Venezuela: Amnesty International warns that amnesty law favors the State

“It is something super important and useful, but its main function is to forgive the State itself from oblivion.“said the activist, visiting Paraguay who warned that for the application of this law no “a process of establishing truth so that this never happens again”.

With this rule, he opined, “The State tries as much as possible to resolve a very great burden it has and tries to simulate justice, making the process in which people can obtain freedom a little capricious.”.

“All persons (detained for political reasons) must be free regardless of the law“Gómez added, echoing those who question the legality of these withholdings.

In that sense, he criticized that “placed families to make requests, to beg“without there being”no guarantee“of that”end the patterns of such serious human rights violations that occurred in Venezuela”.

According to the law, the “crimes or misdemeanors committed” in the context of the coup d’état of April 2002, during the oil strike of December 2002, as well as in the midst of the demonstrations that occurred in 2004, in May 2007, from July to September 2009, in 2013, between March and August 2017 and in the midst of the 2024 and 2025 elections.

It also covers the events related to the actions of Parliament between 2016 and 2021 – dominated that five-year period by the opposition – and the ignorance at that time of public institutions and authorities.

Gómez registered the amnesty in the context of “due process” and the “legal security that any international investor who wants to go to Venezuela should have“, which is part of the conversations between the Government of Donald Trump and the Administration in charge of Delcy Rodriguez after the military operation in January, in which he was captured Nicolas Maduro.

“But – he warned – what is not being taken into account is that this is a trap if it is simply built around judicial authoritarianism, an ability of the Executive to get involved and decide who is released.”.

In that sense, he assured that they are “very concerned that only 690 people have been deliberately” and criticized that “The rest of the figures announced are actually propaganda surrounding people already released who were kept under a regime of presentation”.

He also requested that the general list of detainees be published.

“The State itself is not clear about the scope of its repression. They do not have a central list that allows organizations, the international community, to verify that people are actually released.”, he denounced.

Likewise, he warned that “the machinery of terror to repress, to imprison, was really super arbitrary” in Venezuela.

“There are people throughout the country who have been prisoners for years, they are prisoners of an official who was extorting, they are prisoners of a mayor, of a governor.”, he illustrated.

On the other hand, he believed that the participation of civil society at the current time “is key” so as not to reproduce authoritarian patterns.

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For Gómez, the country is experiencing the effect of agreements between two governments, referring to that of the United States and Venezuela, “focused, mainly, on the business level and obviously minerals”.

In that sense, he indicated that these “small changes that are taking place, if they do not include civil society, will simply reproduce authoritarian patterns” which led to what he considered the “misfortune” of the country, so he emphasized the need to “build a Human Rights agenda“, which he considered should start from “recover freedom of expression”.

“If we offer Venezuela the possibility of having separation of powers, which is long, but legal security for each person, for each entrepreneur, for each person who can help improve society; To that extent we will definitely have a country that can be as great as the wealth that its subsoil has.”, he concluded.