Caracas Chronicles

In 2018, Emirlendris Benítez was arrested after accompanying her partner on a taxi ride that authorities later linked to an alleged drone attack against President Nicolás Maduro. She was three weeks pregnant at the time, but she would not be for much longer.

In custody, she was tortured, suffocated with plastic bags, beaten, and subjected to a forced abortion. She was sentenced to 30 years in prison on no evidence beyond her proximity to someone (who was also wrongly) accused of a crime. Eight years later, Emirlendris remains imprisoned and uses a wheelchair as a result of the torture she endured.

Her case reveals a dimension of repression too often overlooked. Women in Venezuela face the same arbitrariness visited upon all Venezuelans, which includes arbitrary arrests, torture, forced disappearances, and prosecutions stripped of due process. But they are also subjected to specifically gender-based abuse: sexual and physical violence, degrading searches, isolation, and systematic invisibilization. While the majority of Venezuela’s political prisoners are men, it is overwhelmingly women —mothers, wives, sisters, partners— who bear the burdens detention imposes on families, navigating an opaque and hostile system alone, demanding answers from a state that offers none.

In Venezuela, today, the two most powerful political figures, Maria Corina Machado and Delcy Rodríguez, are both women. And yet, for the women caught between these forces, imprisoned, threatened, waiting outside jail cells, very little has changed. A recently passed amnesty law has brought fragile hope, but its scope remains deliberately vague, its application arbitrary, and thousands of cases fall through its gaps. 

The Women Detained

The women detained in Venezuela’s political prison system are not a monolithic group. They include human rights defenders, journalists, political activists, and ordinary women arrested for a social media post, for attending a protest, or, like Emirlendris, simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

There are higher-profile cases, such as Rocío San Miguel or María Oropeza. But then there are also Génesis Pabón and Rocío Rodríguez, two young women who owned a small screen-printing shop open barely a month before a plainclothes officer ordered t-shirts with a toppled Chávez statue, a trap that earned them a ten-year sentence. Marggie Orozco, 65, was sentenced to 30 years over a WhatsApp audio criticizing the government. Ruth Morales was arrested in front of her eight and ten-year-old daughters for participating in a protest. Lourdes Villarreal, a teacher and union leader detained in May 2025, was forcibly disappeared. And there are many others.

Once inside, they face torture, denial of medical care and legal counsel and, as Emirlendris’s case makes plain, violence that targets them specifically as women.

The state also weaponizes families. Sippenhaft, the practice of arresting relatives as leverage, used by the Nazis, has been repeatedly documented in Venezuela. Such are the cases of Aranza and Samantha Hernández, 19 and 16 years old, sisters of an exiled lieutenant. 

Meykelis Borges was arrested because she was the partner of a retired lieutenant that the regime was pursuing. She was two months pregnant at the time and gave birth by emergency cesarean section while still deprived of liberty. 69-year-old Yosida Venegas was detained as she entered Venezuela to accompany her arbitrarily detained son to emergency surgery. 72-year-old Miriam Fernández Ruiz was arrested along with her son, daughter, and two-year-old granddaughter when authorities could not locate her other son, a collaborator of María Corina Machado in Carabobo. And there are many others.

The Women Who Wait

For the families of Venezuela’s political prisoners, the state’s first weapon is silence. There is no formal notification, no access to a lawyer, no confirmation that the person is alive. 81-year-old Carmen Navas has been searching for her son’s whereabouts for 14 months, with no official information. She is not an isolated case. By January 2026, at least 200 families were still searching for relatives held in conditions that amount to enforced disappearance.

When women do manage to locate their detained relatives, the mistreatment does not stop at the prison door. Visits are frequently denied, and when they are allowed, women face degrading treatment, and some have been forced to cover their heads, treated as though they themselves were criminals. Many also face threats and extortion aimed at keeping them silent. One of the highest-profile cases is that of Mariana González, who publicly denounced pressure to coerce her into asking her father, Edmundo González, to abandon his political activity in exchange for her husband’s release. But there are many other, less visible cases like hers.

The economic toll compounds everything. In many of these families, the detained person was the primary breadwinner. Their arrest removes the ability to cover basic expenses at a time when costs are only multiplied. These women must now fund their own visits, purchase food and medicine to bring to detention centers, and navigate a system that offers no assistance and demands constant payment. For those who live in a different state from where their relative is being held, the burden is even heavier.

Since Maduro’s capture, families have been camping outside detention centers for over a month. Some went on hunger strike for over 100 hours. The releases, when they come, are opaque and arbitrary, without timelines, without due process, without guarantees. For some, the news came too late. 

Carmen Dávila had spent months holding signs outside the prison where her son Jorge was held; she was unconscious when he reached her bedside and died two days later. Yarelis Salas, 39, died of a heart attack after a vigil outside Tocorón; her son Kevin was released four days after her death. Omaira Navas spent four years demanding justice for her son, journalist Ramón Centeno, and suffered a stroke shortly after his release.  

These women paid the highest cost while waiting for their loved ones’ release. But they are not the only ones. Every woman standing in that endless wait is also a victim of a system that has denied information, justice, and basic dignity.

The Feminist Lie

For decades, Chavismo has claimed feminism as part of its revolutionary identity, while the data tells a different story. Venezuela has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the region, abortion remains criminalized except in cases of life-threatening risk, and in just the first six months of 2025, there were 76 femicides, one woman murdered every 2.3 days. Gender policy has functioned as a tool of legitimation, not liberation. When women organize outside state structures, protest, or simply exist in opposition, they fall outside the protection that official rhetoric claims to offer.

Equally striking has been how much of the international feminist movement has accepted the government’s framing or decided to look away, despite mounting evidence and documentation of systemic violence against women in Venezuela. In the weeks following Maduro’s capture, as families camped outside prisons and three mothers died waiting, global feminist organizations have been largely silent. The women doing the hardest work have been sustained not by international solidarity, but by Venezuelan civil society, accompanying them at great risk and with limited resources. 

A government that tortures pregnant detainees, arrests daughters as leverage, and leaves mothers to collapse outside prison gates cannot plausibly claim feminism as part of its identity. The contradiction is no longer rhetorical. It is documented in court files, in hospital wards, and in graves. Solidarity with these women is not a gesture. It is long overdue.