MIAMI — In a Venezuelan election, running as an incumbent gives you the sort of edge that any unscrupulous and power-hungry leader around the world can only fantasize about.

You are down in the polls? You start arresting the campaign leaders of each state your rival visits. You are still behind? You charge your rival’s campaign manager and their team with crimes against the state, and order their arrest along with the apprehension of your opponent’s security chief as well as of any political leader, well-known journalist, or human right activist advocating in favor of change. The owner of a local hotel allows your rival to speak there? Well, You arrest him too, and while you are at it, confiscate the truck of the guy transporting the sound equipment.

The threat of imprisoning opponents, laced with the justified fears of being tortured once apprehended, played a key role in the electoral strategy of ruler Nicolás Maduro’s presidential campaign last year, said Magalli Meda, campaign manager of opposition leader María Corina Machado and of presidential candidate Edmundo González.

“Imprisonment wasn’t just a threat — it was the plan,” said Meda. According to her and other exiled opposition campaign leaders, fear was central to the Maduro regime’s re-election strategy.

By March 2024, that fear reached a peak. Meda and five fellow members of the Machado-González campaign knew their arrests were imminent. They had watched as allies were rounded up.

“We knew we were next,” said Pedro Urruchurtu, one of the six. The others — Omar González Moreno, Claudia Macero, Humberto Villalobos and Fernando Martínez Mottola — feared the same fate. Their decision to act came suddenly, triggered by a passing conversation with Gabriel Volpi, the commercial attache at the Argentine embassy, at an event they attended.

“I never thought I’d actually call him,” Urruchurtu recalled. “But with the intelligence agencies closing in, I locked myself in the bathroom and dialed. I told him, ‘Gabriel, we need sanctuary. Now.’”

Volpi promised to check. Ten anxious minutes later, he gave the green light. The six campaign leaders entered the Argentine Embassy in Caracas just ahead of their pursuers.

The embassy gave them safety — but not freedom. Venezuela broke off relations with Argentina on July 29, the day after the presidential election, primarily due to disagreements over its outcome. As the Argentine diplomatic staff were ordered to leave, Venezuelan regime forces surrounded the compound. Snipers appeared on neighboring rooftops. Attack dogs were stationed nearby. Drones buzzed overhead. Electricity was cut, water shut off, food and medicine restricted.

“What was supposed to be a refuge became a prison,” said Macero. “There were no bars, but we were caged.”

Speaking to the Miami Herald in an hourlong interview, five of the six opposition figures said that for months, they endured. No visitors were allowed. Food was seized, then returned, as a form of psychological torment. “It was like a game of cat and mouse,” Villalobos said. “They wanted to break us.”

They considered using the water from the swimming pool, but it had became so contaminated that it was unsafe to use other than for flushing toilets.

Gonzalez said that as food became scarce and the days dragged on, those inside began to feel the psychological effects of living under siege. The purpose was evident to all of them: The regime sought to crush their will and force them to betray the cause.

But more unbearable than the hunger was the silence, he said: It enveloped everything, thick and oppressive, interrupted only by the yelling of the officers outside, the barking of the dogs, or the buzzing of their watchers’ vehicles and drones.

“They wanted to break us. They wanted us to give in, for fear to eat us up from the inside. They longed for our surrender, our betrayal. They wanted to see us renounce what we were defending: María Corina, Edmundo, the people who never stopped shouting from the streets, demanding, believing,” Gonzalez said.

Suddenly, it all became too much for one of those inside. On Dec. 19, Martínez Mottola, 71, former minister of transportation in the 1990s, surrendered, defeated by the siege. After nine months of confinement without seeing his family, he walked out and surrendered to Venezuelan authorities. On Feb. 26, 2025, he died under house arrest in circumstances that remain unclear.

According to regime officials, Martínez Mottola voluntarily appeared before the prosecutor’s office and died after suffering a stroke. But Meda is quick to blame the regime. “He died because of an order to kidnap him and keep him away from his family,” she said, adding that the government “must take responsibility” for his death.

Outside, Venezuela’s political reality continued to deteriorate. Though the July 28 presidential election was widely seen as a victory for González, Maduro’s regime declared itself the winner. But the real margin of victory for the opposition — reportedly as much as a 40-point lead — was too large to convincingly manipulate. The world watched, and so did Venezuela’s exhausted population, over 90% of whom, according to opposition data, believe Maduro lost.

For those inside the embassy, the stakes were life or death. They knew what happened to dissidents detained by the intelligence agencies. Torture was routine. Disappearance was possible. “We were on the list of those to be liquidated,” Macero said.

Still, they planned. They waited. And in May, under cover of secrecy and intense coordination, they escaped.

The details of Operation Guacamaya, as the escape operation was called, remain tightly guarded. No gunfire. No visible confrontation. Just quiet, disciplined execution. One by one, the six slipped through one of Caracas’ most fortified zones, past military checkpoints, and out of the country.

Reports that the United States and Argentina had helped in the extraction soon circulated around social media, but these were never confirmed. The world did initially find out about the operation from a statement issued on X by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in which he extended gratitude “to all personnel involved” and to “our partners who assisted in securing the safe liberation of these Venezuelan heroes” — a message widely interpreted as hinting at U.S. involvement.

Nevertheless, the White House later said that no U.S. personnel actively participated inside Venezuela during the rescue.

For the five that manage to escape the embassy and now find themselves in the United States., their newly found freedom has monumental symbolic value.

“It wasn’t just an escape,” said González. “It was a message: that resistance still breathes in Venezuela.”

The implications went further. According to González, their escape and the public pressure it generated peeled away the regime’s carefully curated image of control and legitimacy. “The world saw what was happening. More importantly, Venezuelans saw it too.”

The escape also cast light on a growing fracture within the regime itself. “There’s an internal war playing out,” González said.

At the center of that internal struggle is Diosdado Cabello, a powerful figure within the ruling United Socialist Party. Long seen as Maduro’s right-hand man, Cabello is increasingly acting with independence — and muscle. His grip on the country’s military and intelligence apparatus has grown. Decisions made by other party elites, even Maduro himself, are being undermined or reversed.

“The infamous Cabello is gaining power every day,” González said. “And that signals a deeper breakdown within the regime.”

It’s a shift with serious implications. The regime’s once-monolithic control is splintering. Loyalties are shifting.

“The abuse, the impunity — it’s no longer in the shadows,” González added. “It’s in the open. Under the noses of those who claim to govern.”

For the five opposition figures now in exile, Operation Guacamaya wasn’t just about survival, the said — it was about revealing the truth and about showing the price of dissent, and the courage required to claim a future.

Whether that act will be remembered as the final chapter or merely the prologue to Venezuela’s next battle remains to be seen. But one thing is certain: those who escaped say freedom — even temporarily — was worth everything.

“Living like that wasn’t really living,” Villalobos said. “If we had to die, let it be fighting for freedom.”

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