Nahuel Gallo describes torture and a sardonic "you're off to Disney" during Venezuela detention
Key takeaways
- Immigration officers, he said, didn't pay attention to the papers and demanded to inspect his phone.
- From that moment, according to his account, the beatings began.
- Gallo remained virtually incommunicado for more than a year.
Why this matters: an international story with cross-border implications worth tracking.
Argentine gendarme Nahuel Gallo, who spent 448 days detained in Venezuela under the regime of Nicol s Maduro, described in a televised interview the torture inflicted on him at the El Rodeo I prison and revealed the phrase his captors used to announce his confinement: You're off to Disney.
Speaking to Argentine broadcaster TN in an interview aired Saturday, the first corporal of the National Gendarmerie's Squadron 27, based in Uspallata, Mendoza province, reconstructed the events of 8 December 2024, when he tried to enter Venezuela from the Colombian city of C cuta to visit his wife and son. Immigration officers, he said, didn't pay attention to the papers and demanded to inspect his phone. They wanted to see if I had photos with weapons. They went straight into my WhatsApp and told me, 'I want to see if you've been speaking ill of my president,' he recalled. A search for the name Ch vez turned up nothing, but a search for Maduro did. That was the trigger for them.
From that moment, according to his account, the beatings began. They pushed me, they told me to kneel. They hit me in the abdomen, in the head, slapped me. They covered my head, he said. When officials discovered he was a gendarme — Gallo had said he worked at Customs — he was transferred to El Rodeo I, on the outskirts of Caracas, one of the country's most feared prisons. There, he alleged, they strip you naked, you're handcuffed, and they spray pepper gas at you.