Juan Barreto/AFP
Venezuelan-Uruguayan José Breijo, sitting on a bed in the hallway of the building in Caracas, Venezuela.
A 73-year-old man, ill, spent several days sleeping in the hallway of his building, in Caracas, Venezuela. He is now sleeping at home, where he will serve his sentence under house arrest, but all of his belongings have been stolen.
At 73 years old, José Breijo finally returned home after leaving prison, thanks to the amnesty decreed for political prisoners in Venezuela. But he found his apartment occupied by the same police officer who arrested him.
With no alternative, the Uruguayan-Venezuelan, placed under house arrest, spent several days sleeping in the hallway of the Caracas building. And they also wanted to expel the political prisoner from the corridor.
According to , three months earlier, his apartment had been handed over to one of the police officers involved in his arrest. It was the elderly man himself who said that the agents even tried to remove him from the corridor where he remained: “If I leave, they’ll send me to prison.”
Weak, with difficulty walking and ulcers on his legs, Breijo describes the years of detention as an “ordeal, in the worst dungeons, where drugs rule”. He was arrested in late 2023 after trying to sell a photo of a flag with Arabic inscriptionshe told EFE, in the context of the beginning of the war between Israel and Hamas. The meeting with the supposed buyer of the photograph, in a bakery, turned out to be a trap: after showing the image, he was reportedly handcuffed.
“I told him I had a photo, showed it to him and then he put the handcuffs on me,” he recalls.
Breijo claims he needed $1,500 to perform a catheterization. He ended up accused of terrorisman accusation that human rights organizations denounce as being used by Venezuelan authorities against opponents, national and foreign citizens.
The recovery of the apartment was only possible this Wednesday, after pressure from neighbors and intervention from the Uruguayan consulate. When he entered the house again, he found the space practically empty.
“There is nothing of mine here, the apartment is completely empty”he lamented, sitting on an old sofa, in front of the few pieces of furniture that remained, while being photographed by Juan Barreto for AFP, in the house. A also confirmed that, after recovering the apartment, Breijo stated that his belongings were missing.
Born in Uruguay, Breijo arrived in Venezuela in 1979 to work as a cook in a luxury hotel in Caracas. He married a Venezuelan and stayed in the country. During his arrest, he was diagnosed with bilateral pulmonary edema.
The case is another in the list of reports of arbitrary confiscation of assets belonging to political prisoners and exiled opponents.
