Families search for relatives as Rodriguez govt frees political prisoners – Firstpost

As Venezuela’s interim leader, Delcy Rodriguez, has started releasing political prisoners, families across the country are running from pillar to post in search of their relatives. Rights group Foro Penal has confirmed the release of 154 political prisoners in recent weeks.

But the number is far from either detentions during the regime of ousted leader, Nicolas Maduro, or the number of released prisoners by Delcy’s government.

During his 13‑year rule, Maduro, who was ousted in a US invasion earlier this month, arbitrarily jailed hundreds of critics and political opponents. Since his ouster, Delcy’s administration has claimed to have released at least 626 people.

Over the decades, detentions and forced disappearances have been tools of dictators in Latin America to silent critics, marginalise the opposition, and entrench their rule. In the 1970s, Argentinian dictator Jorge Rafael Videla mastered the strategy that Maduro eventually adopted. After claiming victory in the 2024 election that was widely condemned as rigged, Maduro had launched a nationwide crackdown on critics, activists, ad political opposition, detaining hundreds.

The New York Times has reported accounts of several families that running from prison to prison in Venezuela in search of their relatives.

Carolina Carrizo took a 10-hour bus ride to reach the Zona 7 detention center in the national capital of Caracas. She said that police personnel forced their way into their home two months back and picked up her 53-year-old husband, Omar Torres, a political activist. She said he has been untraceable since.

Carrizo is one of the several family members looking for their relatives in various prisons and detention centres. The fact that many of those picked up were never formally charged with an offence but were simply detained makes it hard to track them as they are outside of formal records and prisons.

‘It is as if the earth swallowed him’

Summing the frustrations of hundreds like her, Yesley Bello, whose former partner, Victor Borges, has been missing since November, said, “It is as if the earth swallowed him.”

Witnesses told Bello that vehicles bearing the insignia of Venezuela’s Bolivarian National Police arrived at Borges’s workplace and took him away, according to The Times.

Borges’ family said it has visited scores of government agencies, prisons, hospitals, police stations, and morgues but they were told everywhere that no one by that name was there. Bello said that she had begun to consider the possibility that he may never return to her or his five children.

“I will tell them about the great father they had,” said Bello.

Borges is not alone. Foro Penal, a rights group, has said that locations of at least 66 prisoners is unknown in Venezuela.

Clara del Campo, the South America campaigner for Amnesty International, told The Times that families literally” knock on prison doors asking for their loved ones, but the guards claim no one by that name is in custody.

“It speaks to the ingenuity of repressive governments whereby they find new ways of applying cruelty and punishing those that they consider real or perceived dissidents,” said Campo.

Marilis Rodriguez, 58, said she traveled 200 miles to Caracas from the city of Acarigua in search of her son, Carlos Jose Rodriguez. She said the police took him from his home on September 23 after accusing him of illegally selling dollars on the black market. She said she was told at one prison in Caracas that he had been released but was later told the information was incorrect.

“My son was taken from his house for an investigation. They were going to question him about something, and it’s going to be four months since we last heard from him,” Rodríguez told The Times.