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