After almost two years in the El Helicoide detention center, the Chavista regime released on Saturday to the opponent Óscar Castañeda, a member of Vente Venezuela in the Portuguese state.
In a video you can see when Castañeda arrives home in a state of disorientation and walking with the help of other people.
Even seems not to immediately recognize his own relatives, which generated concern for his physical and mental health after the torture he allegedly suffered during his detention.
Castañeda, who was part of the Vente Venezuela team in the town of Santa Rosalía, was arrested in April 2024 after participate in a rally by opposition leader María Corina Machado, who was campaigning for the candidacy of Edmundo González Urrutia.
“I am one of the Venezuelans who came with his family defeated from Colombia,” Castañeda stated at that time, who also regretted the acts of xenophobia and expressed his support for Machado’s political proposal.
The regime accused him of conspiracy and association to commit a crime, and since then he remained held in El Helicoide, the most feared torture center in Venezuela and Latin America.
The narrative against Óscar Castañeda
Before and after his arrest, the regime promoted a narrative to justify the arrest of Óscar Castañeda. Chavismo propagandists promoted that the cap worn by the East during the rally, with the initials “JGL (Joaquín Guzmán Loera)”, would link him to drug trafficking.
Fake News Hunters noted in X that this strategy was an “informational scarecrow” to divert attention from Castañeda’s arbitrary detention.
The cap, the organization explained, is an item linked to the Mexican corridos tumbados, marketed on platforms such as Mercado Libre, Amazon, eBay, Facebook Marketplace and Instagram, and without any link to illegal operations.
The original brand JGL 701, created by Chapo’s daughter, disappeared in 2023, but pirated versions are available on the market.
Fake News Hunters It also documented the existence of a disinformation network, led by the then Minister of Communication Freddy Ñáñez. They were made up of fake accounts that amplified falsified messages attributed to Machado and other opposition leaders, as well as tags like #NARCOrinaMachado.
