El Helicoide: The futuristic wonder that now sums up Venezuela's spiral into despair

It has become a "dark site" where different Venezuelan police forces have their headquarters, in particular the intelligence agency Sebin and the PNB (national police). Several inmates have alleged abuses at the prison, which CNN has reported.

The immediacy and horror of this situation tend to conceal a poignant structural condition that is the underlying cause of the socialist revolution led by the late Hugo Chávez and of the political impasse that afflicts Venezuela today.

El Helicoide is a microcosm of the contradictions written into Venezuela's modern history. A promise of instant "first world" development amid ever-expanding slums.

The book Downward Spiral: El Helicoide's Descent from Mall to Prison (2018), which I edited along with cultural historian Lisa Blackmore, presents the history of the building and of its many failures and contradictions along with archival photography and personal testimonies that attest to the building's original grandeur and eventual collapse.

Originally conceived as a monumental showroom for the country's emerging oil and mineral industries, El Helicoide was built between 1956 and 1961 and would have been the largest and most state-of-the-art mall in the Americas.