US presses Venezuela to free the 322 political prisoners still locked up

The US State Department said Marco Rubio called for the release of Venezuela's remaining political prisoners during a Monday meeting with his Venezuelan counterpart, Oliver Blanco. The two also discussed reforms the US wants as groundwork for free, fair and credible elections. Prisoners' rights group Foro Penal puts the number still behind bars at 322. More than 1,000 others have already been freed since US forces seized Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in a raid on Caracas on 3 January and flew him to New York, where he faces drug-trafficking and torture charges.

Most of those detained were swept up in the crackdown that followed the 2024 presidential election. Venezuela's National Electoral Council, stacked with government loyalists, declared Maduro the winner, even though tally sheets gathered by the opposition and checked by independent media pointed to an opposition victory. The Carter Center, which sent observers, said the vote could not be called democratic. A UN fact-finding mission later found the government ran what it described as a harsh repression campaign against people seen as opponents, or simply those who expressed dissent.

After Maduro's capture, his loyal vice-president Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as interim president. She has the Trump administration's backing, but opposition parties inside Venezuela are growing impatient with how slowly reforms are moving. The State Department stressed it is still committed to Trump's three-phase plan: stabilisation, economic recovery and political reconciliation, and democratic transition.

Rubio had told journalists a week earlier that Venezuela's election infrastructure has to be replaced before any new vote can be valid. He insisted it needs to happen fast, on the timelines Washington has set, rather than in two, five or ten years. Days later, Rodríguez went on television and told Venezuelans that elections will happen under a renewed electoral authority. She gave no date.

Opposition leader María Corina Machado, who won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, has her own clock in mind. She returned to Venezuela on 25 October after nearly a year in exile, and one of her first stops was a meeting with relatives of political detainees. She had pushed for a vote in 2027, at one point floating 24 July 2027, the anniversary of independence hero Simón Bolívar's birth, before settling back on calling for elections sometime in the next year.