Government defends actions

“We’ve noted a great increase in the number of torture and cruel, inhumanetreatment cases,” El Fakih said, noting there are no definitive numbers on the phenomenon. “I can say that the increase has been exponential.”

The office of President Nicolás Maduro - as well as the National Guard, the National Police and the Ministry of the Interior - did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the allegations. But the government has publicly defended its actions against the demonstrators and reiterated its commitment to human rights.

“The National Guard and the National Police have made a heroic effort and should keep doing it, with no firearms, no pellets, only water and tear gas,” Maduro said on television this past week.

The current unrest began with peaceful marches against what protesters call an increasingly authoritarian government and an economic crisis. But the demonstrations have devolved into chaotic street battles between protesters hurling rocks and molotov cocktails at National Guard and police, who fire water cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets.

At least 70 people have died, and more than 1,300 have been injured in the demonstrations.

The economics student, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution by the government, said that during his detention in the Helicoide, intelligence agents interrogated him about whether he worked with opposition political parties and scoured his social-media accounts.

At one point, after he was zapped with a stun gun three times, he begged to borrow a cell phone to call his mother, the student recounted.

“Do you think you’re in Disneyland?” he recalled a guard taunting him.

The student was eventually taken to a police station in downtown Caracas, where he spent 29 days handcuffed to another detainee before being released on a charge of public disorder, he said. The only severe physical abuse he suffered, he said, occurred in the Heliocoide, a facility that repeatedly comes up in protesters’ allegations of mistreatment.

The student’s account, and those of the other exdetainees interviewed for this story, could not be independently confirmed. But they have similar characteristics to other testimonies gathered by human rights groups.