Venezuela: An amnesty is neither weakness nor oblivion

Guillermo Barreto

On 20 May 2017, during a violent protest planned by sectors of the Venezuelan opposition, 21-year-old Orlando Figuera was attacked by a mob that accused him of being a Chavista.

After being stabbed, he was doused with petrol and set on fire in front of everyone present.

Young Orlando was admitted to a hospital with multiple wounds and burns covering 80% of his body and died 15 days later, on 4 June.

The violence of this crime is an expression of what has characterised the Venezuelan right wing, led by people such as María Corina Machado, among others.

Hatred, racism and intolerance. Violent actions have accompanied the Venezuelan opposition since the beginning of Hugo Chávez’s government.

It is worth remembering the events of April 2002 when the business sector, private media and minority sectors of the Armed Forces, supported by the governments of the United States and Spain, conspired to overthrow the government.

On that occasion, they deployed snipers who fired from various points at both opposition and pro-government individuals to create the narrative that the government had ordered the shooting of unarmed demonstrators.

The coup lasted only a couple of days, but the way it was carried out revealed the fascist nature of an opposition whose visible faces have not changed since then.

Chávez returned to power and not only called for peace and coexistence, but in 2007 he signed an amnesty decree that allowed for the release of many of those involved in those events.

The decree granted amnesty to those who were prosecuted and convicted of committing any of 13 crimes, including the violent takeover of state and municipal governments, the unlawful deprivation of liberty of a minister, incitement to military rebellion, and a series of events that led to the death of people.

We are referring to crimes that are clearly defined in Venezuelan law. These crimes are also defined in the laws of every other country in the world, including the US.

When President Chávez granted amnesty to these individuals, he was not nullifying the crime. He was extending a hand and calling for politics to be conducted within the framework of the law, peace and coexistence.

Recently, the acting President of Venezuela, Dr Delcy Rodríguez, announced an amnesty and asked the National Assembly to draft and discuss an amnesty bill.

This law would formalise a process of case review and release from prison that had already begun under President Nicolás Maduro Moros and that excludes those convicted of murder, drug trafficking, corruption or human rights violations.

The corporate media is already talking about the release of political prisoners, but it is important to be precise and understand what we are talking about. Political prisoners or politicians in prison?

According to Amnesty International, a political prisoner or prisoner of conscience is a person “imprisoned (or subjected to other forms of deprivation of liberty) solely because of who they are (their ethnic origin, sex, colour, language, national or social origin, socioeconomic status, birth, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or other status) or for believing what they believe (their political, religious, or other deeply held convictions), who has not used violence or advocated violence or hatred in the circumstances leading to their arrest”.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the EU also establishes that a person is a political prisoner when his or her detention has been imposed for purely political reasons unrelated to any crime.

Who, then, are the prisoners whom the mainstream media calls political prisoners? We are referring to people who promoted, instigated or participated in violent actions explicitly characterised as crimes under Venezuelan law.

Let us recall those events. In 2013, after the official results were announced declaring then-candidate Maduro the winner of the elections, the losing candidate, Henrique Capriles Radonsky, rejected the results and called on his supporters to publicly express their rejection through the use of violence, which led to the murder of nine people, including children and adolescents.

In 2014, opposition leaders, including Leopoldo López, Machado and Antonio Ledezma, called for people to join a plan they called “La Salida” (The Way Out). This led to attacks on people identified with the government and attacks on and setting of fire to public health, education, transport and electricity infrastructure, subsidised food storage and distribution networks, libraries and even a pre-school that was housing 89 children under the age of six at the time of the attack.

In total, 43 people were killed and 878 injured during these events. Among the dead were nine security officials and a public prosecutor who was doing his job.

A similar situation occurred in 2017. The same actors, the same faces, but with even greater violence. A report by the human rights organisation Sures refers to acts of violence that left 74 people dead, of whom only six were attributable to the security forces.

Twenty-eight people were killed by gunfire, some from homemade weapons. Some people were killed while participating in activities in support of the government by shots fired from nearby buildings. And there was the terrible case of Figuera, with which we began this article.

Most of the demonstrations, which also included road closures and the obstruction, under threat, of free movement, took place in municipalities whose authorities were from the opposition, some of whom even participated directly in the actions.

In 2024, after the 28 July elections, the opposition once again refused to recognise the results and called (once again) for violence. We can list, by way of example, that 12 universities, seven pre-schools, 21 schools, 34 high schools, six comprehensive diagnostic centres, 11 metro stations, 38 buses, 10 National Electoral Council headquarters, ministry headquarters, courts and police stations were attacked with blunt objects, incendiary bombs and firearms.

People (mostly women) who led community processes were murdered. Soldiers were killed. Several officers of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces, professional troops, and 120 police officers were wounded.

There is no space to continue listing the actions of an opposition that, since the beginning of the Bolivarian Revolution, has not stopped in its attempt to overthrow the government and uses violence as a tool for that action. This is an opposition that has saturated its supporters with speeches of hatred and intolerance.

We are not talking about political prisoners. We are talking about people who have committed crimes, have been charged and convicted for those crimes, people who have left deep wounds in the Venezuelan people.

An amnesty at this time, however, is not a sign of weakness. It is not oblivion. It is a demonstration, as Chávez did in 2007, that Venezuela is committed to peace and a call (once again) to the sectors opposed to the government to follow paths framed by democracy, coexistence and the Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. – Globetrotter

Guillermo R Barreto is a Venezuelan who holds a doctorate in science from Oxford University. He is a retired professor at the Simón Bolívar University in Venezuela. He was a deputy science and technology minister, the president of the National Science and Technology Fund, and eco-socialism and water minister of Venezuela. He is currently a researcher at the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research and a visiting collaborator at the Center for the Study of Social Transformations-Ivic.

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