Venezuela began this Thursday, at a moment of maximum weakness, the release of the regime’s most emblematic political prisoners. It has been the most important change since the capture by the United States, in the early hours of January 3, of the president on charges of terrorism and drug trafficking. The release of opponents of the Chavista regime was one of the main demands of the international community, although President Donald Trump has not made any mention of the matter until now, and Venezuelan human rights organizations.
He did not specify the number of those released or the names, but it has been evident as the hours progressed that the magnitude of the measure far exceeded. On the list of those released there are figures as relevant as the Hispanic-Venezuelan woman accused without evidence of conspiring to assassinate the president, and while relatives of former presidential candidate Enrique Márquez were awaiting release from prison. By mid-afternoon, human rights organizations that follow the path of political prisoners had only managed to confirm the release of five people.
In the surroundings of Helicoide, the prison that concentrates the largest number of political prisoners in Caracas, the prisoners’ families waited for news. Other liberations produced during Chavismo were marked by uncertainty and waiting. Some relatives have been told that the first releases could occur between midnight and Friday. “You have to wait for the call,” says one of them.
In the absence of precise official data, the organizations were trying to confirm whether among those released there will be other key opposition figures, such as Juan Pablo Guanipa, leader of Primero Justicia; the lawyer Rafael Tudares, son-in-law of the opposition leader Edmundo González Urrutia; Ronald Carreño, journalist and member of Voluntad Popular; or the activist Jesús Armas.
The announcement of the beginning of the liberations was in the mouth of the president of the National Assembly of Venezuela, . They are, he said, “a unilateral gesture [de Venezuela] to strengthen” the “unwavering decision to consolidate peace” in the country and “peaceful collusion”, without distinction of ideology or religion. The deputy, brother of the interim president, especially appreciated the mediation in the Venezuelan crisis of the former president of the Government of Spain, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero; the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the Government of Qatar.
Rocío San Miguel, a Venezuelan of Spanish parents, had been imprisoned in El Helicoide prison since February 2024 after being detained with her daughter at the airport when she was preparing to travel to Miami. Days after her capture, the attorney general, Tarek William Saab, accused her of being involved in operation Brazalete Blanco, an alleged conspiracy plan denounced by the senior Chavista hierarchy. According to his family, San Miguel will travel to Spain shortly.
Márquez, for his part, was a presidential candidate in the elections of July 28, 2024, representing a small opposition party, Centrados. Between 2020 and 2023, he headed the body of rectors of the National Electoral Council (CNE) as part of a political pact reached between sectors of the opposition and Chavismo for the electoral cycles of those years.
Along with San Miguel are the Basques Andrés Martínez Adasme and José María Basoa, the Canarian Miguel Moreno and the Valencian Ernesto Gorbe, as diplomatic sources have confirmed to EL PAÍS. The Spanish Foreign Minister, José Manuel Albares, has expressed that this is a “great first step.”
The Bolivarian Government has presented the releases as a decision unrelated to the extraordinary pressure it has received from the United States since Maduro’s capture. Trump had already made clear that the arrest of the Venezuelan president for alleged terrorism and drug trafficking was only the first step in a much broader strategy of political oversight and control of his Venezuelan oil industry. the Republican said a day ago, while announcing that he would keep Delcy Rodríguez in power as long as his government followed Washington’s directives.
President Rodríguez had already shown how far she was willing to give in to pressure. During a meeting with deputies of the new Assembly at the Miraflores Palace, he said that. At the end of the day, he argued, the country must have them “with all the countries in the hemisphere.” Hours before those statements, Trump had announced that Caracas would be handed over to the United States for sanctioned commercialization,” that is, that previously they were going mainly to China.
It is in this framework that the last release of political prisoners took place: a scenario conditioned by the standards of good behavior that the Republican Administration demands of Chavismo in exchange for keeping it alive.
In Venezuela there were, until this Thursday, more than 820 political prisoners, the highest number in the entire hemisphere, according to Foro Penal. Of them, 89 were foreigners (adding Venezuelans with two nationalities). The director of the organization, Alfredo Romero, celebrated the releases, but asked “the people who control power to publish a list of those imprisoned.” “We hope that this is indeed the beginning of the dismantling of the repressive system in Venezuela,” he said in
Other organizations, such as, estimated that there were more than 1,000 detainees for political reasons, many of them arrested after protests that questioned Maduro’s victory in the 2024 presidential elections. Last December, the Government
It is not clear whether these release measures imply the full freedom of political prisoners or whether restrictions will be applied to them, such as a periodic regime of appearance before the courts or the prohibition of leaving the country, as has happened with almost all the cases announced in the past. In any case, civil organizations linked to the defense of human rights demand a general amnesty for what they consider “arbitrary and unjustified” arrests.
Although Hugo Chávez had political prisoners, such as Commissioner Iván Simonovis – exiled after escaping house arrest – or Judge Lourdes Afiuni, the Venezuelan dungeons were filled with political prisoners in the last decade, the decade of greatest political friction during the Maduro Government.
