A Former Top Cop Makes a Daring Escape
Iván Simonovis went from Caracas police chief to prisoner of Venezuela’s socialist regime—then over a 60-foot cliff to freedom.
By Tunku Varadarajan
Dec. 24, 2019 6:18 pm ET
Iván Simonovis is celebrating Christmas as a free man for the first time in 16 years.
A former police commissioner of Caracas, Venezuela, he became a political prisoner in 2004 and spent much of the next decade in a tiny underground cell. In 2014 he was transferred to house arrest, from which he made a daring escape this May. Accomplices spirited him to Florida, where he now lives with his wife, Bony. With her by his side, he tells me in Spanish that he’s “trying to adapt to a life of liberty.”
Mr. Simonovis, 59, and his family—two grown daughters and a brother-in-law—are enjoying a traditional Venezuelan Christmas feast: hallacas, a dish that resembles tamales, plus bread baked with ham and olives, chicken-and-potato salad and papaya pudding. “For sure, this is a meal that very few people in Venezuela will eat this Christmas,” he says. Even if the ingredients were available, hyperinflation would make them much too expensive for ordinary citizens.
Mr. Simonovis’s story is, in many respects, the story of Venezuela under the Bolivarian socialist regime that has ravaged the country since Hugo Chávez came to power in 1999. The deprivation of freedom has accompanied the destruction of the economy, and the arrest and imprisonment of Mr. Simonovis—initially without warrant or charge—proves that no one is immune to the regime’s political vendettas.
Iván Simonovis became a police detective at 21 and eventually came to be a boldface name in Venezuela. He created the country’s first SWAT team, the Brigada de Acciones Especiales. In 1998 BAE acquired an international profile when one of its snipers shot dead a gunman who’d taken a woman hostage in the town of Cúa, 40 miles from Caracas. “If you type ‘BAE Caso Cúa’ into YouTube,” he tells me, “you’ll see what happened.” The episode was caught on TV cameras. The viewing isn’t for the squeamish, but it leaves no doubt BAE knew how to do its job.
He was promoted to head the Office of Operations for the national police. Chávez was elected president in 1999, and a year later the mayor of Caracas asked Mr. Simonovis to run his city’s police force. There he established “a professional alliance” with the New York City Police Department, importing many of its methods to the most dangerous parts of Caracas. “We tropicalized the NYPD,” he says with a smile. He enlisted the help of Bill Bratton, who had been and would again be New York’s police commissioner, as a private consultant. This association would come back to haunt Mr. Simonovis, as the regime later used it to support its contention that he was in the pay of the Central Intelligence Agency.
ILLUSTRATION: TERRY SHOFFNER
“This was a turbulent time in Venezuela,” Mr. Simonovis says. “Politics was really starting to heat up.” Chávez was consolidating his control, but the press was still resilient, and civil society hadn’t lost its appetite or capacity to fight. On April 11, 2002, provoked by Chávez’s sacking of strikers at Petróleos de Venezuela SA, the national oil monopoly, tens of thousands of demonstrators marched toward the presidential palace demanding his resignation. “His treatment of PdVSA caused consternation,” Mr. Simonovis says. “The marchers were angry. There were many there from the middle class, from the nicer parts of the city.”
The demonstration sealed Mr. Simonovis’s fate. “There was no way to stop the march,” he says. As protesters approached the palace, Chávez loyalists confronted them at the Llaguno Overpass. What happened there is fiercely disputed. Mr. Simonovis says that 19 marchers were shot dead and hundreds wounded. “I should add that some pro-Chávez people died, too.” As he tells it, the Caracas police—his officers—intervened to halt the mayhem, and that mostly involved protecting the unarmed marchers from pro-Chavez gunfire. Inevitably, the regime accused Mr. Simonovis of siding with the opposition. “That’s when the accusations started—that I was CIA,” he says. “They wanted a scapegoat for Llaguno.”
Two months later Mr. Simonovis resigned, fed up with the regime’s hostility. He started a security consultancy with clients in Venezuela and the U.S. He worked unmolested until Nov. 22, 2004, when he was arrested at Maracaibo airport on his way to a business trip. “They told me they had to detain me because I was a flight risk,” he says. “But this was my fifth trip to the U.S. that year. I always came back to Venezuela after my business was over.”
The most renowned cop in Venezuela was flown to Caracas in handcuffs and driven to the headquarters of the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service, known by the Spanish acronym Sebin. “They took me to a cell, 6 feet by 6 feet, subterranean, with no natural light or source of air, concrete floors, no toilet,” he says. “I didn’t know at the time, but I was to be there for eight years. Until 2012.”
He describes his life in jail in simple language, seemingly without rancor. “My trial began a year later, in a court in Maracay, 60 miles from Caracas,” he recounts. “For many years, until my trial was over and my sentence was passed, the only time I saw natural light was when they hustled me to Maracay and back.”
His trial lasted three years and four months. “I must have made about 80 trips, woken at the crack of dawn, bundled into a car with tinted windows, where I sat in the middle at the back between two policemen.” At Maracay he was taken straight to a cell, then brought out to the kangaroo courtroom, then bundled back into a car and returned to Sebin in Caracas. “I didn’t really see much sunlight, but I was aware of it for a few hours each time.”
