Soweto–Prague–Caracas: One Year Without Jesus Armas

On December 10, 2024, while I was teaching a class in New York, dozens of messages began lighting up my phone all at once. Each one brought the news I had feared for months: Venezuelan security forces had kidnapped my friend, the community leader Jesus Armas. I felt my heart collapse. For years, I urged him to leave the country, but Jesus is Caracas — and Caracas is Jesus.

For more than a decade, he worked in neighborhoods that most Venezuelans have never seen, places where the collapse of the state is not a statistic but a daily reality. He helped organize drinking-water systems in low-income areas, earning the respect not only of opposition supporters but even some chavistas. His work offered something rare in today’s Venezuela: results, dignity, and trust.

However, exactly one year ago he became the latest target of a regime that survives through fear. Jesús is now one of more than 1,000 political prisoners in Venezuela: activists, union leaders, students, journalists, and human-rights defenders like Rocío San Miguel. Their imprisonment traces a silent map of national talent that the regime has chosen to repress instead of listen to.

In the months since Jesus disappeared, I have tried to understand what drives people like him to stay despite all the warning signs, despite scholarships offered abroad, despite the real possibility of going to prison. Searching for answers, I returned again and again to the writings of Václav Havel, Nelson Mandela, and Alexei Navalny — very different figures who nevertheless shared a stubborn commitment to truth over safety. Their examples helped me understand Jesus’s decision. He did not stay out of naïveté. He stayed because he believes Venezuelans deserve more than resignation.

Today, while friends and family wait for crumbs of information from inside El Helicoide — the detention center where torture has been documented for years — the regime’s strategy is evident. By detaining local leaders, it sends a message that participation carries a cost. But political prisoners send a message of their own: that conscience still exists in a country where the state tries to extinguish it.

A year after his arrest, I think of a phrase I once read in Soweto, written by South African prisoners during apartheid: “We, who are confined within gray walls, extend our hands toward our people. We salute them for daring to rise up against tyranny.” I never imagined those words would one day feel so close.

Jesus cannot receive messages from the outside. I cannot send him the music he loves — Coltrane, the Rolling Stones — nor tell him how many people are still asking about him. What I can do is reaffirm publicly what cannot reach him privately: he is not forgotten.

His family, his friends, and the communities he served in Caracas think of him every day. We admire his integrity. We are proud of his courage. We await his return.

Jesús has always admired Václav Havel, so I’ll end with a phrase he treasured: “The true test of a man is not how well he plays the role he invents for himself, but how well he plays the role destiny assigns to him.”

One year after his imprisonment, that test continues. Jesús has faced it with dignity, conviction, and an intact sense of purpose. Venezuela — and the region — should not forget him.

This article was translated into English from the original in Spanish.