Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado assured this Friday that the general amnesty law to free political prisoners proposed by the acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, is “a product of real pressure” from the United States and that she hopes it becomes a reality.
“Obviously it is not something that the regime has voluntarily wanted to do, but rather it is a product of the real pressure it has received from the United States government. I hope this is the case and I hope the 700, more than 700 prisoners who still remain in the torture centers in Venezuela can be with their families very soon,” he said.
Machado made the statements in the talk ‘Let’s talk about Venezuela’ with journalist Michael Stott at the Hay Festival in Cartagena de Indias.
Amnesty
Delcy Rodríguez said today at the start of the judicial year, at the Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ), that they have decided to “promote a general amnesty law that covers the entire political period of political violence from 1999 to the present.”
In this regard, Machado, 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner, said that in Venezuela “the regime’s repressive apparatus is brutal” and “has responded to the interests of the multiple criminal forces that make up this regime.”
“We have lived through 27 years of a brutal process, of persecution, of repression, of silencing the voices of all citizens, whether they are journalists, human rights activists, housewives, students, teachers, doctors, economists and, of course, political leaders,” he stated.
The opposition leader added that in Venezuela “there are political prisoners who have been in prison for 23 years,” as is the case of three metropolitan police officers, and there are others “who have been disappeared.”
He even said that in the weeks after January 3, when a US military attack deposed President Nicolás Maduro, there were arrests of about 16 people.
The Nobel Prize winner regretted that Venezuelans have trusted Chavismo, which came to power in 1999, and have underestimated “the destructive capacity of the regime”, which she said “was integrated into a criminal system”, and only years later have they realized that it had to be confronted.
“We underestimated the magnitude of the criminal network that was taking shape in Venezuela, we underestimated the complicities that were forged,” he stressed.
However, he stressed that in recent years Venezuelans managed to persuade and convince the world that something had to be done to combat Chavismo.
“I do believe that the situation in Venezuela after more than 400,000 deaths in these 27 years with violent weapons of war, after more than 20,000 extrajudicial executions, after more than 18,000 political arrests just after Maduro came to power (in 2013) presents a core question to the global democratic order,” he expressed.
