On September 19th, José Guillermo Mendoza was driving through northeastern Caracas, Venezuela, toward the office of a human-rights organization called Provea, to deliver a thousand printed inserts for a new record dedicated to the history of Venezuelan punk rock. Mendoza was forty-three and worked for the printer that had made the booklets, but he didn’t know what was in them and had never heard of punk music. Around noon, a couple of policemen stopped him at a routine checkpoint, noticed the booklets, and asked to review them. “This is subversive material,” an officer said. They arrested him and took him to the Helicoide, a building that was envisioned as a mall but is now a detention center and a headquarters for Venezuela’s intelligence police. Shaped like a pyramid and sitting atop a hill overlooking the city’s slums, the Helicoide has become infamous as a location where political prisoners are detained and tortured. Word of Mendoza’s arrest soon got back to Provea. “He managed to call his boss at the printer, and that person called us right away,” Rafael Uzcátegui, who is forty-six and runs the N.G.O., told me. Uzcátegui sent lawyers to the prison to learn more. “I thought maybe the officers wanted money, or maybe an exchange: that they would agree to release him in order to detain one of our people from Provea,” he said.

Venezuela is in the middle of a political crisis. In 2017, President Nicolás Maduro created a new law-making body to delegitimize the opposition-led National Assembly. This led to mass protests, which the government met with repression, and the jailing of opposition leaders. In 2018, Maduro held (and won) a rigged Presidential election. (Dozens of countries now refuse to recognize Maduro as the legitimate head of state.) Provea, which documents arbitrary detentions of the opposition and extrajudicial killings, is an old enemy of Maduro’s government, which accuses it of being “financed by the empire.” (Provea has received financial support from the U.N., European countries, and the Ford Foundation, among others.)

For two years, the N.G.O. had worked to produce a new record that compiles punk songs from the eighties and nineties protesting corruption and repression. What caught the police’s attention in the booklet, Uzcátegui learned, was a picture taken by a famous anarcho-punk photographer named Nelson Garrido. The photo, which was inspired by a famous punk-rock song calling out the corruption of a government minister, showed a military officer in a red beret (a trademark of Hugo Chávez, the former President), with the head of a pig and U.S. dollars in his breast pocket and electric cables dropping from his shoulders. “It means he’s an enchufado,” Garrido told me—meaning a well-connected politician profiting from government funds. The officer is flanked by two masked paramilitary soldiers holding guns. The three stand before a dinner table laid with a skull, broken dolls, bananas, and two miniature statues, one of Chávez and one of another former President, Carlos Andrés Pérez, who ruled Venezuela in the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-nineties.

Uzcátegui panicked when he learned the reason for Mendoza’s detention. Maduro’s government has no sense of humor and hasn’t hesitated to jail those who mock the President. Among critics, Maduro is sometimes referred to as Maburro, a play on the Spanish word for “donkey.” Last year, military-intelligence services arrested two firefighters after they shared a video on social media in which one of them led a donkey into a fire station, pretending the animal was the President on an official visit. (Both men denied having made the video.) They were charged under a 2017 law called the Anti-Hate Law for Tolerance and Peaceful Coexistence, which allows the government to imprison a person for up to twenty years if he is accused of instigating hate. The firemen were released a month after their arrest, but Uzcátegui feared that Mendoza could be charged under the same law.

Uzcátegui contacted Garrido, and the two decided to spread the word. At the time, the government was trying to improve its international image by freeing political prisoners, and they hoped to use this to their advantage. Uzcátegui alerted the U.N., the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, and several activists. Garrido contacted artists in Venezuela, Chile, and Argentina, who posted about the arrest on social media under the hashtag #LiberenAJoseMendoza. The campaign worked. Twenty-four hours after his arrest, Mendoza was released, unharmed, without trial or further explanation. Photos of Mendoza were shared on social media, smiling outside the Helicoide, although he refused to discuss what happened with the press. (He did not respond to a request for comment.) According to Uzcátegui, during Mendoza’s twenty-four hours in the Helicoide, he was questioned about the booklet, though he didn’t know who had written the inserts or who had shot the photo. “He didn’t know what Provea was,” Uzcátegui told me. “He didn’t even know what the word ‘punk’ meant.”

Photograph by Nelson Garrido / Courtesy Provea

As in most Latin American countries, Venezuelan radio is dominated by reggaetón. But, as Uzcátegui explains in “Previous Education,” a collection of essays about Venezuelan punk rock that Provea is releasing with the record, the country once had a large punk scene that was affiliated with a previous period of turmoil. In 1983, oil prices dropped and the country’s currency depreciated dramatically. In the following years, inflation skyrocketed into the double digits, salaries were cut by more than half, and the poverty rate doubled. The government announced austerity measures in 1989, prompting a movement of protests called the Caracazo, which was brutally repressed, leaving hundreds of people dead. In the middle of that crisis, middle- and upper-class teen-agers (including Uzcátegui) who were critical of the state and could afford to travel abroad and buy records, began listening to British and American bands, including the Sex Pistols and the Dead Kennedys. Among this milieu, the Venezuelan punk scene was born.

Dozens of bands proliferated, but no group was as famous as Sentimiento Muerto (Dead Feeling). “We needed to express the anguish we had seeing the country turn to shit,” the lead singer once told an interviewer. The band created a kind of punk superhero named Doctor Death, who, in comics produced by the group, fought corruption in the Venezuelan Central Bank, evaded the police, and resolved street fights (sometimes with the help of his friend, Mr. Calipso). Other groups expressed similar anxiety and frustration, including bands like Public Disorder (“A lot of oil is produced here / A lot of money is robbed in portfolios”), the women’s group Psh-Psh (“Stop the repression / No more hyperinflation”), and Victims of Democracy (“We saw the cadavers eaten by the bullets of order / Bodies, many bodies, buried alive, buried dead”).

The musicians in the groups weren’t virtuosos. “These were lyrics of young kids who were better at thinking than at playing, who preferred to read books instead of music sheets, who were better at living than at practicing scales,” Asier Cazalis, the lead singer of a band called the Cyanide Caramels, writes in the prologue to “Previous Education.” A few bands made it to Latin American rock festivals, but most remained underground, playing at public universities for other kids with similar frustrations. “We were happy, and we didn’t know it,” Cazalis writes.