Chavismo frees Samantha, the teenager jailed for being the sister of a military officer

Samantha Hernández Castillo was implicated in a plot to plant a bomb in Caracas that never detonated. When she was arrested last November, she was at her grandparents’ house and about to start her final year of high school. Samantha is 16 and the younger sister of First Lieutenant Christian Hernández, an exiled officer accused of military conspiracy. On Monday night, six months after her arrest, she was released from a juvenile detention center under precautionary measures; the restrictions she still faces remain unknown. She appears in a photo with a flat smile and an emoji sweater, embraced by her grandparents. But her family remains broken.

Samantha’s sister, 19-year-old Arantza Hernández Castillo, remains detained, as do her uncle Henry Castillo and her cousin Arialdo Camargo. The two men were missing for almost a year until they were located in El Rodeo prison. The only sign the family had of Henry Castillo for months was the photo Diosdado Cabello circulated at a press conference, presenting him with his alias “El tío” and as part of an alleged conspiracy against Nicolás Maduro. Samantha’s sister-in-law, Maykelis Borges, the wife of the military officer targeted by the Chavista government, was also arrested, spent a pregnancy in precarious conditions and gave birth in prison. In February she was granted house arrest.

They are, or were, imprisoned for being close to a military officer the regime is pursuing. Their case is not unique, but it has helped illustrate a pattern that has become routine in the Chavista repressive apparatus and that is repeated in the reports of the Independent Fact-Finding Mission of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights: sippenhaft. The German term refers to the Nazi Third Reich laws that held the relatives of someone accused of crimes against the state equally responsible.

Also released on Monday night was 71-year-old Merys Torres de Sequea, after eight months of detention. Last year, masked men who identified themselves as police arrested her alongside her niece near El Rodeo prison when she was going to visit her son, National Guard Colonel Antonio Sequea, who has been imprisoned since 2020 and sentenced to 24 years over the so-called Operation Gideon, a failed coup attempt. Part of Sequea’s family, which includes other military members, had to go into exile amid the persecution.

The woman’s whereabouts were unknown for several months until she turned up at the Instituto Nacional de Orientación Femenina (INOF), the country’s main women’s prison. Her arbitrary detention contravenes the Venezuelan Penal Code, which prohibits prison sentences for people aged over 70, but she is not the only political prisoner of that age. In a video of her release, Torres de Sequea runs to embrace a relative who greets her.

The cases of Samantha — one of the few teenagers still imprisoned after the 2024 protests that saw more than 100 people jailed — and of Merys had become symbols in the campaign to free political prisoners. Both had been explicitly excluded from the amnesty law passed in February, which recently ended by the decision of interim president Delcy Rodríguez.

The releases, which continued on Tuesday, come amid outrage over the death in state custody of Víctor Hugo Quero, another political prisoner who had been missing for 16 months, the period during which his mother, Carmen Navas, searched for him from prison to prison without being told by authorities that he had died. The government acknowledged his death on May 7. Carmen Navas died ten days later.

Even with these releases, over 600 people remain detained for political reasons, according to the NGO Justicia Encuentro y Perdón, and more than 400 according to the Foro Penal organization. Although the government counts more than 700 prison releases so far this year and another 8,000 measures granting full liberty, the process has stalled and shown itself to be discretionary. Human rights defenders warn that the amnesty has not resulted in broad clemency or recognition of harm, but has been selective and re-victimizing. Many of those still detained are precisely military personnel and their relatives, and arbitrary detentions have not stopped. The military are explicitly excluded from the amnesty law.

On Monday, university students once again protested to demand the release of all detainees. A group blocked Caracas’s main highway and scuffled with riot police who moved in to disperse the demonstration. There were injuries. The opening brought by the U.S. military intervention and the decapitation of Nicolás Maduro’s government has proven limited.

Carlos Trapani, a lawyer and general coordinator of the NGO Cecodap, which took on Samantha’s defense, stated: “She should never have been deprived of her liberty. It was months of suffering, accumulated harm, and an impact on her rights as an adolescent.” Meanwhile, the trial against the teenager continues.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition