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The interim president of Venezuela assured this Friday that the amnesty is a step in the construction of a “more democratic, more just, more free” nation, after the law aimed at the release of hundreds of political prisoners was supported by the military and questioned by experts.
“Today we are building a more democratic, more just, more free Venezuela, and it must be with the efforts of everyone,” said Delcy Rodríguez in a speech on state television.
Although the Rodríguez government granted conditional freedom to 448 opponents after the capture of Nicolás Maduro in a US raid in early January, there are still almost 650 political prisoners imprisoned, according to the NGO Foro Penal.
Experts doubt the scope of this law, an initiative by Rodríguez and approved Thursday night in Parliament by consensus: hundreds of detainees as soldiers involved in “terrorist” activities may be left out.
“Many of us are aware that the amnesty law does not protect our relatives,” Hiowanka Ávila, 39, told AFP. His brother Henryberth Rivas, 30, was arrested in 2018 accused of participating in an assassination attempt with drones against Maduro.
“We have to wait for some other measure, it could be a pardon,” he lamented outside the Rodeo I prison, about 40 km from Caracas. Sadness fills the atmosphere: many of those detained there are soldiers or police, accused of “terrorism.”
The law “must be interpreted as a sign of maturity and political strength, as it represents a transcendental step to achieve the stability of the nation,” said the Minister of Defense and General in Chief of the Armed Forces, Vladimir Padrino, in a statement.
The Armed Forces are the support of the so-called Bolivarian Revolution. He swears “loyalty and subordination” to Rodríguez, who was Maduro’s vice president and assumed functions temporarily after his overthrow.
“It has been an act of greatness,” the interim president described after promulgating the law on Thursday night.
“You have to know how to ask for forgiveness and you also have to know how to receive forgiveness,” he noted.
– «Deeds, not words» –
Narwin Gil, a relative of a prisoner in the National Police cells in Caracas known as Zone 7, did not hide his impatience. “We need actions, not words,” she asked tiredly.
She was lying on a makeshift bed in front of the prison. A dozen women began a hunger strike there on February 14, which ended when the amnesty was approved.
Gil was the last to end the protest. “We are waiting for these events, and for them to be as soon as possible, because we need to go home,” he said.
Relatives have been stationed outside Venezuelan prisons since January 8, when the government announced a release process that is advancing slowly.
“The amnesty is not automatic,” said the director of Foro Penal, Alfredo Romero, at a press conference. He criticized the amnesty application process before the courts, a debated point in the bill that generated discord in Parliament.
The project went through a public consultation that included jurists and relatives of political prisoners, as well as negotiations with the small opposition bench in the National Assembly.
“The balance of the law is negative” because it leaves many out, Ali Daniels, director of the NGO Access to Justice, told AFP. He denounced “serious structural deficiencies” in the standard.
– «Full freedom» –
“With our people, with the people of Maracaibo in the Basilica,” the opposition leader Juan Pablo Guanipa wrote this Friday in X, along with a video that shows how dozens of his followers receive him with applause in the streets of the country’s second city.
Guanipa is a close ally of Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado. He was detained for nine months accused of conspiracy and, after a few hours released from prison, he was captured again on February 8, accused of violating his parole.
Since then, he was under house arrest. This Friday he was left in “full freedom.”
There will be no “lasting reconciliation without memory or responsibility,” said opponent Edmundo González Urrutia, exiled in Madrid, who claims victory in the 2024 presidential elections.
The amnesty is part of Rodríguez’s agenda, as well as greater oil opening and a turnaround in the battered relations with the United States, broken since 2019.
Spain announced on Friday that it will ask the European Union to lift sanctions on Rodríguez in response to the steps taken.
Rodríguez governs under pressure from Washington, which claims to be in charge of post-Maduro Venezuela.
On Wednesday, the head of the United States Southern Command, General Francis Donovan, met in Caracas with Rodríguez, Padrino and the powerful Minister of the Interior, Diosdado Cabello, who for years proclaimed anti-imperialist speeches.
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