Though the interim government instituted in his absence promised on 8 January that “a significant number” of detainees would be released, this has progressed slowly in the weeks since, with a handful being released at a time.<\/p>\n
Foro Penal, which provides assistance to political prisoners in Venezuela, says nearly 400 people have been released.<\/p>\n
Its president Alfredo Romero said at least 30 people had been freed on Sunday, including Guanipa. Perkins Rocha, Jes\u00fas Armas and Luis Tarbay were also named as having been released.<\/p>\n
Since Venezuela’s widely disputed presidential election in 2024 – which saw Maduro officially re-elected despite opposition tallies suggesting their candidate had won by a landslide – critics of his regime said legal proceedings against activists, journalists and Maduro’s political adversaries increased.<\/p>\n
Among them was Guanipa, who went into hiding after being accused of terrorism and treason for challenging the 2024 result.<\/p>\n
He was tracked down by Venezuela’s security forces and detained in May 2025.<\/p>\n
Opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner Machado, who was also in hiding at the time, said her colleague had been “kidnapped” in “an act of state terrorism”.<\/p>\n
Guanipa is the leader of the centre-right Justice First party. He was elected governor of the Zulia region but barred from taking office after he refused to swear an oath before Maduro’s National Constituent Assembly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Though the interim government instituted in his absence promised on 8 January that “a significant number” of detainees…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":415916,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-415915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=415915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415915\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/415916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=415915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=415915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=415915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}