The LAW Way

There is a narrative circulating in certain Venezuelan political circles – sometimes spoken with good intentions, sometimes with alarming carelessness – that the time has come for Venezuelans abroad to return home. Some go further, claiming that the diaspora wants to return, that the longing is universal, and that the path is now clear. The argument rests on one central premise: Nicolás Maduro is no longer in power.

That premise is technically true. What it implies is dangerously false.

The Regime Did Not End – It Was Reshuffled

On January 3, 2026, U.S. special forces carried out Operation Absolute Resolve, capturing Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores and transferring them to U.S. territory to face federal narco-terrorism charges. In the immediate aftermath, Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, was sworn in as interim president.

Let us be precise about who Delcy Rodríguez is. She is not a reformer. She is not an outsider. She is not a moderate. Her political career began under Hugo Chávez, and between 2018 and 2021, as vice president, she controlled the Bolivarian intelligence agents responsible for many of the crimes constituting crimes against humanity, including detentions and torture. The U.S. Treasury Department had sanctioned her in 2018 precisely because she was described as a member of Maduro’s inner circle who helped solidify his authoritarian rule. She also exercised hierarchical control over the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN), Venezuela’s feared intelligence service, which the 2020 UN Fact-Finding Mission found to have committed crimes against humanity.

She did not become a different person when Maduro was taken away. For more than a decade, Maduro presided over an entrenched, and still fully intact, authoritarian system. The figures who enabled that system, who staffed its prisons, who directed its intelligence services, who passed its repressive legislation, they are still there. The apparatus did not dissolve; it simply found a new spokesperson.

The UN Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela put it plainly in its March 2026 findings: the structures that have sustained persecution for years have not been dismantled, nor have State policies been announced to begin that process. And as U.S. Senators recently noted in pressing the Trump Administration to explain the lifting of sanctions on Rodríguez, the March 2026 UN Fact-Finding Mission concluded that the key structures responsible for repression remain intact and that there are no meaningful indicators of structural reform sufficient to prevent ongoing abuses.

This is not a democratic transition. It is, as one analyst aptly described it, normalization without transition.

The Human Rights Crisis Did Not End Either

The repression of Venezuelan society did not begin with Maduro’s arrest, and it did not end with it. The documentation of abuses is extensive, current, and deeply disturbing.

Political detentions remain the norm. According to the Venezuelan NGO Foro Penal, 902 political prisoners were being held in Venezuela at the end of 2025, the majority detained during the harsh crackdown that followed Maduro’s fraudulent victory in the 2024 presidential election. Even after the prisoner release process that began in January 2026, over 500 political prisoners remained detained as of early March 2026, according to Foro Penal. The regime’s own numbers have repeatedly been contradicted by independent human rights monitors: when Venezuela’s government announced the release of 116 political detainees in January 2026, Foro Penal independently confirmed only 41 at the time of the announcement, with over 800 political prisoners remaining after those releases.

Torture and abuse in detention have been documented at the highest levels. Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2026 documents in extensive detail that detainees have been subjected to beatings, electric shocks, asphyxiation with plastic bags, sexual torture, solitary confinement, and detention in overcrowded punishment cells. The UN Fact-Finding Mission found that women in detention were subjected to sexual and gender-based violence, including coercive transactional sex, reproductive violence, forced nudity, and possible acts of sexual slavery and forced prostitution.

Crimes against humanity were ongoing as recently as months ago. The UN Fact-Finding Mission, reporting to the Human Rights Council in March 2025, stated unequivocally that the Government of Venezuela continues to engage in actions constituting the crime against humanity of persecution on political grounds, committed in connection with the crime of imprisonment or severe deprivation of physical liberty. The Mission documented that arbitrary detentions of perceived opponents, including human rights defenders and journalists, continued through late 2024 and into 2025.

