Venezuela and The Illusion of Amnesty

Venezuela’s latest Ley de Amnistía para la Convivencia Democrática arrived draped in familiar language: peace, coexistence, national healing. It promises closure to all. Yet the deeper one looks, the harder it becomes to treat this law as an issue of optics.

On paper, the 2026 amnesty proposal sounds sweeping. It wipes away liability for political offenses; it shuts down proceedings; it orders records erased. The headlines always write themselves—a gesture of reconciliation, a step towards normalization, perhaps even generosity. But laws do not operate in a vacuum, and context is, in this case, a moral necessity.

Nothing in the proposal alters the structures that made an amnesty necessary in the first place.

Prosecutorial power stays where it is; judicial dynamics stay where they are; the elastic legal categories that have long hovered over political life remain available for reuse. The very courts and prosecutors who participated in the massive and indiscriminate repression campaigns are the ones entrusted with executing the amnesty. Here lies a clear conflict of interest; judges would decide whether cases qualify, yet nothing in the law itself expressly forbids them from maintaining detention by reclassifying charges. It does not even allow families, lawyers, or NGOs to act on behalf of beneficiaries who are abroad or deceased, meaning many potential cases might never see a judge’s review.

This is why skepticism persists, and not only among the usual critics. Venezuelans have watched the cycle repeat: provisional releases, freedoms that carry asterisks, and detentions that reappear under new rationales. Relief is granted; pressure dissipates; control adapts. The system itself bends just enough to signal flexibility, though never enough to limit its own reach.

Even the provision mandating elimination of prior offenses, the erasure of "antecedentes", raises more questions. Yes, clearing records can lift real burdens for individuals; but records are also historical evidence, they tell the story of how power was exercised and against whom; erasing them without truth-seeking mechanisms gives state-sanctioned immunity to torturers, judges, prosecutors and perpetrators alike. This deletion represents a blanket obliteration of files which would bury historical accountability.

Forgetfulness, after all, is politically convenient.

Even more striking is what the law does not do. There are no reparations for victims, whether for seized property or psychological harm; no commission to document what happened, nor a framework to hold anyone—not even indirectly—responsible for decades of political persecution.

The 2026 Amnesty Law may well generate the optics of liberalization. It may yield highly visible releases; it may momentarily alleviate pressure on selected detainees; it may even be interpreted by external observers as indicative of political de-escalation. Yet the juridical effects of an amnesty cannot be meaningfully assessed in isolation from the institutional environment in which it operates.

An amnesty that modifies outcomes without altering the systemic conditions that produced those outcomes is nothing more but a device for political theater.