Venezuela grants amnesty to 379 political prisoners

Venezuela says it is granting amnesty to 379 political prisoners. The number is large enough for headlines—and precise enough to remind everyone the state kept the receipts.

According to Al Jazeera, the government has announced the release of hundreds of people it describes as political prisoners. Dhaka Tribune, citing the same development, likewise reports an amnesty for 379 detainees. “Amnesty” is a curious word in a country whose authorities routinely insist opponents are not jailed for politics but for crimes. One does not typically pardon a category that does not exist.

The move functions as a legitimacy repair kit. By releasing prisoners in bulk, the regime can present itself as magnanimous—without conceding that arrests were abusive, trials were politicized, or security services operated as a domestic counterinsurgency. Amnesty is the state’s favorite form of ‘accountability’: it changes the headcount while leaving the machinery intact.

This is also how authoritarian systems manage international pressure. Releasing a few hundred people can be offered as evidence of “dialogue” or “reconciliation” to foreign governments and mediators, while the legal framework that enabled the detentions remains untouched. The deal, such as it is, is often asymmetric: the state yields bodies; civil society yields silence, participation, or recognition.

Neither Al Jazeera nor Dhaka Tribune, in the versions available here, provides a full list of who is freed, who remains behind bars, or what conditions attach to release. That omission matters. In regimes that use imprisonment as governance, releases can be conditional, reversible, or paired with new charges. Amnesty can also be selective: freeing those with high visibility while keeping organizers, financiers, or military defectors locked away.

The key point is not the regime’s sudden compassion. It is the implicit admission that the state treats liberty as a discretionary grant. When the government can incarcerate opponents and later “forgive” them, citizenship becomes a probationary status—revocable when politics demands it and restorable when optics require it.

If Venezuela wants to prove it is changing, it would not merely empty cells. It would dismantle the incentives that fill them: politicized prosecutors, security services insulated from liability, and courts that function as administrative departments.

Until then, an amnesty is not a step toward rule of law. It is a reminder that the law remains whatever the executive says it is—today, mercifully; tomorrow, not.