The former president of the Government landed in Caracas this Friday to meet with the acting president Delcy Rodríguez of . Zapatero has been mediating with Chavismo for a decade for the release of political prisoners and has a good relationship with the new leader of Chavismo. Sources familiar with his agenda affirm that he will also meet with the president of the National Assembly and brother of the president, Jorge Rodríguez. “I have a long-range, almost daily relationship with Delcy Rodríguez, and I have great confidence in her. I know her very well. She is taking steps so that Venezuela can breathe, after many difficult years,” Zapatero acknowledged in statements to the press.
Zapatero’s visit, advanced by The World and confirmed by this newspaper, is part of the process of mass releases that Chavismo is preparing. The releases that have occurred in the last month are now being added to the National Assembly. The articles will now undergo a brief consultation period and will be definitively approved soon.
“With great satisfaction, after 10 years of being linked to the political situation in Venezuela, this is a moment of well-founded hope,” Rodríguez Zapatero told reporters. “The will for peace is the task. Coexistence is the path. Definitive reconciliation is the goal. The country needs everyone, for us to recover the affections between those who are different,” he added. Zapatero assured that Venezuela’s will be one of the “fastest amnesties that has been applied in countries that have experienced profound changes.” And he added: “Forgetting should not exist, but what lies ahead must be forgiveness and reconciliation.” The former president assured that he already knows the law and said that it is very “ambitious” and “broad.”
The former president will meet during the day with opposition deputies, such as Henrique Capriles and Stalin González. Also scheduled on his agenda is a meeting with a man recently released after spending a year in prison after refusing to sign the electoral records that favored Nicolás Maduro in 2024. Deputy Antonio Ecarri will also meet with the former Spanish president, with whom he has been a frequent interlocutor. Ecarri, presidential candidate in 2024, is the only opponent included in the commission of 19 parliamentarians that will participate in consultations on the amnesty law.
Zapatero will join the Commission for Democratic Coexistence and Peace that Delcy Rodríguez created in her first weeks in the Government. This group participates in the drafting of the amnesty law and other measures to promote reconciliation in the country. Led by the Minister of Culture, Ernesto Villegas, it is made up mostly of actors close to Chavismo, such as the influencer Indira Urbaneja and some representatives of civil society, such as the political scientist Michael Penfold and the journalist Lamking González. This commission already had a meeting this week at the Eurobuilding Hotel and this afternoon it will meet at the Rómulo Gallegos Latin American Center, in Caracas. Before this meeting, Zapatero said that he had met with relatives of political prisoners whom he had helped in their recent releases.
The draft of the bill that has been circulated, which includes all crimes of a political nature and immediate releases, is broader than expected. So much so that there were some Chavista deputies who did not applaud its approval. “We ask for forgiveness and we have to forgive too,” said the president of the Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, on Thursday. On Friday This Friday, in any case, other more restrictive drafts have been known, so the final version has yet to be finalized.
Chavismo, beheaded on January 3 with the capture of Nicolás Maduro by elite US troops, is rehearsing a new stage of opening. Internally, Delcy Rodríguez has defended that measures such as the opening of the oil market or the releases of prisoners (and even the amnesty) were decisions already taken by Maduro under supervision, but the messages from the United States affect the protection. Secretary of State Marco Rubio outlined the roadmap that his country wants for Venezuela – stabilization, recovery and transition – and this is what the new US chargé d’affaires recalled this week. “We will work with Venezuelans to achieve a transition,” said Laura Dogu.
Zapatero’s role in Venezuela has been questioned for years due to his dialogue with the Rodríguez brothers. The former president, however, has always defended that his role—and his silence on Venezuela—has been important for the release of dozens of prisoners in recent years, a mediation that began in 2017 with the release of Leopoldo López. His phone is full of messages from family members. Zapatero accepts that this means public wear and tear that he is willing to assume.
It was his mediation together with that of the Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Qatar that achieved the release of Chavismo starting on January 8, just five days after the United States attack that ended Nicolás Maduro in a New York prison.
