Venezuela freed former police officers Erasmo Bolívar, Héctor Rovaín, and Luis Molina after 23 years in prison, following announcements of broader political prisoner releases in the country. Credit: Infobae. For editorial use only.
Venezuela freed three former officers of the now-dissolved Policía Metropolitana de Caracas (Caracas Metropolitan Police), Erasmo Bolívar, Héctor Rovaín, and Luis Molina, on the night of Tuesday, May 19, 2026, after 23 years of uninterrupted detention, a release confirmed by Foro Penal, the Venezuelan NGO that provides legal assistance to political detainees and tracks the country’s prisoner population, which designated the three men as Venezuela’s longest-held political prisoners.
Twenty-three years, still counting: that phrase describes not only the duration Bolívar, Rovaín, and Molina spent behind bars, but also the pace at which Venezuela has addressed the political detentions that human rights organizations have documented for over two decades, and the breach between those two timelines defines the significance of what happened on May 19.
The 2002 coup and two decades of detention
The three former officers were arrested on April 19, 2003, in connection with events tied to the failed coup attempt against President Hugo Chávez in April 2002, a period during which members of the Policía Metropolitana de Caracas were implicated in shootings near Puente Llaguno in Caracas that left 19 people dead on April 11, 2002, one of the deadliest days of that political crisis.
The Chávez government used those events to anchor criminal charges that kept the three men incarcerated through four successive presidential terms and across the full arc of Venezuela’s political and economic deterioration, from the oil boom years of the mid-2000s through the hyperinflationary collapse of the late 2010s and into the governance vacuum that followed Nicolás Maduro’s removal from power in late 2025.
For Rovaín, Bolívar, and Molina, 23 years in detention meant experiencing from inside prison walls every major political transformation Venezuela underwent, including the death of Chávez in 2013, the rise of Maduro, the 2019 opposition challenge led by Juan Guaidó, and the country’s most severe economic contraction in Latin American recorded history.
The 300-prisoner announcement and the verification gap
Jorge Rodríguez, president of Venezuela’s National Assembly and brother of interim President Delcy Rodríguez, announced earlier in the week that Venezuela would release 300 detainees before Thursday, May 21, 2026, targeting individuals who were minors, over 70 years old, or suffering from a diagnosed medical condition, with the three former officers included in that group under a humanitarian criteria that Rodríguez framed as a goodwill gesture by the current administration.
However, Foro Penal’s director, Gonzalo Himiob, confirmed on Wednesday morning that his organization had verified far fewer than 300 releases by that point, a discrepancy that followed a pattern established in January 2026, when Venezuela’s government announced the release of 116 political detainees and Foro Penal independently confirmed only 41 at the time of that announcement, with NPR reporting that more than 800 political prisoners remained detained following those January releases.
That persistent gap between official announcements and independently verified releases is not a minor accounting difference; it reflects the structural problem that rights organizations have identified across every phase of Venezuela’s prisoner release cycle since 2025.
What the release signals and what it does not
The freedom of Venezuela’s three longest-held political prisoners carries genuine symbolic weight, since Bolívar, Rovaín, and Molina entered detention before most current Venezuelan adults had graduated from secondary school, and their release closes a chapter that outlasted two presidents, multiple constitutional crises, and the full collapse of Venezuela’s oil-dependent economy.
In reality, however, Foro Penal and Amnesty International both document a total political prisoner population that human rights organizations placed above 1,000 as of early 2026, meaning that 23 years of detention finally ended for three men on May 19 while hundreds of other Venezuelans continued counting their own years behind bars, and no announced release mechanism has yet produced independently verified numbers anywhere near the scale the government has claimed.