David Sawatzky, a Manitoba wheat farmer turned pilot, has been in Venezuelan prison since 2013.David Sawatzky/Supplied
Hours before dawn on a February morning in 2013, David Sawatzky began piloting his Aero Commander 500 in circles around a runway without lights. He had taken off from Belize 12 hours prior and had entered Venezuelan airspace for the first time. The objective was San Fernando de Apure, a city 300 kilometres south of Caracas, where, he says, a company wanted to buy the plane to use as an air ambulance.
By 2 a.m., Mr. Sawatzky was an hour and a half short of his destination, but unexpected headwinds had sapped his fuel reserves. He was nearly running on empty. He declared an emergency.
The Manitoba wheat farmer turned Central America crop duster did not know what lay ahead of him – whether he could buy the fuel he needed or what might come next.
In fact, what the future held was a jail sentence that would keep him in Venezuela until the present, locked behind bars.
But that day, all he knew was that the control tower had not heeded his pleas to illuminate the runway.
Nonetheless, “I decided to land rather than run out of fuel and land on someone’s house,” Mr. Sawatzky said in an interview. He used GPS to navigate down to 200 feet above ground level, enough to see the runway before him. He brought the aircraft down with only his landing light as a guide.
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Then he turned the aircraft around to find a line of men on motorcycles with guns pointed in his direction.
“They started firing above the plane,” he recalled. “I shut off the motors, and it turns out that was the last of my freedom.”
The men threw him and his co-pilot to the ground and seized their cash and papers. Interrogations followed. Dogs sniffed the plane. Mr. Sawatzky says they found nothing. Another search followed, by an officer who said it tested positive for cocaine. Mr. Sawatzky believes it was a lie concocted to cover for the armed men who had stolen his belongings, including the aircraft.
“That was the introduction to one of the most corrupt, unjust countries in the world,” he said.
In Venezuela, Mr. Sawatzky is a convicted drug trafficker, sentenced to 17 years in prison for illicit transportation of narcotics and dangerous goods, in addition to violations of aeronautical laws.
Now 64 years old, he is being held in the Venezuelan state of Carabobo, southwest of Caracas, his sixth Venezuelan jail in nearly 13 years.
He spoke with The Globe and Mail from prison in hopes of drawing attention to his incarceration at a moment when Venezuela has begun to release political prisoners. Convinced he, too, has been held for political reasons, Mr. Sawatzky has for years petitioned Ottawa for help.
“The Canadian government left me stranded and alone here,” he said.
Global Affairs Canada will not publicly acknowledge his existence.
“Due to safety and security considerations, no information can be disclosed regarding Canadians arrested in Venezuela,” Samantha Lafleur, a spokesperson, said in an e-mail.
Family members of detainees wait outside the National Police Zone 7 Detention Centre in Caracas on Tuesday as Venezuela's government begins releasing some of the detainees, with the freeing of political prisoners marking a move long demanded by human rights groups, international bodies and opposition leaders.Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/Reuters
At Mr. Sawatzky’s first trial, he says a member of the country’s National Guard acknowledged that no cocaine was recovered from his aircraft. A lawyer who represented him said no evidence was presented to show that he entered Venezuelan airspace without permission. The dangerous goods he was found guilty of carrying were, the lawyer said, empty fuel barrels in his aircraft.
Mr. Sawatzky’s family said they have no knowledge of him ever using drugs.
He “probably made some poor choices and ended up in a corrupt country in jail,” said his son, who lives in Manitoba and shares the same name. But he cannot see his father being involved with cocaine.
“If he was actually guilty, I would not be helping him at all, to be honest,” the younger Mr. Sawatzky said. “But I really don’t feel he is guilty.”
The Globe verified elements of Mr. Sawatzky’s account through Venezuelan court documents, news media accounts, aircraft registration records, e-mail correspondence with the Canadian government and interviews both with members of Mr. Sawatzky’s family and a lawyer who represented him. The Globe is not identifying that lawyer because they fear reprisal.
Others, however, have said that Mr. Sawatzky’s past actions raise questions about the credibility of his claims.