Attacks on civil society are now written into law. Between August and November 2024, the National Assembly, controlled by Maduro’s party, passed legislation that severely restricts the work of civil society groups and penalizes people who advocate for sanctions, whether targeted or broad, with penalties of up to 30 years in prison. The OMCT-FIDH Observatory documented over 1,730 attacks against human rights defenders and civil society organizations between 2022 and 2023 and the 2024 presidential elections, including arbitrary detentions, forced disappearance, harassment, defamation, censorship, physical aggression, and intimidation.

The amnesty law does not solve the problem. The amnesty bill announced by Rodríguez in January 2026 has been denounced by human rights organizations for its limited and politicized scope. Human rights organizations have denounced the law’s limited scope and claim that it is another politicized mechanism that discriminates against certain political prisoner cases, especially those of former military members. The law is not applied automatically, one must file a petition before the courts, and it excludes high-profile political leaders inside and outside the country. In other words, the very people most at risk are precisely those the law was designed to exclude.

Even after the political shift, new detentions continued. The UN Fact-Finding Mission documented that after Maduro’s capture and Rodríguez’s swearing-in, at least 87 people were detained, including 14 journalists and media workers temporarily arrested while covering the swearing-in ceremony, and at least 27 individuals detained for allegedly celebrating Nicolás Maduro’s detention, including 15 children.

Not Everyone Wants to Return – And That Is Not a Betrayal

One of the most insidious aspects of the “come back to Venezuela” narrative is its implicit accusation: that those who remain abroad are abandoning their country, or that their reluctance is somehow disloyal or ideologically suspicious. This framing must be rejected.

A UNHCR survey conducted between January and March 2026 found that almost two thirds of Venezuelan refugees and migrants in Latin America do not currently intend to return. The desire to reconnect with relatives in Venezuela is offset by socioeconomic and political factors, including recovery of the labor market, security, and concerns about what return would mean for their legal status in host countries.

UNHCR itself has been unequivocal on the standard that must apply: return must always be voluntary, safe, and dignified, accompanied by as much information as possible about the implications of any move. None of those conditions are currently guaranteed in Venezuela.

For specific categories of Venezuelans, the risks of return are not abstract – they are immediate and well-documented:

• Asylum seekers and refugees whose claims are based on political persecution face return to the very conditions that generated their asylum claims. The regime apparatus that persecuted them is still in place.
• Social media critics and activists – including ordinary people who shared posts or expressed opinions about the regime’s human rights violations – are among those most vulnerable to the regime’s use of vague charges like “incitement to hatred” and “terrorism.”
• Human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers, and civil society workers face particular risk under legislation that criminalizes advocacy for sanctions, oversight of security forces, and independent monitoring of detention conditions.
• Former military officers and their families have been explicitly excluded from the amnesty law’s scope.

The UN in 2025 even weighed in directly on this point in the context of U.S. deportations: UN experts warned that the arbitrary detention and deportation of Venezuelan political dissidents and a human rights defender living in exile in the United States would breach international human rights law and refugee law. If forced return to Venezuela constitutes a human rights violation under international law, then voluntarily encouraging people to return – without guarantees that the conditions generating persecution have changed – is at minimum irresponsible.

The Continuity of Criminality

One final point deserves to be stated without diplomatic softening: the people currently governing Venezuela are not neutral caretakers. They are individuals who held senior positions in an administration that has been found, by multiple UN bodies and international organizations, to have committed crimes against humanity. Diosdado Cabello, Jorge Rodríguez, Vladimir Padrino López – these are not new figures; they have been central to the repressive apparatus for years or decades.

Freedom House, writing in April 2026, assessed the situation directly: over three months after Maduro’s removal, Venezuelan authorities have yet to signal a decisive break with his authoritarian rule. The country is wrestling with a legacy of severe human rights abuses, corrupt power structures, and an interim regime drawn from the vestiges of the previous administration. Freedom House concluded that the United States and other democratic countries cannot trust the existing regime as a stable and long-term partner that will lead Venezuela toward democracy and rule of law.

