By Albert Sun, Gilad Thaler, Melanie Bencosme, Joey Sendaydiego, Edward Vega, Jon Miller and Thomas Trudeau

January 18, 2026

The wife of a once-detained American citizen was released this week after being held for more than a year in a Venezuelan prison following their arrest while traveling to the South American nation to meet her family. 

Renzo Humanchumo Castillo, a Peruvian- American who was detained for close to a year by Venezuelan authorities, told Fox News Digital that his Venezuelan wife, Rosa Carolina Chirino Zambrano, as well as her friend and the taxi driver they were with, were released after being imprisoned and charged with espionage due to their contact with him. 

He spoke with Zambrano following her release, he said, their first contact since December 2024 when they were confronted by Venezuelan authorities near the country’s border with Colombia. 

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“It was surreal,” Castillo recalled of the conversation. “She got teary, you know, but she was like… ‘hey baby, I’m out.’ Now my main concern is how do I get her here with me.”

Castillo, who lives in Southern California, was detained after crossing the border into Venezuela, along with his wife and her friend, who were in a taxi. After being questioned at length by Venezuelan authorities, he was charged with terrorism and conspiring to kill Nicolas Maduro, then the country’s president, who was recently captured by U.S. forces in a daring military operation. 

“They got me as a professional hitman sent by the CIA, and (that) I was there to overthrow the government and kill Maduro and Diosdado (Cabello),” Castillo said.

Diosdado Cabello, known as the “octopus,” runs Venezuela’s security apparatus and is considered one of the country’s most feared government figures. The U.S. has accused him of narco-terrorism and several other crimes. The State Department has issued a $25 million reward for his arrest and conviction.

“Cabello, he presented me on the news, and then he put me on a chart saying that I came here to overthrow the government,” Castillo said. “Me and some other Americans.”

After spending months in Venezuela’s notorious “El Rodeo” prison, Castillo was freed in a prisoner swap in July 2025. However, his wife remained in detention. 

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Castillo said he was initially questioned by Venezuelan authorities who accused him of being a “commando” or some kind of military operator.

A search of his cell phone only heightened their suspicions when they found images of him wearing a protective vest and other tactical gear. However, Castillo said he works in private security and executive protection and has never served in the military. 

The gear was used for work, he said. 

He was eventually detained and transferred to “El Rodeo” where he endured beatings and other forms of torture, he said. In one instance, he was hung by his arms like a piñata and beaten. 

“They had me hanging. And like my feet were still kind of touching the floor,” he said. “They just hit me for maybe at least five to eight hours, just hanging… just not even questions anymore. But you can feel the joy, how much they wanted to hit me, hurt me, you know?”

Castillo got in trouble several times while at the prison, he said, for speaking out of a window in his cell where he would sometimes get updates on events outside the facility. Stressed about not knowing what happened to his wife, he went on a hunger strike in an effort to write a letter to her, he said. 

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Castillo met Zambrano during a visit to Peru to reunite with old classmates from grade school. One night, he went to a bar with friends where the pair met and struck up a friendship. 

That was followed by multiple trips to Peru, where she lived, before they got married. On his last journey, the couple met in Colombia and traveled via road to her home country to meet his in-laws for the first time, Castillo said. 

After crossing the Colombia-Venezuela border, they were separately detained and their misfortune began. 

Since Zambrano is a Venezuelan citizen, she was not part of the prisoner swap that freed her husband. Despite now being free, she remains under the watchful eye of the Venezuelan government, Castillo said. 

In the meantime, Castillo is working to get Zambrano to California. He said he plans to reach out to the State Department. Despite his wife’s citizenship status, his optimism heightened following Maduro’s capture earlier this month. 

“It was that moment when, inside of me, I felt I was going to be able to see my wife again,” he said. “The chances of me seeing my wife again just went from like, from nothing to like a hundred. It really lifted my spirit.”

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“It took Americans and it took foreigners to be kidnapped for the world to put eyes on Venezuela,” he said. 

On Tuesday, Venezuela’s interim government released at least four Americans imprisoned during Maduro’s regime. The release was the first involving U.S. citizens since Maduro’s capture by U.S. forces. 

“We welcome the release of detained Americans in Venezuela,” a State Department official said Tuesday. “This is an important step in the right direction by the interim authorities.”

On Wednesday, Acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez said she spoke with President Donald Trump by phone during a “long and courteous” conversation. The pair discussed a “bilateral work agenda for the benefit of our peoples, as well as pending matters between our governments.”

On Truth Social, Trump said topics of discussion included oil, minerals, trade and national security. 

“This partnership between the United States of America and Venezuela will be a spectacular one FOR ALL. Venezuela will soon be great and prosperous again, perhaps more so than ever before!” he wrote. 

Castillo praised the Trump administration for addressing the Maduro regime and his action in Venezuela.