His departure from Belize was his first time in command of that Aero Commander 500, which he bought from Texan Max Heatherington, who now lives in Belize.
In an interview, Mr. Heatherington recalled the first inquiry to buy the plane came from someone asking how far it could fly and how many kilos it could carry.
“He didn’t say, ’What’s the useful load?’ That is what pilots say,” Mr. Heatherington recalled. (Mr. Sawatzky denies this.)
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Mr. Heatherington was well-acquainted with the fleet-footed twin-engine plane’s historical popularity with cartels. In Belize, he had built a business of salvaging parts from drug-runners’ planes, which were often burned to destroy evidence.
The sale of his Aero Commander was unusual in other ways. He was paid in cash and asked to equip the plane with extra fuel. And when Mr. Sawatzky arrived to fly the airplane away, he did not take any of its logbooks, which provide a maintenance history critical to anyone taking possession for the long term.
This did not suggest, Mr. Heatherington said, that the plane was intended to be used for typical aviation purposes.
Mr. Sawatzky acknowledges that he took off from Belize without a flight plan – typically illegal on an international flight – and left at a time that would have had him arriving at a Venezuelan airport without international customs at an hour when its control tower is not operational.
He says he had permission to enter the country, and that importation of the aircraft meant starting new logbooks, removing the need for old ones.
“I did things in a bit of a rush,” he says, “which resulted in problems.”
The two men do agree on one thing. Mr. Heatherington believes there was no cocaine on board the plane.
“The airplane was totally clean when it left here,” he said. The circumstances led him to believe it was intended to transport drugs. But “it didn’t have any drugs in it.”
Mr. Sawatzky has come to believe that political interference has prevented his release. In 2018, he and his Colombian co-pilot were told their case would go to trial in late August, with the expectation that this would quickly lead to their freedom.
Mr. Sawatzky, however, was sentenced to 24 years, a number subsequently reduced on appeal to 17. He recalled that a translator passed a message from a judge, saying one of the country’s most powerful figures had directly intervened to ensure he remained behind bars.
Mr. Sawatzky says he was at one point held with political prisoners who include members of Nobel prize-winning opposition leader María Corina Machado’s party.
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It was only later that Mr. Sawatzky realized the Canadian government had in 2018 announced new sanctions against Venezuela. He now thinks he was kept in jail as a form of reprisal.
The co-pilot was released in 2022, his sister told The Globe.
Mr. Sawatzky has remained behind bars for nearly 13 years, but said he earned credit for the equivalent of an additional five years by working while incarcerated. He served food, made soap, trained inmates, did electrical work and plumbing, planted peanuts – even played the trumpet. This should have been enough, he said, to more than fulfill his 17-year sentence.
“I should have been out a year ago,” he said.
Born into a Mennonite community in Morden, Man., Mr. Sawatzky began a career as a pilot in northern parts of the province, flying float planes before returning to the grain fields of his youth. In the early 1990s, he garnered national attention for selling wheat to the United States, defying the Canadian Wheat Board’s export monopoly.
After a lengthy court battle, he moved to Belize in 2005. He bought a small farm and continued to fly, crop-dusting bananas.
In prison, he has been supported by family and a small group of Manitoba farmers, who have transferred tens of thousands of dollars to buy food and cover payments demanded by judges.
One judge sent ”a veiled threat that he wouldn’t get food unless we sent money,” Mr. Sawatzky’s son recalled. The family received a picture of Mr. Sawatzky, who “was down to something like 65 kilograms,” or 143 pounds. Mr. Sawatzky is 6 foot 1.
The money, however, has done little to shield Mr. Sawatzky from the harsh realities of Venezuelan justice.
“Death was a norm. Blood was common,” he said.
“It was really difficult. I had never in my life experienced hunger. Starvation. I learned what penal warfare is all about.”
Venezuela's top lawmaker Jorge Rodriguez said Tuesday that over 400 people had been freed from prison as part of an ongoing release process, although rights groups say the real figure is much lower.
Reuters
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the reference to Morden, Man., where David Sawatzky was born.