Edmundo González, the man widely considered the legitimate winner of Venezuela’s tainted 2024 presidential election, said Thursday that his son-in-law Rafael Tudares had been released after more than a year in Venezuelan detention — one of several recent high-profile releases amid continuing repression.
Mr. González’s daughter confirmed he was free. “After 380 days of an unjust arbitrary detention and having endured, for more than a year, an inhuman situation of enforced disappearance, my husband Rafael Tudares Bracho has returned home,” Mariana González de Tudares wrote on X.
Mr. González, 76, said that the move ended “a year marked by uncertainty, silence, and anguish” for his family but that it underscored the necessity of Venezuela’s freeing all remaining political prisoners.
“Rafael’s release does not erase what happened,” he said in a video posted to social media. “On the contrary, it reinforces a demand that remains fully in force.”
Mr. Tudares was detained last year while walking his children to school, Mr. González said, when hooded men dressed in black seized him and drove him away. His disappearance was part of a government crackdown after the 2024 election that led Mr. González, a retired diplomat, to flee into exile in Spain.
Venezuela’s interim government, led by Delcy Rodríguez, has begun freeing a limited number of detainees since U.S. forces captured President Nicolás Maduro this month.
Of almost 900 political prisoners in Venezuela, 151 have been let go, according to a leading human rights group, Foro Penal, with many of those freed still facing charges, travel bans and regular enforced court appearances.
Ms. González said last month that her husband had been sentenced to 30 years in prison after a single closed-door hearing the month before on conspiracy charges. The accusations of conspiracy included another person that Mr. Tudares’s family said he had never met.
The authorities, she said, denied the family and lawyers access to the case file, classified the proceedings as confidential and barred him from choosing his own lawyer. Mr. Tudares’s legal case, his family said, was a violation of due process and international human rights standards.
Ms. González said at the time that Mr. Tudares was being held at Rodeo One, a high-security prison where former detainees have reported abuse, and that she had not been able to visit or communicate with him. A coalition of opposition groups said he had been “subjected to prolonged isolation.”
A United Nations report said Mr. Tudares was held incommunicado for more than eight months, with his family given no official information about his whereabouts. While the authorities accused him of crimes including forgery, conspiracy, terrorism, money laundering and criminal association, the report said the actual basis for the charges appeared to be his relationship to Mr. González and his role as a legal representative for his father-in-law in a property matter.
Mr. Tudares’s release came days after Ms. González said she had been the target of three separate extortion attempts that indicated her husband’s freedom depended on forcing her father to abandon his political cause. The government did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
Analysts said Mr. Tudares’s release could be linked to pressure from Washington. It came a day after the U.S. representative to the Organization of American States called for the liberation of all political prisoners in Venezuela.
“Slowly but surely the government is being forced to release even high-profile political prisoners,” said Geoff Ramsey, who studies Colombia and Venezuela at the Atlantic Council, a Washington research institute. “As much as Delcy Rodríguez claims she’s in the driver’s seat, she’s having to make an increasing number of concessions to Washington.”
But, he added, repression continues and, amid Venezuela’s rapprochement with the Trump administration, whether there will be an opening of political freedom remains an open question.
President Trump, said in an interview on Fox News this month that it was “going to be a while before they can have elections,” adding, “but ultimately they’ll have elections.”
Phil Gunson, an analyst based in Caracas with the International Crisis Group, a research organization, said the government had been holding Mr. Tudares hostage to try to force his father-in-law to abandon his claim to the presidency.
“But it may also reflect the fact that — for now at least — there seems little prospect that Washington will insist the Rodriguez government honor the true result of the 2024 presidential election,” Mr. Gunson said. “More plausible is a fresh election at some indeterminate future date. In that regard, perhaps Edmundo González represents less of a threat to Chavismo.” Chavismo refers to the socialist-influenced political movement that has led the country for more than two decades.
Genevieve Glatsky is a reporter for The Times, based in Bogotá, Colombia.
The post Son-in-Law of Venezuelan Opposition Candidate Freed appeared first on New York Times.
