In Venezuela these days, political prisoners come out the way concessions used to: in carefully counted batches. Between Friday and Saturday, 39 dissidents were freed from various prisons, according to Justicia, Encuentro y Perdon, a human-rights group, following a second round of Washington-backed negotiations between the country’s interim government and the opposition.
Among them, the group said, were eight women accused of “narco-terrorism” in 2021 and six people accused of working with the United States in a 2020 attempt to overthrow the former president, Nicolas Maduro. The composition of the list is telling: those accused of plotting with Washington are now freed at Washington’s negotiating table.
The country has been run since January by a caretaker administration headed by Delcy Rodriguez, Mr Maduro’s former vice-president, after American forces captured him and his wife on narco-terrorism charges and flew them to New York, a fact confirmed by Reuters at the time. Ms Rodriguez has since promised elections, pledging them days before the release, according to The Nation, a Pakistani daily. Each batch of freed prisoners seems to mark a stage in the talks.
Nor is this the largest such payment so far: in August the government said it had freed 131 people considered political prisoners, Al Jazeera reported. The arithmetic suggests a process with some way still to run, and a negotiating calendar kept behind bars.