Was there an Amnesty Law before Chávez?

Published at: 27/03/2026 06:12 PM

In Venezuela, since the Bolivarian Revolution came to power, it has had to apply amnesty at different times as a tool to reconcile with the national opposition and resume a process of political coexistence within a democracy. However, in reviewing history, we found that when those who represent that opposition held political power, they were never willing to promote spaces of reconciliation for the construction of democracy. This time, we bring some examples of this.

In this regard, the general secretary of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), Diosdado Cabello Rondón, described how amnesty was treated at the time of the Fourth Republic, and specified that, “unlike the Bolivarian Government, none of the governments of that period forgave, even if that legal framework would have been approved.” On February 11, during the broadcast of the Con El Mazo Dando program, the political leader recalled the words of former presidents such as Rómulo Betancourt and Raúl Leoni, who, after receiving amnesty proposals, rejected them and were not held to account for the detainees who became disappeared.

During their presidential address for the New Year in 1963, the statements of Betancourt and Leoni, in their speech at the presidential takeover on March 11, 1964, were almost identical: “There will be no Amnesty Law or general pardon for outlawed parties and insurgent groups of the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) and the Armed Forces for National Liberation (FALN)”.

To close the passage to the approval of any law associated with national reconciliation that was discussed in Congress, General Ramón Florencio Gómez, then defense minister , added: “There are 95 detainees that nobody takes them out; neither with law nor without law. I don't know how they're going to get them out or who will dare to get them out.” The door was sealed to the request of Amnesty General requested by the factions of the Democratic Republican Union (URD), the Popular Democratic Force (FDP) and the Revolutionary Party for Nationalist Integration (PRIN), the floodgates of the murders were opened selective and the deployment of public force in all anti-government demonstrations.

Thus, history recalls how the Government of Leoni applied Betancourt's “hard line”, which resulted in the execution of a bloodbath that continued from 1958 to 1998. Forty years of systematic violation of human rights in Venezuela.

The request for General Amnesty was submitted to the National Congress on several occasions, representing the more than 2,000 political prisoners held in subhuman conditions in the concentration camps of Laguna de Los Tacarigua, known as Isla del Burro, the political prisoners of the San Carlos Barracks , the Mobile Colonies of El Dorado, known as El Hampoducto and the La Pica Prison in Maturín . Among the political prisoners were the “reds”: Gustavo Machado, Guillermo García Ponce, Clodosbaldo Russián, Ali Rodríguez Araque, Jesús Farías, Captain Manuel Ponte Rodríguez, Víctor Hugo Morales, Máximo Canales , Teodoro Petkoff, Pompeyo Márquez, Nery Carrillo and Alejandro Mariño Suzzarini, among others. Some died in prison, victims of mistreatment and torture or lack of timely medical care, such as the case of Ponte Rodríguez, others make up the long list of more than 3,000 prisoners, who disappeared and others were lucky enough to tell about it.

To each request for Amnesty, the governments of Democratic Action (AD) and Copei responded with greater brutality in political persecution, torture, shootings and forced disappearances; and they accused Congress of promoting violent riots, with statements such as that of the Minister of Internal Relations of that time, Gonzalo Barrios, who said that “amnesty is not adapted to environmental conditions and could mean an incentive for recidivism in serious criminal acts and the consequent alteration of the social order, to the protection of which all legal instruments contribute” .

It is also important to remember an episode that occurred days after the presidential New Year's address in 1963, when President Betancourt, through his Minister of Internal Relations, Carlos Andrés Pérez, put an end to the expressions of joy and welcome expressed by the people of Caracas who came out en masse to receive the Rear Admiral Wolfgang Larrazabal. As a result, an 11-year-old boy, Alejo Celis, holding the Venezuelan flag in his hands was struck by government bullets.

Raúl Leoni did the same during his administration, when the country's living forces and especially the political forces represented in parliament promoted the discussion of a General Amnesty Law, to which the president responded with the institutionalization of forced disappearance as a State policy and the installation of five Theaters of Anti-Guerrilla Operations (TO).

Since then, the binomial Directorate General of Police (DIGEPOL), as an agent of arbitrary arrests, and the TOs, as secret isolation centers for torture, shooting and forced disappearances, operated uninterruptedly throughout the national territory from 1964 to the 80s.

The refusal of the AD and Copei governments to approve any General or Partial Amnesty Law, to the general pardon, to the clean slate to establish a climate of peace, was always based on the criterion of “shoot first, find out later”, implementing de facto the death penalty.

B etancourt was responsible for leaving the jails crammed with political prisoners: more than 1500 left-wing leaders, including deputies and senators, constitutionally elected in free and democratic elections, were put behind bars. At the end of his administration, parliamentarians from the Revolutionary Party for Nationalist Integration (PRIN), denounced in the voice of deputies José Vicente Rangel and José Herrera Oropeza, how the president broke the infamous record of political crimes committed throughout Venezuelan history.

During his term of office, 1200 were tortured and killed in just five years, under the policy of “shoot first, find out later”. He introduced the unprecedented practice of “not carrying a prisoner tied up”, that is, the shootings of political detainees in situ and the opening of concentration camps in the Guiana jungles of El Dorado and the Island of Tacarigua in Lake Valencia. More than a thousand dead, thousands politically persecuted, and for the first time, international indebtedness was used, tying the country's economy to the interests of world banks. Leoni received a morally and financially bankrupt country and his government maintained the same repressive and violent policy that left thousands of Venezuelan families in mourning.

It was not until the arrival of Rafael Caldera (1969—1974) to the presidency that pacification was adopted as a State policy and applied a strategy different from the traditional repression to which we had become accustomed. He appealed for mass judicial dismissals for political crimes, presidential pardons for imprisoned guerrilla fighters, facilitated the return from exile of insurgent leaders and proceeded to legalize left-wing organizations to abandon armed struggle, together with programs for incorporation into civil, academic and political life.

However, given the current scenario, we remember his position regarding the unpatriotic practices of Venezuelan politicians . Caldera went to his grave wearing the mantle of a supposed gentleman of diplomacy. In his environment, gifts that have always been attributed to him are still exalted. But even the former Social-Christian president himself would not have forgiven the betrayal against Venezuela on the part of Juan Guaidó, María Corina Machado and their supporters... “I would have shot them!” , this was published in a press review published in 1995 in the newspaper Notitarde, entitled "Provoke shooting those who speak ill of Venezuela abroad ", taken from an interview with Venevisión “When a man goes and tells investors abroad you should not invest in Venezuela because you can't invest in Venezuela, it causes me to shoot them,” the former president said verbatim.

It seems then that it has only been in the Bolivarian Revolution that political differences are debated in democratic spaces... and we can only agree that those who ask for invasion and blockades should not be the object of forgiveness.

AMELYREN BASABE/Mazo News Team