5 different Individuals, after a Trump envoy met with Maduro and mentioned doable financial sanctions aid.

“My American privilege kind of made me chill, because I realized I wasn’t going to be there for a long time,” Guillaume says. “So I tried to learn the names and nationalities of the people there” to relay the data to international governments and human rights teams.

However whereas negotiations to free prisoners have labored in some instances, they’ll additionally make issues worse, says Laura Dib, a human rights lawyer on the Washington Workplace on Latin America (WOLA), a suppose tank and advocacy group.

“It actually creates a very dangerous environment in which anyone can be detained,” Dib says, including that the Venezuelan authorities has realized there are advantages from retaining worldwide hostages.

“Seeking other ways to pressure without necessarily negotiating and giving an authoritarian government what they want is very, very important,” she says.

Dib factors out that a number of nations are actually issuing journey warnings, telling their residents to not go to Venezuela on account of the massive variety of foreigners imprisoned there with out trial.

Again in Bogotá, the Tique household says they need the Colombian authorities to be extra vocal concerning the launch of its residents — and to hyperlink commerce and safety cooperation to their freedom.

However with American naval forces gathering off Venezuela’s coast, fears are intensifying over what this rising present of drive may imply for the prisoners — trapped between fragile diplomacy and the prospect of armed confrontation.

“What has happened to us is an injustice,” says Víctor Manuel Tique. “And it doesn’t help to improve Venezuela’s situation.”