María Corina Machado asserted that the general amnesty is an “irreversible” step towards democracy in Venezuela

María Corina Machado, opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, assured on Friday that the general amnesty law proposed by the acting president Delcy Rodríguez was not celebrated by Venezuelans, although “it is already an irreversible and unstoppable path towards democracy and towards reconciliation” in Venezuela.

During the talk ‘Let’s Talk About Venezuela’ at the Hay Festival in Cartagena de Indias, the Venezuelan opposition figure expressed her hope that the measure would materialize: “Hopefully it will be so and hopefully the 700, more than 700 prisoners who still remain in the torture centers in Venezuela can be with their families very soon.” “The people of Venezuela have not yet celebrated what we already know is an irreversible and unstoppable path towards democracy and reconciliation,” Machado said.

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“Obviously, it’s not something the regime has voluntarily wanted to do, but rather it’s a product of the real pressure it has received from the United States Government,” Machado highlighted about the role of the North American country in the Venezuelan transition towards a full democracy. On the same day, Delcy Rodríguez announced at the opening ceremony of the judicial year at the Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ) the decision to “promote a general amnesty law that covers the entire political period of political violence from 1999 to the present.”

Machado, awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, described the Venezuelan repressive apparatus as “brutal” and subordinate to “the interests of the multiple criminal forces that make up this regime”.

Furthermore, he elaborated: “We have lived through 27 years of a brutal process, of persecution, of repression, of silencing the voices of all citizens, whether they be journalists, human rights activists, housewives, students, teachers, doctors, economists and, of course, political leaders.” The opposition leader mentioned that in Venezuela there are “political prisoners who have been in prison for 23 years“, such as the case of three metropolitan police officers, and denounced the disappearance of other people. She added that after the United States military attack that deposed Nicolás Maduro on January 3, there were at least 16 arrests. Machado lamented that Venezuelan society trusted Chavismo and underestimated “the destructive capacity of the regime,” which, according to her words, “integrated into a criminal system,” and took years to recognize the need to confront it. “We underestimated the magnitude of the criminal network that was being configured in Venezuela, we underestimated the complicities that were being forged,” she emphasized.

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However, he emphasized that in recent years Venezuelans convinced the world of the urgency to act against Chavismo. “I do believe that the situation in Venezuela after more than 400,000 deaths in these 27 years with weapons of war violently, after more than 20,000 extrajudicial executions, after more than 18,000 political detentions just after Maduro came to power (in 2013) presents a fundamental questioning of the global democratic order,” concluded the leader. Last Wednesday, María Corina Machado met with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the State Department in Washington, where she conveyed a clear message: Venezuela needs a comprehensive democratic transition that eliminates the possibility of the structures of Chavismo remaining in power. The meeting took place after the US official presented to the Senate the Trump administration’s strategy towards Venezuela, following the capture of former dictator Nicolás Maduro on January 3rd. Before the press, Machado avoided directly commenting on the option of integrating a transition government alongside Delcy Rodríguez, current acting president after Maduro’s detention. However, she emphasized that her work is focused on facilitating “a real transition” and on restoring institutions that guarantee justice and national reconciliation, without seeking the stability of “a sector of the regime in power”. You can also read “We are willing and working to facilitate a real transition. This is not a Russian-style transition where the mafias remain in power,” said Machado, alluding to what happened in the post-Soviet era. She insisted that the objective is to restore institutions to ensure justice and the reunion of Venezuelans, without guaranteeing continuity to sectors linked to the previous regime.