My Venezuelan jail hell

There are two conditions British foreign correspondents must meet before they can consider themselves old hands. The first is having one’s work savaged by John Pilger; the second is spending time inside a cell somewhere abroad, preferably somewhere exotic and hot.

It so happens that it was during a trip to sultry Venezuela that I came of age as a reporter and achieved the rare double. Not only did Mr Pilger describe my television work as a ‘one of the worst, most distorted pieces of journalism I have ever seen’, but I was also locked up, ordered to strip to my underpants, accused by a military prosecutor of espionage and threatened with over 30 years in a Venezuelan jail.

The editor kindly acceded to a long-cherished whimsy of mine and headlined this piece ‘My Venezuelan jail hell’. In fact, it wasn’t hellish at all; being stripped to my cojones in Caracas proved a good deal more pleasant than the verbal abuse from Mr Pilger once my clothes were back on.

My alleged crime was to have ‘broken in’ to a Venezuelan military base to spy on secret operations undertaken by the Bolivarian Socialist Republic, but in journalistic terms it was far worse than that. I had been waved through the gates one weekend afternoon, not quite comprehending I was entering a military installation at all.

Lurking beneath some trees were Venezuela’s Home Guard, planning the counterinsurgency they would mount once the United States had invaded: earnest young men and women in red berets, ready to die for Hugo Chávez and his revolution, if he didn’t die for it first.

It was a bad time for a westerner to wander into a Venezuelan army base. Chávez had become convinced that the CIA was plotting to kill him — which wasn’t an entirely paranoid thought.