Collaboration with the U.S. government under external pressure – releasing some prisoners, passing a flawed amnesty law, making public statements about a “new political moment” – does not erase a history of documented crimes. It does not dismantle the institutions that carried out those crimes. And it does not make Venezuela safe.

Conclusion

The narrative that Venezuelans should return because Maduro is gone is built on a fundamental misreading of what Venezuela is right now. The regime that persecuted Venezuelans for decades did not end on January 3, 2026. It adapted. Its personnel are largely the same. Its repressive infrastructure – SEBIN, the DGCIM, the colectivos, the politicized judiciary – remains intact. The laws it passed to silence dissent remain on the books.

Nearly 8 million Venezuelans have been displaced, one of the largest refugee crises in the world. Most of them did not leave because they wanted to. They left because staying was not safe. That calculation has not fundamentally changed.

Returning to Venezuela must remain a choice – voluntary, informed, and based on genuine guarantees of safety and dignity, not on political slogans or the illusion of change. Until the repressive apparatus is dismantled, until political prisoners are truly free, until independent institutions exist and function, until there are credible conditions for peaceful return without fear of persecution – until then, the answer to “is it safe to go back?” must remain: not yet.

But there is something else that must be named directly, because silence on this point would itself be a form of complicity.

The conditions described in this article – the ongoing detentions, the documented torture, the intact repressive apparatus, the regime’s manipulation of prisoner releases, the laws that criminalize dissent – are not hidden. They are publicly available. They appear in UN reports, in Human Rights Watch assessments, in Freedom House analyses, in the documented testimonies of survivors. Any political figure who calls on the Venezuelan diaspora to return under these conditions, while having access to this information, is not making an honest mistake. They are being irresponsible in a way that puts real people at real risk.

And those who go further – claiming, without evidence, that the Venezuelan diaspora universally longs to return, that the desire is collective and unanimous, that the millions who have built lives abroad are simply waiting for the right moment – are doing something worse. They are erasing the individual experiences of people who fled persecution, who applied for asylum, who lost family members to the regime, who documented abuses, who organized resistance from abroad. They are constructing a fiction of unanimous yearning that conveniently serves a political narrative while silencing the voices of those who know firsthand what return would mean for them.

This kind of rhetoric does not just mislead – it actively attempts to normalize the conditions in Venezuela by suggesting that even those who suffered under the regime are ready to forgive and forget, that the country is ready to welcome them back, that the danger has passed. It hasn’t. And making that claim with the authority of a public figure, to an audience that may trust them, is a serious breach of the responsibility that comes with a platform.

It also, bluntly, destroys credibility. Political leaders who ask to be trusted as voices for Venezuelan democracy cannot simultaneously ignore – or worse, contradict – the documented findings of the UN, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, Foro Penal, and every serious organization that monitors the situation on the ground. The Venezuelan people, in Venezuela and in the diaspora, deserve honest representation, not comfortable fictions calibrated for a political moment.

The fight against injustice and human rights violations in Venezuela is not over. It cannot be declared over from abroad, by politicians seeking relevance, before the conditions that made it necessary have actually changed. That fight has cost too much – in lives, in exile, in broken families, in years of documented atrocities – to be surrendered to a premature narrative of triumph. To call that fight finished, or to diminish it by implying that those who still refuse to return are simply being stubborn, is to side with the silence that the regime has always demanded.

We cannot afford that silence. We cannot accept it.

By Lissie Albornoz

Sources: Human Rights Watch World Report 2026 (Venezuela chapter); UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela, March 2026 statement to the Human Rights Council; Freedom House, “Beyond Maduro: Building a Sustainable Democratic Transition in Venezuela” (April 2026); OMCT-FIDH Observatory Report on Human Rights Defenders in Venezuela (March 2025); UNHCR Survey on Venezuelan Return Intentions (April 2026); Foro Penal (Foro Penal Venezolano) detention data; Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, Venezuela country page (March 2026); U.S. Senators Shaheen and Warren letter on Venezuela sanctions (May 2026); NPR expert interview on Venezuela human rights situation (January 2026).