Washington D.C. – NPR, Oct. 04, 2025
Manuel Alejandro Tique used to live in a peaceful condo on the outskirts of Bogotá, from where he would bike to his office in the center of the city several times a week. Now, he’s in a maximum security prison in Venezuela, where inmates are rarely allowed to communicate with the outside world.
“We are constantly worried about how he’s doing,” says his sister Diana Tique, who lives in the three-bedroom apartment that has been the family’s home for years.
She says that during the first months of her brother’s detention, she had trouble sleeping, adding that the “emotional toll” of having him detained without trial in a foreign prison has been immense.
Manuel Tique, a 32-year-old humanitarian worker, is among a growing number of foreign nationals detained by Nicolás Maduro’s authoritarian government as Venezuela faces economic sanctions and political isolation from the United States and Europe.
With the U.S. now amassing naval forces and even blowing up several boats in the southern Caribbean in an anti-narcotics mission that Maduro has described as the start of a potential attack on his government, relatives of the prisoners say they face a new level of uncertainty.
