Rafael Tudares, the son-in-law of Venezuelan opposition candidate Edmundo González, has been released from prison, his wife has said, more than a year after he was detained as part of a crackdown on Maduro government critics and their relatives.
Mariana González said her husband had returned home after “380 days of unjust and arbitrary detention”.
Tudares is one of more than 150 detainees who have been released since the US military seized Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro, in a nighttime raid and took him to New York to stand trial on drug-trafficking charges.
An NGO lobbying for the release of Venezuelan political prisoners warns that 777 still remain behind bars.
Tension within the country remains high with Maduro’s former vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, now in power having been sworn in as the acting president.
Her interim government has received the backing of US President Donald Trump, who has praised Rodríguez for agreeing to “turn over” up to 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil to the US.
The release of political prisoners had been among the first things the Trump administration had pushed Venezuela’s interim government to do.
Just five days after the US raid, the head of Venezuela’s National Assembly announced that “an important number of people” would be freed as “a gesture of peace”.
However, rights groups have denounced the slow pace of the releases and the fact that the number given by officials – 400 – falls far short of what they have been able to confirm.
The NGO Foro Penal says it has so far only been able to verify the release of 151 political prisoners since 8 January, when the head of Venezuela’s National Assembly announced that “an important number of people” would be freed as “a gesture of peace” following the US operation.
Foro Penal has also said that many those released have not had the charges against them dropped, leaving them in legal limbo, and have been barred from speaking in public.
Tudares’s imprisonment was one of the emblematic cases of the repression which followed in the wake of Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election.
His father-in-law, González, became the main challenger of the incumbent Maduro after the well-known opposition leader María Corina Machado was barred from running.
Fearing the Maduro government would resort to fraud to rig the result, González and Machado mobilised hundreds of people to act as observers at the polling stations and collect the tallies from the electronic voting machines.
The electoral council, dominated by government loyalists, declared Maduro the winner but never provided the detailed voting tallies to back up its claim.
The voting tallies collected by the observers deployed by the opposition and independently verified by the Carter Center, however, suggested that González had won by a landslide.
Nevertheless, Maduro – who was firmly in control of the state institutions, including the armed forces and the police – was sworn in for another term in January 2025.
In the run-up to his inauguration, many opposition leaders and activists were seized by the security forces in an attempt to stifle any dissent.
Fearing arrest, González had sought refuge in the Dutch embassy as early as September 2024 and gone in to exile in Spain shortly afterwards.
Three days before Maduro’s inauguration, González’s 46-year-old son-in-law – a lawyer who was not involved in politics – was seized by hooded men as he was taking his young children to see their ailing grandmother.
For months, his family did not know where he was being held or on what grounds he had been seized.
Last month, his wife said she had learned that he had been sentenced to 30 years in prison for “terrorism and conspiracy”. She said her access was not allowed to choose a lawyer and had only been allowed to read the charges levelled against him on the day of his “only hearing”.
Mariana González told El Pais newspaper that she had been approached on at least three occasions by middlemen who told her that her husband would only be allowed to return to his family if her father renounced his cause.
“This has nothing to do with justice,” she said at the time. “Being the son-in-law of Edmundo González is not a crime,” she added.
Mariana González took to X to thank all of the people who had supported her in her fight for her husband’s release.
But she also reminded readers that there were still many families waiting for the release of their loved ones who, she said, had been “forcibly disappeared, arbitrarily detained and unjustly locked up.
Many of them have been holding vigils outside the main prisons in Venezuela in the hope that their relatives will be among those released in the wake of the US military raid.
