Caracas Chronicles

“I really can’t believe it!” Nicolás Maduro said on the night of August 11, speaking on his television program alongside Diosdado Cabello, Vladimir Padrino, and other security chiefs.

“Chief Prosecutor Tarek William Saab called to inform of an investigation into groups posing as bohemian leftists, using NGOs to attack us from within. They launch these things to stain my name, out of envy, pettiness, or because they are traitors who sold out,” Maduro ranted.

“Well, they didn’t stain Maduro, and they never will. It’s you whose souls are stained for life. Cowards and traitors.”

Maduro used his platform to smear an activist—an old militant of chavismo, at that time forcibly disappeared—who had grown disillusioned with the course of the revolution and was now dedicated to defending victims of state violence in the most vulnerable communities. Martha Lía Grajales heads SurGentes, a human rights colectivo active in neighborhoods like La Vega and San Agustín.

According to its own work and messaging, SurGentes directly exposes the contradictions between today’s Venezuela and the social justice and grassroots participation values once brandished by Chávez.

In 2019, it led a campaign against the FAES and extrajudicial killings in low-income neighborhoods, using the hashtag #NoEnNombreDeChávez (#NotInTheNameOfChavez) and invoking the 2006 police reform.

On August 8, Grajales was forced into a vehicle withot plates like hundreds of others before her, and taken away after a peaceful protest outside the UN office in Caracas.

In response to FAES raids in 2021, SurGentes helped form the Human Rights Committee of La Vega and denounced the “criminalization of poverty” there. It also stood in solidarity with imprisoned state workers, and a month before the last presidential election, organized a forum on the “pact between elites and betrayal of the working people” with lawyer María Alejandra Díaz, another dissident chavista persecuted since August 2024.

Grajales still speaks with the accent of her native Colombia, and belongs to the Venezuelan chapter of the Pacto Histórico, the party coalition backing President Gustavo Petro. Her colectivo aligns with many positions of Latin America’s hegemonic left, like supporting Evo Morales during Bolivia’s 2019 political crisis. None of that spared her from the regime’s standard treatment of opponents.

On August 8, Grajales was forced into a vehicle withot plates like hundreds of others before her, and taken away after a peaceful protest outside the UN office in Caracas.

Because Grajales, albeit with different words, had joined the fight for the release of political prisoners—a cause consuming much of today’s political and civic activism. Since May, SurGentes had openly supported one of the committees born in the past year, Madres en Defensa de la Verdad (Mothers in Defense of Truth), formed out of the repression against the poor after the electoral revolt. Grajales, a lawyer, and SurGentes played a comprehensive role: giving visibility to the cases, offering legal aid to families, and providing material support to prisoners, like preparing meals for young detainees in Tocorón. They also organized peaceful protests, which ten days ago led to Grajales’ disappearance.

Kidnapped for defending mothers of victims

One of those actions came on August 5, when Grajales and the Madres held a vigil outside the Venezuelan Supreme Court, requesting a meeting with justices Caryslia Rodríguez and Elsa Gómez, presidents of the TSJ and its Criminal Chamber. PNB officers monitored the event, SurGentes said. After six hours, the committee announced at 8:30 pm that neither official had shown up, but they would stay anyway.

At 10 pm, SurGentes reported that armed colectivos stormed the site and attacked the mothers shortly after PNB patrols withdrew.

“They beat the mothers and those present, including a mother with a baby and a pregnant woman,” read the SurGentes statement.

“They stole purses, IDs, phones, keys, a megaphone, and tents, dragging people who resisted giving up their belongings. The paramilitary group pushed everyone for four or five blocks until they dispersed.”

Grajales then went to the Public Ministry and the CICPC, but both refused to register the complaint. Yet something unprecedented did happen: Alfredo Ruiz, the Maduro-appointed Ombudsman, acknowledged and condemned the attack on August 7, blaming “unidentified subjects” and urging victims to file a complaint with prosecutors. Former prosecutor Zahir Mundaray noted that Grajales had once been part of the Red de Apoyo por la Justicia y Paz, a human rights NGO for vulnerable communities founded by Ruiz in the 1980s.

Chavista propaganda painted Grajales as an infiltrator bent on dividing the revolution from within and whitewashing “violent and terrorist” groups.

SurGentes, Provea and another civil society group convened the UN protest for Friday, August 8, in solidarity with the Madres. Among those present were activist Marino Alvarado, Provea founder Raúl Cubas, iconic protester Rafael Araujo (Señor Papagayo), and Grajales with her husband, fellow activist Antonio González Plessman.