His cell was “full of mosquitoes, with a clunky fan that just churned up the hot air in there.” The greasy, dirty food antagonized his stomach. His eyesight deteriorated, as did his bones. Osteoporosis set in. He was never allowed to see a doctor. “A male nurse would come down to see me and the other political prisoners, some bankers and others, from time to time. His verdict always was that I was a ‘healthy adult.’ ”
His wife visited him when the authorities permitted, sometimes with the children. Then she spoke to the press, indignantly describing his treatment. “Whenever she did that,” he says, “they punished me. They would curtail her visits. Sometimes, they would confiscate my toothbrush and other items of personal hygiene for weeks, just to degrade me.” After one of Bony’s fulminations to the press, he wasn’t allowed out of his cell for a month, except for one daily visit to the toilet.
When he first saw his wife and younger daughter, Ivana, after that ordeal, it was in the usual filthy visiting room, “a place crawling with rats. My daughter, then 8, thought one of the rats was a rabbit, they were so big.” Mr. Simonovis was unshaven and cut a figure that frightened the girl. She shrank back, and he reassured her that he was emulating Tom Hanks in the 2000 movie “Cast Away.” That film, he says, “really helped me. Especially the Hanks character’s idea to set a daily routine to keep sane.”
Mr. Simonovis set up his own routine: Exercises—sit-ups, jumps, push-ups. Contemplation. Reading. Writing, on paper smuggled in to him by Bony with the complicity of friendly guards. He painstakingly wrote a memoir, “El Prisionero Rojo” (“The Red Prisoner”). “My jailers weren’t aware I was writing a book,” he says, adding with a chuckle that they found out only once it was published, in 2013, while he was still in captivity. (He’s working on a second volume.)
In 2008 the court in Maracay convicted Mr. Simonovis of conspiracy to commit murder and imposed a 30-year prison sentence. “The future seemed as bleak,” he says, “as the verdict was absurd.” Chávez had consolidated his suffocating control. In the tiniest concession, Mr. Simonovis was permitted to go into the sun—for 10 minutes each morning. “Sometimes, it was just five minutes. The men guarding me were occasionally men I knew. It was awkward. Mostly, they were young recruits who didn’t know how to deal with a man of my rank.”
His condition eased in 2012. He was shifted to a military prison in Ramo Verde, 20 miles southwest of Caracas. There his cell had some natural light and air, and he had occasional visits by a doctor. “They treated me with more dignity here,” he says, because his jailers were no longer from the intelligence service.
In 2014, thanks to Bony’s tireless efforts, he was moved to house arrest—heaven by comparison. His wife stayed with him in their two-story, detached Caracas home. “I was permitted visits by close family, but no one else,” he says. He had to wear an electronic ankle bracelet at all times, and be available for three random checks a day, when he was photographed as proof of his presence. Often that meant rousting him from bed at 3 a.m.
Yet the security had its vulnerabilities. A police post outside the front gate was “manned by 14 or 15 cops who were bored out of their minds,” Mr. Simonovis says. He “set them up with a nice table, an awning to keep out the sun, and a TV connection.” They often wandered off “to grab a bite, or to meet sweethearts.” Behind the house was a cliff—a sheer, 60-foot drop to a road below. There was no police presence there. Who could possibly exit that way?
Mr. Simonovis could. Before daybreak on May 6, 2019, he rappelled from a balcony to the road below. He used gear that had been smuggled into the house over months. A waiting car whisked him to a safe house. His family, by this point living in Germany, were unaware of his escape. For a month, he sneaked from one hideout to another before being driven by friends to a fishing village on the Caribbean coast, opposite the Venezuelan island of Margarita. “We passed several roadblocks from Caracas to the coast, but we weren’t stopped.” Venezuela’s culture of corruption helped: The police were interested only in stopping commercial trucks.
At the village, Mr. Simonovis got into “a creaky motorboat” with a fisherman who’d agreed to ferry him to a “nearby Caribbean island” outside Venezuela. He won’t name the island for fear of endangering those who helped him, but he does say they swerved west. “We had bad luck on the way,” he says. “The launch developed engine trouble, and a trip that should’ve taken six hours took 12 instead.” When they finally sputtered into their destination, he was met on a desolate coast by accomplices, who drove him to an airfield.
From there a small plane carried him to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where U.S. immigration agents awaited him. “ ‘Welcome to America,’ they said, as they took my decades-old passport, which was expired—a museum piece, really. It was the only documentation I had.”
Mr. Simonovis is now working with U.S. and inter-American agencies to build forensic cases against members of the Venezuelan regime who have trafficked drugs and laundered stolen money. “I want nothing more than the freedom of my country,” he says, “and to help bring an end to [Nicolás] Maduro,” who succeeded Chávez after the latter’s death in 2013.
After years of captivity, freedom takes some getting used to. “Sometimes,” Mr. Simonovis says, “when I’m driving on the highway, I have to pull over and ask myself, ‘Is all this open space for real?’ ” Unlikely triggers stir his emotions—not all of them as warm as the family’s Christmas. “In jail, you can’t imagine the value that a single cube of ice has,” Mr. Simonovis says. He didn’t have any ice for years. “Now, every time I hold a cold glass, I think of jail.”
Mr. Varadarajan is executive editor at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
