On January 30, just three weeks after the bombing of Caracas and days before María Corina Machado’s most recent meeting with Marco Rubio, Delcy Rodríguez announced her intention to propose a general Amnesty Law retroactive to 1999. A week later, the first draft was presented to the National Assembly, and for the first time in decades, senior figures within chavismo spoke openly about “building bridges” and forgiveness.

“I ask for forgiveness, because I do not like political prisoners,” Jorge Rodríguez said, a sentence that, until recently, would have been unthinkable in that room.

In the span of a single month, Venezuelans have witnessed what may be the most radical rhetorical shift chavismo has ever made. Not in my wildest imagination did I expect to hear this language on the Assembly floor. And while it is far too early to speak seriously about forgiveness—or about how, or whether, a country marked by the cruelty of recent years could move forward—the sudden invocation of amnesty forces deeper and more uncomfortable questions: what kind of responsibility is being acknowledged, what kind is still being avoided, and which kind will ultimately be required?

To understand what responsibility means in Venezuela, it is helpful to look backward.

On December 17, 2009, Judge María Lourdes Afiuni was arbitrarily detained without a warrant or formal explanation after issuing a ruling that displeased then-President Hugo Chávez. Her detention came days after Chávez publicly demanded her arrest on national television. While imprisoned, Afiuni was subjected to threats, abuse, and torture that severely affected her health, her life, and her family. Her case became emblematic of the personal cost of judicial independence in Venezuela. Nearly two decades later, she remains under restrictive measures, unable to live or speak freely.

Afiuni’s detention marked one of the first and clearest signals of how far chavismo was willing to go and how routinely it would do so in the years that followed. In her case, responsibility can be clearly traced: from Chávez himself, to Judge Alí Paredes, to those who carried out the abuse. This pattern has repeated itself across many cases of political imprisonment, where chains of responsibility are visible, increasingly documented, and form the first layer of accountability.

For figures such as Chávez, Nicolás Maduro, Diosdado Cabello, Delcy Rodríguez, Jorge Rodríguez, Vladimir Padrino López, Cilia Flores and others at the top of the regime, evil is not difficult to identify. Remaining in power required instilling fear. Repression was a strategy to silence dissent, force exile, and secure compliance. The cruelty is evident in their words, their decisions, and their legacy.

The deeper challenge for Venezuela is understanding how chavismo built, and perfected, a system capable of functioning through people who stopped thinking.

The same logic applies to those who directly participated in torture, imprisonment, and the construction of the surveillance and repression apparatus. High-ranking officials who became the visible faces and personifications of cruelty. These names are known. This layer of responsibility is brutal, but clear.

Persecution and torture must remain at the center of any demand for justice. But they are not the whole story. Venezuela’s tragedy also lies in quieter, more uncomfortable layers of responsibility, the kind that made cruelty routine and obedience normal. This may be one of the most difficult challenges of any future transition.

An army of accomplices

Some days ago, Daniel Cadena began an X thread under the motto “cultura chupística de personajes random del chavismo que no recuerdes salvo que te los nombren.” It received over a thousand replies. Hundreds of names resurfaced. Figures many of us had half-forgotten, but who once spoke loudly, pledged loyalty, and promised no truce against the opposition. This represents a second layer: outspoken enablers whose public words helped sustain the system.

These individuals will likely face some form of accountability, or at the very least, public reckoning.

But there is a more dangerous layer, one that must be addressed before Venezuela can even imagine rebuilding itself.

This layer is composed of individuals who, within their small spheres of influence, became complicit in grave crimes. Drivers who transported political prisoners to their fate. Guards who remain today in El Helicoide and other detention centers and, instead of organizing to free prisoners, continue to comply with a regime in visible decline. Militants who denounced neighbors to deny them food or accuse them of conspiracy. Judges who systematically validated arbitrary detentions and denied civilians any semblance of due process.

There is also the vast, quieter world of those who profited on the sidelines: corruption, theft, embezzlement. Many Venezuelans can name people they personally knew who enriched themselves through the collapse of the state and now live comfortably abroad, enjoying lives financed with resources stolen from the country.

History shows that justice, in one form or another, eventually arrives. There will be truth commissions, reparations, mediation. Transitional justice mechanisms and amnesties will define paths toward accountability. But these processes tend to reach only the most visible faces.

The deeper challenge for Venezuela is understanding how chavismo built, and perfected, a system capable of functioning through people who stopped thinking. A country where evil advanced not only through cruelty, but through silence. Through obedience. Through the refusal, or inability, to say enough.

Thinking instead of obeying

When Nazism fell and justice was pursued, Hannah Arendt observed this problem with chilling clarity in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. Adolf Eichmann’s defense rested almost entirely on one claim: he was “following orders.” Arendt warned that the most dangerous forms of evil are not committed by monsters, but by ordinary people who stop thinking.

Venezuela’s greatest unresolved question, then, is not justice versus impunity. It is whether we understand how evil actually operated. Can a society forgive without understanding how cruelty became normal? How judges rubber-stamped detentions because they were “just following orders” without thinking on the people they were harming? How officers who were not directly torturing still chose silence?

Fear explains much of Venezuela’s silence. Afiuni’s case was not only an act of cruelty; it was a very clear warning. It made clear the price of agency, of refusing to comply. In our case, fear is a powerful reason to stop thinking.

And yet, fear is not immutable.

Venezuela’s future will be shaped by what those who still sustain the system choose to do now, in this purported ‘transition’ moment.

In recent days, something new has appeared in public view. University students openly confronted Delcy Rodríguez and demanded the release of political prisoners. Not anonymously, not from exile, but face to face. It was a small moment, perhaps. But it mattered. It suggested that fear, which once organized obedience, may be weakening.

That moment matters especially for those still inside the system.

Hannah Arendt insisted that the opposite of evil is not goodness, but thinking. Judgment. The refusal to outsource moral responsibility to orders, procedures, or necessity. Her warning was not directed at monsters, but at ordinary people, at those who convince themselves that their role is too small to matter.

Venezuela’s future will not be determined only by courts, truth commissions, or amnesty laws. It will be shaped by what those who still sustain the system choose to do now: judges who still sign, guards who still comply, officials who still look away. History will ask not only what crimes were committed, but when fear began to fade, who chose to keep obeying anyway.

Forgiveness, if it is ever to mean something in Venezuela, cannot be granted in the absence of truth. In our case, truth requires understanding how cruelty became routine, how silence became policy, and how so many learned, or had to learn, not to think. The question is no longer only whether Venezuela will forgive, but whether it is finally ready to understand.