“We, people and organizations with different visions of the country and its conflicts, want to come together to reject the violence suffered by over 50 women of the Comité de Madres en Defensa de la Verdad,” Grajales read during the event.

Afterward, she reportedly approached the police on site to explain that armed colectivos had stolen her ID. Other officers then arrived and took her away. Grajales was missing for three days while Alvarado and González searched for her in detention centers across Caracas. Alvarado told Runrunes they went four times to a PNB station in Maripérez—the first stop for many political detainees—and four times officers denied knowing about Grajales, misleading them and sending them elsewhere.

On Monday, August 11, Saab announced Grajales was being charged with incitement to hatred, conspiracy with a foreign government, and criminal association. The next day she was released under precautionary measures, though chavista sources said “the investigation against her” would continue.

“If you believed the scam about Martha Lía Grajales, let me tell you they played you,” wrote a Health Ministry employee who spreads Maduro propaganda online.

“She’s been released, she’s not behind bars. She’ll be sentenced and judged from home.”

Character assassination and shockwaves in the Left

Chavista propaganda painted Grajales as an infiltrator bent on dividing the revolution from within and whitewashing “violent and terrorist groups”—the regime’s term for those detained or killed during and after protests against electoral fraud. They accused her of coordinating with María Corina Machado’s camp, getting inside grassroots chavista organizations, and moving funds to finance destabilizing or terrorist actions.

“I can understand feeling sympathy for the moms of imprisoned guarimberos. After all, those moms aren’t to blame for the bad choices their kids made,” read another pro-government account. “But to launch a media crusade, to claim those kids are innocent and the state is wrong to keep them jailed, that’s something else. If you’re doing that, you definitely can’t call yourself a chavista.”

The government also used statements in her defense—from UN High Commissioner Volker Türk and opposition figures like María Corina Machado, Miguel Pizarro, and Zahir Mundaray—as “evidence” against her.

“If a murderer, a criminal like María Corina Machado writes a post supporting another criminal, to me that’s proof enough she’s involved,” said Jorge Rodríguez. “Here, the fake left in disguise, anyone who seeks violence, will face justice.”

The case of Grajales highlights the thin line for revolution loyalists who, even silently, see Maduro’s rule as a betrayal of the chavista project.

What stood out most was the shock within the hard left across the region, and the possible implications inside grassroots chavismo. More than 800 intellectuals and activists, including Nobel Peace laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, demanded her immediate release. Communist outlets reported her disappearance. So did Front Line Defenders, an international NGO protecting Global South activists. Crucially, so did Pacto Histórico Venezuela, which appealed to Grajales’ historic support for the chavista process and her opposition to Álvaro Uribe and Iván Duque. Perhaps that prompted the Petro government to intervene, which earlier sheltered María Alejandra Díaz at its Caracas embassy and defended former presidential candidate Enrique Márquez.

The case of Grajalis highlights the thin line for revolution loyalists who, even silently, see Maduro’s rule as a betrayal of the chavista project and cannot justify things like the destruction of the electoral system since July 28 or the sweeping repression. Within the ruling party, there’s talk over arrogance, lack of self-criticism, and the need to stop suspecting its own base for having different views.

“No one is disposable in a revolution,” said former Venezuelan Vice President Elías Jaua to chavista journalist Oswaldo Rivero (aka Cabeza e’ Mango). Jaua had shared debate spaces with Grajales and González Plessman and also called for her release. “Some people will walk with us while being critical in some areas, even if they don’t agree with everything we do.”

For former militants now openly opposing the regime, Maduro and company released Grajales to avoid splitting organized chavista movements—who just saw one of their own forcibly disappeared—between those who keep quiet and those who criticize (or at least question) the regime’s human rights abuses.

“The government isn’t ready yet to break with its grassroots left,” said Sergio Sánchez, a former PSUV member and official until 2017, now exiled in the United States. He argued there was an internal struggle over the Grajales case, but “the government backed down because a major internal fracture was looming. Rationality prevailed over arrogance.”

While Grajales was still missing, political scientist Marisela Betancourt argued her disappearance could signal an irreparable rupture between chavismo and madurismo with the potential to reshape the regional left’s stance toward Venezuela. She reached the same conclusion as Sánchez once her release became known.“They backed down, it was slipping out of their hands,” Betancourt posted on X. “It was a trial balloon, and it looks like they didn’t like the result.”