US traveller recounts brutal detention in Venezuela’s feared prisons: ‘They beat me, chained me up’

‘I was never fed, I was never given water,’ James Luckey writes of his time imprisoned. Photograph: Joseph Mario Giordano/The Guardian

There were few countries James Luckey didn’t see during three years backpacking across the Americas, from Haiti and Honduras to Bolivia and Uruguay. Early last December, he set off from a budget hotel in the Brazilian Amazon hoping to fill in one of the final gaps.

Luckey’s intended destination was the two-billion-year-old tabletop mountain Mount Roraima, one of the most spectacular corners of South America’s most troubled nation, Venezuela. But within hours of crossing into the border town of Santa Elena de Uairén, that plan went up in smoke.