CARACAS, Venezuela — Jorge Rodríguez, the head of Venezuela’s National Assembly and the brother of interim president Delcy Rodríguez, announced Thursday that authorities had begun releasing political prisoners in what he described as a “unilateral gesture” by the government. He said the releases would include Venezuelan citizens and foreigners, though he did not specify how many people would be freed, saying only that it would be “an important number.”
Five Spanish citizens have been released and are “preparing to travel to Spain with assistance from our embassy in Caracas,” Spain’s Foreign Ministry said Thursday, adding that Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares had spoken with each of them personally. The statement did not say who had been freed or why.
But among those released is Rocío San Miguel, the head of Control Ciudadano, a nonprofit that has investigated extrajudicial killings by Venezuela’s security forces, Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, a Spanish lawmaker who has advocated his release, said in a statement. The arrest of San Miguel, a dual citizen of Spain and Venezuela, nearly two years ago drew fierce international condemnation, including from the United States.
The White House said it had pushed for prisoner releases. “This is one example of how the President is using maximum leverage to do right by the American and Venezuelan people,” said Anna Kelly, deputy White House press secretary.
The move was widely seen as the new government’s first tangible — if limited — gesture of change since the removal of longtime strongman Nicolás Maduro in a U.S. military operation last week.
Most of the details on who is to be released and when have yet to emerge. “These release processes are occurring as of this very moment,” Rodríguez said during a news conference Thursday at the National Assembly.
Human rights groups say Venezuela holds hundreds of political prisoners, though exact figures are difficult to verify. According to the watchdog group Foro Penal, as of Monday, 806 people were detained for political reasons, including 105 women, a teenager and 85 foreign nationals.
“Some people” are “on their way to freedom,” Alfredo Romero, president of Foro Penal, said Thursday. He did not say how he had been made aware of the releases.
“Let’s hope that this really is the beginning of the dismantling of the repressive system in Venezuela,” Romero said — “not a simple gesture” to be followed by more imprisonments.
Venezuela has the largest number of political prisoners in the Western Hemisphere, according to Freedom House and the Washington Office on Latin America, human rights advocacy organizations based in Washington. More than 16,000 political detentions have been registered in the South American nation since 2014, according to Foro Penal.
Many detainees have been accused of crimes including terrorism, incitement of hatred or conspiring to overthrow the government — charges human rights groups say are routinely used to punish dissent and the exercise of basic political rights. Few have been formally convicted, and many have been held for months or years without trial.
Some of the highest-profile Venezuelans detained include prominent opposition leaders and human rights activists. Among them are San Miguel, who a Spanish lawmaker said was released Thursday; Juan Pablo Guanipa and Perkins Rocha, close allies of opposition leader María Corina Machado; the politician and former presidential candidate Enrique Marquez; and Rafael Tudares, the son-in-law of the opposition’s stand-in candidate for president, Edmundo González.
The country has a long record of pairing crackdowns with selective reprieves, including prisoner releases. The latest announcement came as authorities this week arrested people they accused of celebrating Maduro’s ouster.
One of the Maduro government’s most intense crackdowns on dissent came in the days and weeks after the July 2024 presidential election, when security forces swept up hundreds of people associated with the opposition or with protests after Maduro claimed, without evidence, victory in an election won by the opposition, election receipts showed. Some of the opposition leaders arrested in the weeks and months that followed had played crucial roles in the opposition campaign and in the efforts to collect vote tallies. One of those was Jesús Armas, a young opposition organizer and activist.
According to Justicia, Encuentro y Perdón, the detainees, many of them journalists, activists, union members or government opponents, are held across at least 92 detention centers used for political prisoners in Venezuela — the most notorious of which is El Helicoide, an imposing spiral-shaped building in the center of Caracas.
Serving as the headquarters for the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service, the Helicoide prison has been singled out as a site of torture by the U.N. Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela — which also found that the orders for the abuse usually came from the highest level of government: Maduro and his inner circle.
Though crimes against humanity by the Venezuelan government have been documented by the United Nations, the International Criminal Court and other groups, Maduro and his administration had long denied both the violations and the existence of political prisoners, asserting that Venezuela respects human rights.
In a news conference Tuesday, Trump suggested that the Venezuelan government planned to shut down El Helicoide — what he called a “torture chamber.” Over the past few days, several Republican lawmakers — including Sen. Rick Scott and Reps. María Elvira Salazar and Carlos A. Gimenez of Florida — have repeatedly called for the release of Venezuela’s political prisoners.
As news broke of Thursday’s releases, Gimenez issued a warning to Rodríguez: “Jorge, from the United States Congress, we are demanding the immediate release of ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS unjustly jailed in your dungeons,” he wrote on X. “Not a single one should remain behind bars. We are watching closely.”
By midafternoon, journalists had gathered outside El Helicoide, outnumbering the security officers at the entrance. Reporters flanked a wide street near the detention complex, waiting for any sign that people might be released.
Officers from the Bolivarian National Police periodically ordered reporters to clear the street as dark-windowed vehicles sped in and out of the compound, prompting quiet speculation about who might be inside.
Paúl and Schmidt reported from Washington. Susannah George in Washington contributed to this report.
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