Watching a video of Enrique Márquez, a Venezuelan political prisoner, walk free on Thursday reminded me of the last time I saw him. It was an extraordinary scene.
I was covering Venezuela’s last presidential elections, in 2024, from the capital, Caracas. Mr. Márquez, then a candidate for a minor opposition party, arrived at an official ceremony convened to rubber-stamp President Nicolás Maduro’s dubious claim to victory.
Days earlier, Mr. Maduro declared that he had secured his third term, even though official tallies from voting machines collected by the opposition parties clearly showed he had lost decisively.
A member of The New York Times’ data team, Ethan Singer, and I had confirmed the veracity of that evidence, as did various independent researchers and electoral observers.
It was a blatant abuse of democratic norms and a reprise of a familiar cycle among Venezuelans: rising hopes, then abject disillusionment.
Then Mr. Márquez spoke.
“The truth, is that I came to see what this is all about, and I leave here with the same question,” he said on the state television broadcast, with Mr. Maduro sitting in attendance. “I have to inform the nation that I refuse to sign the act” confirming Mr. Maduro’s victory, he added.
Mr. Márquez, a former member of Venezuela’s electoral commission, then rattled off several articles of Venezuelan law that the ceremony was violating.
I was dumbstruck. In more than a decade covering Venezuela, I have grown used to covering abuses of power, cynical ploys and repression by Mr. Maduro’s government. I was not used to hearing someone speak like that to the government, not with such directness and certainly not on its own turf.
Mr. Márquez paid for that truth.
Months after his speech, Mr. Márquez was stopped by the police while driving in Caracas and jailed. The government accused him of planning a coup, though he was never convicted.
He spent a year in El Helicoide, the Venezuelan secret police’s notorious jail, and was released on Thursday, along with seven other prominent political prisoners. It was the first tangible move by the interim government that took over after the U.S. military removed Mr. Maduro on Jan. 3.
“God bless you,” Mr. Márquez told his wife, Sonia de Márquez, as he hugged her and cried on a Caracas street on Thursday, according to a video published by Venezuela’s press union.
I met Mr. Márquez around 2015, when he was a lawmaker for a centrist opposition party, and have interviewed him periodically.
An electrical engineer from the oil-rich state of Zulia, he struck me as a strong example of Venezuela’s professional middle class, which has been decimated by Mr. Maduro’s economic policies and repression. In a country known for its casual dress and exuberant speech, he always wore sober dark suits and a tie, and spoke in a calm, measured voice.
His decision to run in the 2024 election exposed him to attacks from both sides of the country’s political spectrum. Many supporters of the main opposition leader, María Corina Machado, accused him of splitting the opposition vote and selling out to Mr. Maduro.
Mr. Márquez knew that his candidacy never stood a chance. His tiny party, called People-Centered, won a small percentage of the vote.
He told me shortly before the vote that his motivation lie elsewhere. He said he wanted to continue his quixotic campaign to give the leading opposition alliance a backup slot on the ballot in case the main opposition party, Unitary Platform, was barred from participating, a real possibility at the time.
After the vote, Mr. Márquez and his allies provided the tallies from the polling stations where they were observing — about 8 percent of the total — to Ms. Machado’s campaign, helping her prove the fraud.
Mariana Martínez and Sheyla Urdaneta contributed reporting.
Anatoly Kurmanaev covers Venezuela and its interim government.
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