While political and military tension with the United States is at its peak, the government of Nicolás Maduro has decided to release 71 political opposition prisoners on Christmas Day, the largest number of politically excarcerated people in Venezuela in months. Last measure of mercy for the arrested politicians and activists who took Maduro’s place on August 2, when 13 prisoners were released from prison with alternative judicial measures. In December 2024, around a hundred prisoners were released from Chavista prisons, the vast majority of them having participated in anti-government protests during the presidential elections.
The Chavista regime is putting on the table a gesture studied to seek to alleviate the pressure against it, without making demonstrations of weakness or excessive magnanimity. 75 prisoners out of around 1,000 (according to the NGO Provea y Justicia, Encuentro y Perdón) who follow the farms return home.
The vast majority of them were also prosecuted for the demonstrations which followed the presidential election of July 28, 2025, deemed fraudulent by the opposition and well within the international community. At present, it is unclear whether frontline politicians or activists have benefited from these alternative legal measures, nor whether many are following the rules.
There is no information yet on all the names of the people who benefited from this Christmas outings. One of them would be the teacher Marggie Orozco, sentenced a few weeks ago to 30 years in prison for critical content against the Maduro government written in a Whatsapp thread. At least 65 men escaped from the Tocorón prison in the north-central part of the country, and three women escaped from the Las Crisálidas detention center. The list includes three teenagers held in custody in the coastal state of Vargas, near Caracas.
The NGO Justicia Encuentro y Perdón issued a statement that recognizes the positive impact of the official measure on the accused, but says that it is “clearly insufficient, if we compare it to the 1,085 people deprived of their liberty for political reasons who appear in our archives.” The civil association believes that “the partial release of people arbitrarily detained does not correct the underlying illegality”. And make sure, more importantly, that “the selective and discretionary nature of these exincarcerations confirms that the deprivation of liberty was used as an instrument of political persecution”.
The announced release of these political prisoners in no way expresses the development of an authentic policy of tension with the political and social opposition of the country, which is currently the very majority in Venezuela and which is under siege like never before. Quite the contrary: the siege of Washington gives Maduro’s government arguments and inspiration to continue radicalizing the Bolivarian revolution, with the approval of new punitive laws, the profusion of arrests in confusing circumstances and the increase in censorship in the media.
In these weeks, state security organs have strengthened their procedures against political and civil dissent, sending new opposition leaders to prison as US harassment intensifies on Venezuelan shores. The latest arrests included political scientist Nicmer Evans; union leaders José Elías Torres and William Lizardo; and political activist Melquíades Pulido, member of the Sale Venezuela party.
Last week, in a case that had a great impact on public opinion, the teenager Gabriel Rodríguez, a minor student, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for “terrorism”, for his participation in the popular demonstrations of August last year, following the presidential elections. The NGO Foro Penal estimates, for its part, that there are just over 800 political prisoners in the country.
In its Justicia declaration, Encuentro y Perdón finely recognizes “the human value of each excarceration and the relief it represents for people and their families, especially at the end of Christmas”. At the same time, he considers that this is an incomplete measure and we are witnessing a new call for a general amnesty for political prisoners, a slogan very frequently mentioned by social organizations and human rights organizations. “Freedom cannot be granted as a prerogative, but as a right, and must be returned to all those who have been arbitrarily arrested,” the organization maintains.
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