‘I’m going to fight’: freed Venezuelan activist on life after Maduro’s downfall

Jesús Armas’s joy at being released has been tempered by reality that the march towards democracy will be slow

Jesús Armas was asleep inside Venezuela’s most infamous political prison at the start of January when a thunderous explosion and a blackout announced the start of a new era.

The activist remembers roars of excitement rippling through the jail’s cells as befuddled guards scurried around “like something really big was happening”. Prisoners began to belt out Venezuela’s national anthem, a stirring battle cry against tyranny: “Glory to the brave people! … Down with the chains! … Death to oppression!”

Armas and his fellow inmates had no idea what had caused the pre-dawn commotion on 3 January, although some suspected it was connected to the United States.

Only three days later, during a rare family visit, did the 39-year-old learn that Venezuela’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, had been captured during a nocturnal assault ordered by Donald Trump.

“In that moment I realised … we had a real opportunity to have a transition to democracy,” Armas said last week after being allowed to leave the El Helicoide prison after 14 months – one of more than 440 political prisoners freed after Maduro’s demise.

Four days after his release, Armas was still trying to comprehend the most startling twist in Venezuela’s turbulent recent history and how it might shape the country’s future.

“It’s weird,” he said, while preparing to head to the latest pro-democracy protest since Maduro’s downfall. “We are not totally in a transition, but I think we are a few steps in that direction.”

Just two months earlier, at the denouement of Maduro’s increasingly despotic rule, such displays of public defiance were inconceivable and would probably have been crushed by security forces. In 2024, more than 2,400 people – including Armas, who was abducted and tortured by men with machine guns – were imprisoned as Venezuela’s dictator tried to silence claims he had stolen the presidential election.

But since Maduro’s removal the mood has shifted, with one recent poll showing a surge in optimism among Venezuelans after years of repression, privation and despair. Last week, Armas was one of thousands of mostly young demonstrators who gathered in cities across Venezuela to demand a full transition to democracy and the complete emptying of political jails.

“I have the right to be in the streets and that’s why I’m here,” said María Fernández, 21, who joined a rally on the palm-dotted campus of the Central University of Venezuela (UCV).

Agustín González, a 20-year-old law student, said he was marching because he wanted neither “imperialist tutelage nor continued authoritarianism” for his homeland.

The fact that Venezuela’s return to democracy was not fully sealed by Maduro’s toppling is explained by the fact that his vice-president, a UCV alumna called Delcy Rodríguez, took the reins immediately after his departure. Trump officials concluded that leaving Venezuela in Rodríguez’s hands, rather than installing the Nobel-winning opposition leader, María Corina Machado, was the best way to avoid violence – and secure access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves – after its surgical strike on Maduro’s military base.

“Delcy has done a very, very good job and the relationship is strong. The oil is coming out and a lot of money is being made,” Trump said on Friday after his energy secretary, Chris Wright, flew to Caracas – the most senior US official to do so in years.

Six weeks after Maduro’s abduction, Rodríguez remains in power – as do many of his regime’s key figures, including the interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, and the defence minister, Vladimir Padrino López. Last week, in a rare interview with NBC News, Rodríguez insisted free and fair elections would “absolutely” be held – but declined to say when. Her brother, the national assembly chief, Jorge Rodríguez, dashed hopes a vote might be held in the “immediate” future.

Armas understands better than most the bewildering disconnect between the unquestionable changes brought about by Maduro’s overthrow and the simultaneous maintenance of Venezuela’s undemocratic status quo.

On 8 February, he remembers El Helicoide’s director approaching him with news that his prison nightmare was over: “Jesús, come with me … you’re getting out.”

A few hours later intelligence agents were driving Armas to his family home to see his 90-year-old father, who he feared might die while he was incarcerated. “He didn’t say anything. He just cried,” the opposition leader recalled of their first hug in months.

Soon after, Armas was cruising through Caracas’s streets in a convoy of motorbikes alongside colleagues including Juan Pablo Guanipa, a well-known opposition politician who had also just been released. “It was amazing … People were screaming [with] excitement,” he said.

The elation was shortlived. As night fell, a group of armed heavies grabbed Guanipa and disappeared with him before he reappeared under house arrest, wearing an ankle tag. “I was in shock,” said Armas, who immediately grasped the limits of Venezuela’s incipient political thaw. “I thought: ‘OK, if this is happening to Juan Pablo, it’s going to happen to me too.’”

Armas suspected senior officials had been spooked by the outpouring of emotion prompted by Guanipa’s release and feared demands for democracy might spiral out of control if a ceiling was not set.

“They must be worried this could grow as people lose their fear … that this could be like a snowball that will grow and grow and grow,” said the activist, who returned to Caracas to continue his political struggle in 2021 after a spell studying at the University of Bristol as a recipient of the UK’s Chevening scholarship and living in London.

Armas believed regime efforts to thwart a South American glasnost by targeting figures such as Guanipa, who was released on Thursday after the national assembly approved a limited amnesty law, might slow the march towards democracy, but would not halt it.

“Right now my role is to lead the reorganisation of the opposition movement in Caracas and to try to be the voice of the political prisoners,” he said. “I’m going to fight until every political prisoner is free … And I will try to fight until we have a transition to democracy.”