On July 4, 2022, Phoenix Mercury center Brittney Griner sent a letter to President Joe Biden. Writing from a Russian prison, she told him how she feared being indefinitely detained. She pleaded with Biden to not forget about her, or the dozens of other Americans the U.S. government considers as being wrongfully held overseas. “It hurts thinking about how I usually celebrate this day because freedom means something completely different to me this year,” Griner wrote.
The next day, Jorge Toledo, an American who was being held captive in Venezuela, penned his own letter to Biden. It opened with a similar refrain. Toledo wrote that he had been thinking about Independence Day and “its meaning and impact for what we know as freedom, which I do not have at this moment.” He described “fighting a battle against a very powerful counterpart.” “Mr. President, I need your help,” he wrote.
“Without knowing,” Toledo says, reflecting on the note nearly a year later, “my letter and her letter had some sort of connection.”
Last summer, Toledo was in the midst of his own ordeal abroad. His began in November 2017, when he and five other American Citgo executives were summoned to a last-minute business meeting in Caracas and arrested shortly after arrival. At first, he says,…
