CARACAS, Venezuela — The detainees held inside one of Venezuela’s notorious prisons had not yet heard the news that had gripped their nation and much of the world for the past week.
They had heard the planes flying overhead on the early morning of Jan. 3 and had hoped the aircraft might have been part of a mission to rescue them. But they knew nothing more until Friday morning, when the father of one of the imprisoned men told him what had happened: The country’s president had been captured and spirited away to the United States, and the Venezuelan government had just promised to begin releasing political prisoners.
“I can’t believe it,” César Omaña, a well-connected doctor and businessman detained at the Rodeo I prison said during a weekly visit with his father, César Alfonso Omaña. “And the whole world knows?”
As the father left the prison that day, he recounted, his son rushed to tell the others the news inside the facility. The detainees began to sing: “Se cayó! He fell!”
The president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, Jorge Rodríguez, on Thursday said that the government would be releasing an “important number” of political prisoners in what President Donald Trump hailed as “a very important and smart gesture.” Many Venezuelans saw the announcement as the first signal of potential change in the autocratic government after the capture of its strongman.
By Saturday evening, 16 of the country’s 800 political prisoners had been released so far, according to the human rights organization Foro Penal. The mix of hope, fear and dread — felt most acutely among the families of political prisoners — captures how much of Venezuela feels as it waits nervously for what comes next.
Inside Rodeo I, no one had been released yet, Omaña said, not even the son-in-law of Edmundo González, the opposition leader who claimed victory in Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election. And as he stepped outside the prison, the elder Omaña saw a group of families waiting, wondering when — or if — their loved ones might see freedom.
By Friday evening, when fewer than 10 releases had been confirmed, the small trickle had done little to ease the anguish of relatives, many of whom had traveled from across the country to Caracas. The burden, human rights group say, has fallen heaviest on families from Venezuela’s interior — regions hit hardest by the country’s long economic collapse — as most political detainees are held in and around the capital, forcing often low-income families to make long, costly trips without knowing if or when their loved ones might be freed.
Outside the Zona 7 detention facility in Caracas, some family members have been camping in front of the center for three days. At least 20 remained on Saturday afternoon. “We want this nightmare to end,” said one of them, Jenny Quiroz.
Outside El Helicoide, one of Venezuela’s most infamous detention complexes, Rosángela Morales Mosquera stood scanning the entrance for any sign of her brother, Ricardo David Fonseca Mosquera — a sergeant in the national guard who has been detained since 2020 in connection to Operation Gideon, a failed incursion. The last five months, she said, Fonseca has been in a state of forced disappearance, with no official information about his whereabouts.
Morales traveled from Valencia, some 71 miles from Caracas, after seeing announcements about potential releases circulating on social media. But the initial rush of hope quickly gave way to uncertainty. “We don’t know if it’s true, if it’s a lie — everything they’re saying,” she said. “The expectation of whether they’ll release them. We don’t know anything.”
She said she had barely slept since traveling Thursday, managing about an hour of rest before heading to the prison. “Just imagining the moment I’d see him was enough to keep me awake,” Morales said. Now, she is holding on to the words Fonseca always repeated to her — fe y esperanza, faith and hope — and plans to remain outside El Helicoide until he is freed.
After the small batch of releases, questions began circulating among Venezuelans about the reason for the pause in what was expected to be a large wave. Some hoped it was simply due to bureaucratic delays. But in other waves of releases in recent years, dozens or even hundreds of detainees have been freed in a single day.
Some human rights activists worried the pause could signal an internal power struggle among the top officials of Venezuela’s authoritarian government. Jorge Rodríguez, who announced the releases, is the brother of interim president Delcy Rodríguez. The siblings, while loyal allies of Maduro, have at times been at odds with a rival, hard-line faction of the government represented by Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, who controls the police and the country’s prisons.
Hours after Jorge Rodríguez announced the release of political prisoners, Cabello appeared alongside security forces in a plaza in a show of force, saying the country was in peace because “the Venezuelan state has a monopoly over the weapons,” allowing them to assert control.
Humberto Prado, director of the Venezuelan Observatory of Prisons, feared the Venezuelan government could be following a familiar pattern of releasing some detainees before arresting new ones, and continuing their repression against dissent.
“Will that change?” Prado said. “They need to show us it will, because until now, they have not shown us.”
That cycle intensified after the 2024 presidential election, when a sweeping crackdown drove the number of political prisoners to as many as 2,500 at its peak. Since then, independent monitors have documented more than 800 people still held for political reasons, though they caution the true number could be higher because of opaque arrests, transfers and releases.
Among the political prisoners released Thursday were five Spanish citizens who were immediately taken to Spain. One of them, Rocío San Miguel, is a prominent human rights activist who had investigated extrajudicial killings by Venezuela’s security forces and whose arrest, nearly two years ago, drew fierce criticism from the international community.
Her brother, José Manuel San Miguel, released a statement on her behalf Saturday, saying her release did not mean full freedom and that she was prohibited from giving any type of statement, including on her health, political or legal situation and the conditions she faced during her imprisonment.
Other detainees who were released included Enrique Márquez, a former presidential candidate and longtime opposition figure, and Biagio Pilieri, a journalist and former member of Venezuela’s National Assembly, according to human rights organizations.
For Víctor Navarro, the announcement of prisoner releases reopened memories that never really left. Navarro, now a human rights activist and founder of the nonprofits Voces de la Memoria and Realidad Helicoide, was a 22-year-old youth organizer when he was arbitrarily detained in 2018 and taken to El Helicoide, where he says he was tortured.
Inside the prison, Navarro said, political prisoners often ask each other a chilling question: Who is your jailer? — the powerful figure believed to have ordered their detention. It is widely believed among political prisoners that different factions within the government maintain their own lists.
“Everyone has their prisoner. Nicolás Maduro has some. Cilia Flores has some. Delcy Rodríguez has hers,” Navarro said. “And that weighs heavily, because these are political decisions that lead to people being detained based on the interests of each of the repressive actors.”
The U.N. Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela concluded that orders for torture and abuse frequently came from the highest levels of government — naming Maduro and his inner circle as the “main architects” of a system designed to silence, discourage and quash dissent.
In the past day, the absence of official information has left families grasping for clues online, where unverified lists of possible releases circulated widely, heightening anxiety and, in many cases, deepening despair. Navarro said his organizations have been inundated with messages from families who had never publicly denounced their relatives’ detention out of fear of reprisals — families now desperate for any information.
In cases involving detainees held without formal charges, the process is often slow and mired in bureaucracy. Since Thursday, he said, it has also grown more secretive — a shift activists suspect is meant to avoid scenes unfolding in front of the press. In the cases of Márquez and Pilieri, their families were summoned to designated locations. The five Spanish citizens were taken directly to the airport to board a flight to Madrid.
For Navarro, the moment has been emotionally disorienting.
“They can’t cheat us again,” he said. “This can’t just stop halfway.”
That same sentiment echoed outside a slew of detention centers in Venezuela, where families and advocates vowed to stay put and continue pressuring for releases. Near El Helicoide, scores gathered for a vigil Friday night.
Cries of “justice and peace” and “they’re all innocent” rang out before the group broke into prayer, their faces lit by at least 150 candles painstakingly arranged on the concrete floor and lit one by one.
Schmidt and Paúl reported from Washington.
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