“I feel like the current administration is doing the hard work that it hasn’t been done,” he said. “Those things that sometimes people don’t want to see and are afraid to say, well, they’re doing it now. And I am very thankful to the administration. I’m very thankful to my president. Very thankful to (Secretary of State) Marco Rubio, because they did all of this. They got us out.”

To say Harry Reid and Jon Ralston had a fraught relationship is like suggesting Arabs and Israelis haven’t always been on the best of terms.

Or there’s a wee bit of tension between fans of the L.A. Dodgers and San Francisco Giants.

Reid, the former Senate majority leader and most powerful and important lawmaker ever to emerge from Nevada, went for long periods without speaking to Ralston, the state’s most prominent and highly regarded political journalist. Beyond that, Reid tried several times to get Ralston fired, finally succeeding when he was unceremoniously dumped by the TV stations that for years broadcast Ralston’s statewide public affairs program.

And yet when it came time to etch his name in history, Reid summoned Ralston and asked him to write his biography.

“He said, ‘Jon, you and I have something in common. We’re both survivors,’ ” Ralston recounted last week, laughing at the memory of their 2021 conversation.

“Which I thought was quite ironic, since he had tried to make sure I didn’t survive in my job several times. But he said, ‘You’re the only one who can do this book right. … I know I’m not going to like everything you write, but I want you to do the book.’ ”

The moment speaks to the quintessence of Reid, a flinty product of Nevada’s hardpan desert, who was famously unflinching and unsentimental in his pursuit and application of political power.

Reid, who died a little over four years ago, was a paradoxical mix of pugilism and self-effacement: cunning, ruthless and, at times, surprisingly tender-hearted. Beneath the bland exterior of a country parson, all soft-spoken solemnity, beat the heart of a bare-fisted brawler.

In short, he was an irresistible subject for a longtime student of politics like Ralston, whose book, “The Game Changer,” comes out Tuesday.

“I think there was a mutual respect there,” Ralston said of his parry-and-thrust relationship with Reid, who left the Senate in 2017 after more than 30 years on Capitol Hill. “Not to sound like an egoist, but he knew that I chronicled him in a way that nobody else did and recognized things about him that no one else did.”

Ralston took up the subject with no constraints.

Reid, who died about six months after asking Ralston to pen his biography, sat for two dozen interviews. He encouraged family, friends and former staffers to cooperate with Ralston. He granted unlimited access to his voluminous records — 12 million digital files and 100 boxes archived at the University of Nevada, Reno — including personal correspondence and internal emails. (Those include the senator and his chief of staff gleefully celebrating Ralston’s professional setbacks.)

The result is the definitive work — clear-eyed, evenhanded — on Reid and his legacy, which includes passage of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, if you prefer; the survival of the Las Vegas Strip during the Great Recession, and, most controversially, the Senate’s abandonment of the filibuster for presidential nominees, which eventually led to today’s Trump-stacked Supreme Court.

(Full disclosure: Your friendly columnist read the book in galley form and provided a favorable blurb that appears on the back cover.)

The biography recounts standard Reid lore.

The hardscrabble upbringing in Searchlight, Nev., a pinpoint about an hour’s drive south of Las Vegas. His hitchhiking, 40-mile commute to attend high school in Henderson. His years as an amateur boxer — and scuffle with his future father in law — and work as a Capitol police officer while attending law school in Washington, D.C. The car-bomb attempt on Reid’s life, connected to his work on the Nevada Gaming Commission.

And, of course, his oft-stumbling climb through the ranks of Nevada politics, which included a failed bid for Las Vegas mayor, a U.S. Senate contest he lost by fewer than 700 votes and another Reid won by fewer than 500.

Ralston, of course, was well-versed in that history, having written much of it. (Today, he serves as chief executive of the Nevada Independent, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news and opinion website he founded in 2017.)

Even as the world’s foremost Reid-ologist, as Ralston jokingly calls himself, there were things that surprised him.

He was unaware of the length and depth of an FBI probe, conducted in the late 1970s and early 1980s, into Reid over purported mob ties and other alleged improprieties. “He was never indicted or charged or anything,” Ralston said, “but they clearly were after him.”

And he had no idea of Reid’s prolific penmanship.

“Hundreds, maybe thousands of [notes and letters] … to friends, to colleagues in the Senate, to journalists and others,” Ralston said. “That really is something that’s not known about Harry Reid, how he established personal connections with people, which helped him become the effective leader that he was in the U.S. Senate.”

Even after decades of covering Reid, and years devoted to researching his biography, Ralston won’t presume to say he knows exactly what made him tick — though he suggested Reid’s impoverished, trauma-filled childhood had a lasting impact.

“He was an incredibly driven person,” Ralson said, “who went right up the line and, some would say over it, in trying to achieve what he thought was best for himself, for his party, for his country, for his friends, for his family.”

Along with that determination, Reid had an industrial-strength capacity to relinquish hard feelings, forget old animosities and move on. So, too, does Ralston. Their clashes were “just business,” Ralston said, and nothing he took personally.

The result is an improbable collaboration that produced an insightful examination and worthy coda to a remarkable career.