Trump prioritizes Venezuelan oil over lives of political prisoners, says mother of two imprisoned sons

The US administration of Donald Trump is endangering the lives of hundreds of political prisoners in Venezuela by not prioritizing their release in its transition plans for the country, says the mother of two imprisoned and tortured brothers.

Marisela Parra, 49, said she was happy the United States captured the Venezuelan president. Nicholas Maduro during a military strike on Saturday. However, the United States left the government structure intact, and Parra believes it still poses a serious threat to those who have been imprisoned for political reasons.

“The priority in this transition is oil and business, and then they talk about political prisoners,” Parra said in a telephone interview with CBC News.

“How can there be a transition when there are… political prisoners, people tortured or disappeared by the regime, while the regime continues?

Venezuelan human rights organization Foro Penal says there are currently more than 800 political prisoners in Venezuela. The Venezuelan government released 54 political prisoners on January 1, 2026. depending on the organization.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday announced the U.S. three-step plan for Venezuela, which places the release of political prisoners in a second phase, after the country’s stabilization, which includes the sale of between 30 and 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil.

The Venezuelan government is currently led by Delcy Rodríguez​, Maduro’s former vice president, who was sworn in as president on Monday. Most of the other key government players remain in place, including Rodríguez’s brother Jorge Rodríguez, who is president of the National Assembly, Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello.

All levers of power, from the legislative branch to the courts and the army, remain under their control. diet control.

“We know that Donald Trump is a businessguy and it made me happy that he took the lead [Maduro] far, but he left the cancer,” said Parra, who is currently in Colombia, but did not want to reveal his exact location, for security reasons.

One son punished for the actions of the other

Parra fled the country after being threatened following her youngest son’s defection from the National Guard in April 2019. Leandro Leomar Chirinos Parra’s unit helped free opposition leader Leopoldo López from house arrest. Leandro then went into hiding.

After his defection, Leandro, 31, was involved in an ill-fated coup attempt against Maduro in May 2020, called Operation Gideon, which involved American mercenaries. He was sentenced to 21 years in prison for his role in the foiled plot.

Marisela Parra said she lost contact with her son on August 5, 2025, and has not heard from him since.

“They took him and disappeared,” she said.

Parra said his eldest son, Leonardo David Chirinos Parra, 33, was punished by Venezuelan authorities for his younger brother’s actions.

Leonardo, a member of Venezuela’s counterintelligence agency, was arrested on April 20, 2020, and tortured into providing information about his younger brother, Marisela Parra said.

She said she lost contact with Leonardo for nine days.until he contacted her via video call asking her to give Leandro’s cell phone number.

“He said they were going to kill him and the rest of the family that was left. [in the country]“, she said.

Marisela Parra took screenshots of the video call and posted them online, then lost contact with her son for months.

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights then examined the case and determined that Leonardo Parra was “in a serious and urgent situation” and that his “rights to life and personal integrity” risked irreparable harm.

Parra said her eldest son was tortured while incarcerated, including electrocutions, beatings and being suffocated with a bag placed over his head. She said her eldest son suffered particularly disastrous treatment while held in a prison at the Fuerte Guaicaipuro military facility, located about 60 km south of the capital, Caracas.

She said the heat in the area is often extreme and prison guards force inmates to dig and then stand in the holes.

“They planted them like trees, standing there,” she said. “They would stay there until they managed to get out of the holes.”

Leonardo willwas transferred from Guaicaipuro about a year ago and is currently in a prison called Yare III, located about 70 kilometers southeast of Caracas.

She last spoke to her son in November 2024, as he is not allowed to make calls outside Venezuela. The family has not heard from him since the American attacks over the weekend.

“My sons’ story is something really hard, very difficult and painful,” Parra said.

A wave of arrests followed the 2024 elections

Jesus Hermoso of the Committee for Freedom of Social Activists said that hours after the U.S. attack on Venezuela, his organization issued a statement saying the first act of any transition should be a general amnesty and the release of all political prisoners.

“THE [regime] intensified its repressive policy… We hoped that with this [U.S.] pressure, there would have been a significant relaxation in repression,” Hermoso said. “However, there is no indication that this is happening.”

Hermoso, who is a journalist, fled the country three months ago with his wife and two young children after learning that government authorities were seeking to arrest him. He said the head of the humanitarian organization where his wife worked had also been recently arrested and imprisoned.

He said his organization had documented various cases of the use of sexual violence as torture by authorities in Venezuelan prisons.

“These are difficult cases to document, because many prisoners do not want to report this after their release,” Hermoso said. “Many prefer not to say anything or ask that it remain secret.”

One of the last major waves of political imprisonment occurred after the July 28, 2024 elections, which many observers determined were won by opposition Unity candidate Edmundo Gonz.onspeed

According to Amnesty International, around 160 members of Vente Venezuela, the main opposition party, and 34 members of Primero Justicia, a smaller party, had been arrested or disappeared by Venezuelan authorities by the end of 2024.

Luis Carrero, one of the main coordinators of the opposition campaign in the western state of Tachira, was among those targeted, but managed to escape.

Carrero said he was constantly under surveillance.

“They were still following us, the repressive forces of the state,” said Carrero, whose case was investigated by Human Rights Watch.

Carrero and his wife, who also participated in the campaign, worked away from home for weeks. But on July 27, 2024, the day before the vote, they were returning home in the early morning to collect some things when five agents armed with assault rifles and with their faces covered burst in.

“They hit my wife,” he said. “I tried to run, to alert my neighbors, but also to protect the information I had on my cell phone. As a campaign manager [in Tachira]I had a lot of valuable information that I couldn’t erase.

Carrero managed to throw his cell phone onto the roof of a neighbor’s house, but he froze when he heard a gunshot. The officers caught him and dragged him to his home. One of them found his cell phone.

“They said if there was chaos after the elections we would be responsible, that they knew where my family lived,” said Carrero, who now lives in Cucuta, Colombia.

The next day, Carrero and his wife went out to vote. They also helped collect printed tallies produced by voting machines at polling places across the state. The opposition garnered more than 70 percent of the results in the first 24 hours, and the results suggest a landslide victory for Gonz.onspeed

“A lot of them [who worked on the campaign] paid with their lives. Many of them paid with their freedom… their membership in the structure [that collected the tallies]for witnessing the electoral process, or for coming out… to protest what happened, the theft of the will of Venezuelans,” Carrero said.

“It’s worth recognizing their struggle.”