Summary:
American traveler James Luckey-Lange was detained in Venezuela after crossing the border from Brazil, despite U.S. warnings about the risks of arbitrary detention there. He reports being held for over a month, subjected to beatings, starvation, and a sham trial before being released following U.S. military intervention in Caracas. His account is corroborated by other former prisoners and a Venezuelan human rights group.
Main Topics Covered:
1. The detention and alleged mistreatment of a U.S. citizen in Venezuela.
2. U.S. warnings about the danger of travel to Venezuela and the government’s practice of detaining Americans.
3. The role of U.S. military action in securing the release of detained citizens.
4. Background on James Luckey-Lange’s travels and motivations.
How a Trip Across the Americas Ended in a Venezuelan Jail
James Luckey-Lange, 28, wrote about kindness and shared humanity as he traveled. But he said he had been shackled, starved and beaten in Venezuela after being detained.
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There was one last place to go before James Luckey-Lange could say he had visited every country in the continental America: Venezuela.
U.S. officials had been warning with increasing urgency that Venezuela was off limits to Americans. Its authoritarian regime had been capturing U.S. citizens to use as pawns in negotiations.
But Mr. Luckey-Lange, 28, had disregarded such warnings before. In a Haiti overrun by gangs, he sold fruit at a roadside stand. In Nicaragua, he worked on a coffee farm and taught martial arts, though U.S. officials had said Americans also risked arbitrary detention there.
He said he had assumed that in Venezuela, as in other countries he had visited, the main hazard was random crime, not the government.
So Mr. Luckey-Lange said he felt no particular sense of danger when he climbed onto a motorcycle taxi in Brazil on Dec. 7 and crossed the border.
He was detained the next day.
What followed, he said, was an ordeal unlike anything he could have imagined. Instead of quickly checking Venezuela off his list, he was held there for more than a month. He said he was beaten, starved and given a sham online trial.
Mr. Luckey-Lange’s captivity ended after the U.S. military attacked Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, captured its leader, Nicolás Maduro, and started pressuring the interim government to release American detainees.
“I just happen to be American, so I lucked out,” Mr. Luckey-Lange said.
He was released on Jan. 13, 10 days after the attack, with several other Americans. U.S. officials have said that all U.S. citizens known to be held in Venezuela have been freed. Advocacy groups estimate that hundreds of other political prisoners from Venezuela and other countries remain behind bars.
Mr. Luckey-Lange’s description of his captivity and treatment aligns with the testimonies provided to The New York Times by other American prisoners who were held in Venezuela.
The Times also spoke separately to two former prisoners recently detained in the same prison as Mr. Luckey-Lange, one of whom was in his prison unit at the same time.
The Times also interviewed Foro Penal, Venezuela’s leading rights group, which said Mr. Luckey-Lange’s account accurately reflected the conditions and treatment it has documented at the prison and at military police headquarters.
The two former prisoners, who live in the United States, asked not to be named because they were concerned about the safety of relatives in Venezuela.
The Venezuelan government did not respond to a detailed set of questions.
Traveling the World
For most of his life, Mr. Luckey-Lange was known mostly as the son of Diane Luckey, who, as Q Lazzarus, sang “Goodbye Horses,” a song featured in the 1991 film “Silence of the Lambs.”
By the time Mr. Luckey-Lange was growing up in New York City, his mother was working as a taxi and bus driver. She died in 2022, after breaking a leg and contracting sepsis.
In January 2023, Mr. Luckey-Lange set out to fulfill his dream of traveling the world, starting with the Americas.
He didn’t want to be just another tourist. He planned to train and fight at Muay Thai gyms along the way. And he brought Okami, a Huskey mix he adopted in Alaska, where he had worked in commercial fishing to save money for his trip.
While traveling, Mr. Luckey-Lange started a newsletter, writing about social issues and chronicling his adventures, like living in a migrant camp in Peru.
He had just buried Okami in Patagonia last year when he learned his father had died. “I had been everywhere from the Arctic Circle to the southern tip of South America,” he said.
But he wasn’t done. After a brief trip back to New York, he returned to South America.
The Checkpoint
At first, no one noticed that Mr. Luckey-Lange didn’t have a visa, a requirement for foreign visitors to Venezuela. He was in a remote area where Venezuela, Brazil, and Guyana meet, and the taxi driver took a dirt road without checkpoints, Mr. Luckey-Lange said, and dropped him off in a town called Santa Elena de Uairén.
The next day, Mr. Luckey-Lange said, he was worried about getting into trouble and was walking back toward the border in search of an immigration office when he was stopped at a checkpoint.
Men in uniform flipped through his passport and searched his bag after they found no visa. Hours later, he was taken to an army base and accused of being an American spy, partly because of the military look of his hiking boots, he said.
His heart sank, Mr. Luckey-Lange said, as he realized that with tensions between the United States and Venezuela running high, he was a trophy to his captors.
“To catch an American at the frontier, I was served to them on a platter,” he said.
From the border, Mr. Luckey-Lange said, he was flown to the city of Puerto Ordaz, interrogated and then flown to Caracas.
Four Days Without Food
Mr. Luckey-Lange said he was taken to military police headquarters, placed in restraints and held in a room where the lights were always on.
The strap linking his handcuffs to his shackles hurt his shoulders, he said, and he repeatedly contorted himself to untie it. When officers discovered what he had done, he said, they would punish him.
“They would hit me, beat me, throw me on the ground, reshackle me, rechain me,” Mr. Luckey-Lange said.
He said he was denied food or water for several days.
He grew hopeless. His family, he said, probably thought he was dead in the Amazon, the last place they had heard from him. The American government would not even know where to look.
After about a week, Mr. Luckey-Lange said, he was taken from the military police headquarters to a prison called Rodeo I, where he was led blindfolded into a room and made to kneel. He thought he was going to be killed.
“I said, ‘Oh. This is it.’”
Reading Lessons
In his travelogues, Mr. Luckey-Lange had celebrated humanity. In Rodeo I, he struggled to hang onto his own.
His head was shaved, he said. He was made to strip and put on a uniform. His cramped cell had a pipe that spat water into a hole in the floor — his shower and toilet. His mattress crawled with insects.
The other detainees heard him, beating his fists against the door and shouting at the guards in English.
“I was in there as if I had nothing to lose,” Mr. Luckey-Lange said. “I was fighting the guards back.”
At the same time, the plight of others held at Rodeo I moved him.
Mr. Luckey-Lange’s cellmate was a Venezuelan in his late 30s who limped from a gunshot wound and had missing teeth. Mr. Luckey-Lange’s Spanish was limited, but the two became friends.
When he realized his cellmate could not read, Mr. Luckey-Lange said, he scraped the alphabet onto the wall. “From there, we worked our way up,” he said. “I started to teach him words.”
Chocolate Cake
Beyond the prison walls, the United States was intensifying its pressure campaign, and by New Year’s Eve, Mr. Luckey-Lange said, rumors were swirling about a possible military operation against Venezuela’s leader.
But, he said, when the U.S. military captured Mr. Maduro in the wee hours of Jan. 3, no one in the prison, which is on Caracas’s outskirts, really knew what had occurred.
They learned he had been removed six days later, from people visiting detainees.
Prisoners began shouting for joy, Mr. Luckey-Lange said. The detainees were served chocolate cake and Pepsi — a hopeful sign that they might soon be released.
A few days later, Mr. Luckey-Lange said, he was fetched from his cell, given clothes and taken back to military police headquarters.
From there, he was eventually shuttled to an airport hangar, he said, where U.S. officials were waiting.
The Biggest Surprise
From Caracas, Mr. Luckey-Lange flew with U.S. officials to Curaçao.
U.S. State Department officials told him that his family had been frantically searching for him and that The New York Times had published an article about him after he disappeared, he said.
A filmmaker who had made a documentary about Q Lazzarus and befriended Mr. Luckey-Lange and his relatives had contacted The Times, which learned of Mr. Luckey-Lange’s whereabouts and published the article about his detention.
He spent two nights in a hotel in Curaçao booked by his aunts, he said, then boarded a commercial flight to New York City.
Back home, he learned that friends and even elected officials had called for his release. The biggest surprise was learning he had not been forgotten.
A Former Prisoner
Mr. Luckey-Lange was not like other Americans returning from Curaçao to the coldest of winters.
His hair, which had been long and dyed blond, was cropped short. He was pale and weak.
He was now a former Venezuelan prisoner, part of a small, tight-knit community.
The former prisoners chatted daily in a text-messaging group, he said. Most of all, they worried about the other captives.
Mr. Luckey-Lange said he had gone online right away to search for relatives of his cellmate. He wanted them to know he was alive.
Patricia Sulbarán contributed reporting.
Annie Correal is a Latin America correspondent for The Times.
Anatoly Kurmanaev covers Venezuela and its interim government.
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