Expectations and disappointments mixed with Venezuelan government’s announcement of amnesty for political prisoners
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Actual release is slow… Raising doubts about the will of the provisional government
Opposition leader Juan Pablo Guanifa will not be released either.
According to the New York times (NYT) on the 12th (local time), the Venezuelan government announced on this morning that it had released 116 prisoners ‘in recent hours’. However,according to a tally by human rights groups that track the situation of political prisoners in Venezuela,only 41 people have been confirmed to be released since the ouster of President Nicolas Maduro.
As the release process progresses at a slow pace,doubts are growing about the intentions of Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodriguez and whether he has the ability to enforce his will against the hardliners in the government who control various security facilities and prisons.
Accordingly, the expectations of the opposition party, which had grown on the 8th when Interim President Rodriguez’s brother and National Assembly Speaker Jorge Rodriguez announced that “a significant number of political prisoners will be released,” are turning into disappointment.
On the 10th, U.S.President Donald Trump also raised the opposition’s expectations by posting on social media, “Venezuela has begun the process of releasing political prisoners on a large scale.”
The unexpected collaboration between interim President Rodríguez and the United States has raised hopes that Venezuela could become a less repressive contry than before, if not a democracy.
However, the slower-than-expected measures to release political prisoners are disappointing the Venezuelan people. On the 11th, families of political prisoners staged an all-night sit-in protest outside El Helicoide, a secret police prison in the capital Caracas.
The NYT assessed that this situation concurrently shows the limits of growing patience with the government’s delayed response and cautious hope. The clarification is that if it were the last days of the Maduro regime, security forces would have dispersed these protests in just a few minutes.
Famous opposition leaders, including Machado, are also imprisoned.
There are many cases where people had hope upon hearing the news of the release of political prisoners, only to be disappointed. A representative example is Ramon Guanipa linares, a college student living in Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second largest city.
The son of prominent Venezuelan opposition politician Juan Pablo Guanipa, he headed to the prison where his father was imprisoned shortly after the interim government’s announcement that it would release political prisoners.
“I wanted to be the first to hug my father,” Guanipa Linares told the New York Times. “But the prison authorities had no data about my father’s release or anything else.”
His father, Juan Pablo Guanipa, is the most influential politician currently detained in Venezuela.
A member of the centrist opposition National Assembly, he won the 2017 gubernatorial election in oil-rich Zulia state. However, the Maduro government dismissed Guanipa because he refused to swear allegiance to the legislative body created extralegally by the president.
in 2023, Guanipa ran for the opposition coalition’s presidential nomination for the next year’s presidential election. He placed second and supported the winner, Maria Corina Machado.
According to the vote counting machine,the opposition party reportedly won an overwhelming victory in the 2024 presidential election,but president Maduro,who declared himself the winner,took power again.
Guanipa and Machado were among the few prominent opposition leaders left in Venezuela even as the repression deepened. However, in May last year, security forces raided Guanifa’s hideout and took him to prison.
“My father did not want to escape his country and become a politician i
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