THE CAFÉ

On the morning of December 10, 2024, Jesús Armas made a decision he knew was a risk. For four months, he had been moving through Caracas in the dark, safe house to safe house, changing phones, never staying long enough to be found. He was traveling with his girlfriend and with Juan Pablo Guanipa, now the number two figure in Venezuela’s opposition. They had organized protests from hiding, maintained contact with activists across the country, and kept their work going underground after Nicolás Maduro stole a presidential election and unleashed the worst political repression in Venezuelan history.

Jesús had spent twenty years building Venezuela’s freedom movement from the inside. He had founded Ciudadanía Sin Límites, a think tank devoted to free-market and democratic values, won a city council seat in one of the most violent districts in Caracas, and spent years organizing students and community leaders around the ideas of classical liberalism. He was exactly the kind of person the regime wanted off the streets.

“To be in hiding for so many months is really, really hard,” he would say later. “It can break you.” So on the morning of December 10, he went to a café in the east of Caracas to work for a few hours. When he stepped outside, two cars pulled up. Eight men in black masks, no identification, no words that mattered. They handcuffed him, put a mask over his face, and pushed him into one of the cars. He would not see his family for fourteen months.

THE ROAD BACK

To understand why Jesús was in that café, why he was in Venezuela at all, you have to go back to 2018. That year, a friend of his named Fernando Albán was abducted by regime intelligence. He was taken to the central police building in downtown Caracas and tortured until he had a heart attack. Then agents threw his body from the tenth floor and told the public it was a suicide.

Jesús had already seen raids on his home. He had already been in the street when protests were crushed. But the death of Fernando was different. It was a message, delivered with precision, about what the regime was willing to do and how little it feared the consequences. After that, Jesús pulled back. He is an engineer by training. He won a scholarship to Columbia University. He studied. His commitment to the freedom movement had been shaped by two decades of relationships that reached far beyond Venezuela. Years earlier, the Venezuelan think tank leader Rocío Guijarro, a longtime partner of Atlas Network, had handed a young university student a copy of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.

That student was Jesús. “When I first took a look at those books, I was really amazed,” he said. “That changed my life.” He became part of the global network of organizations connected through Atlas Network, building relationships with freedom movement leaders from across the world. Those connections would matter more than he knew. Then he saw a video of María Corina Machado. She was in one of the poorest towns in Venezuela, a place that had been Chavista territory for twenty years, and there were thousands of people in the street around her. Not opposition activists. Regular people.

“That day I understood that something was happening in Venezuela,” Jesús said, “that the spirit of freedom was winning in the souls of every Venezuelan.” He reached out to María Corina. She told him to come back and join her campaign. He came back.

JULY 28

The 2024 presidential election was not supposed to be winnable. Maduro had banned María Corina from the ballot, jailed opposition figures, and made clear through years of repression that the machinery of the state would deliver whatever result he needed.

What he had not accounted for was the tallies. In the weeks before the election, Jesús and Ciudadanía Sin Límites worked with community leaders across Caracas and beyond to place trained witnesses in every voting center they could reach. The effort grew out of an election integrity program that Atlas Network had supported, a project focused on building civic capacity, organizing community leaders, and fighting for transparent electoral conditions, called “We Want to Choose” in Spanish. It was not campaign work. It was the harder, slower work of making citizens capable of defending a vote.

On July 28, Venezuelans went to the polls and cast their ballots for Edmundo González Urrutia, the candidate María Corina had endorsed when she was barred from running herself, by a margin exceeding 70%. When regime officials appeared on television after midnight and declared Maduro the winner, offering no evidence, the opposition was ready. Jesús and his colleagues uploaded the tallies to a public website. The world could look for itself.

“We showed the world that we won the election,”
Jesús said. The regime’s response came the next morning.

EL HELICOIDE

By July 29, the crackdown had begun, with more than 2,000 political prisoners in the first week. Jesús went into hiding that day. He lasted four months. After his arrest at the café, intelligence agents interrogated him for four days, waking him at two in the morning for sessions that combined questions with threats against his family. They wanted to know where María Corina was hiding. They used plastic bags over his face to cut off his breathing.

He did not give them what they wanted. From there he was transferred to a cramped jail cell with 37 other prisoners. He was given no food or water for four days and survived on portions that other prisoners shared with him. Then he was moved to El Helicoide, an abandoned shopping mall development repurposed by Venezuela’s intelligence service into the country’s most notorious political prison.

Jesús was held there for twelve months in total isolation. No phone calls. No visits. No information from outside. His father is 90 years old. For a year, he did not know if his father was alive. “It’s like a psychological form of torture,” he said. “But we resisted.”

What kept him going were books. Fiction, energy, and freedom: Václav Havel, Václav Smil, Hayek, Huerta de Soto. “That was my anchor,” he said. “The only way I had to keep my mind healthy and to keep my soul in a good place.”

THE RADIO

Sometime in late 2025, a small radio made its way into El Helicoide. On December 10, 2025, exactly one year after Jesús had been taken from that café, news reached the prisoners through it: María Corina had won the Nobel Peace Prize. “We were so happy inside of prison,” Jesús said. “But we were happy not only because of the Nobel Prize, or because of María Corina. We were really happy because this means a lot for the democratization movements and freedom movements all around the world.”

FEBRUARY 8

He was released on February 8, 2026. Maduro had been taken into U.S. custody on January 3. Jesús was asleep in his cell when he heard an explosion outside—a sound he knew was different. Around two in the morning, a guard told him: Maduro had been arrested by the United States.

In the weeks after his release, Jesús came to Atlas Network’s Arlington, Virginia, office, where he spoke with our team and reflected on what the partnership had meant, the election integrity work, the community leaders his organization had trained, the voices throughout the world that had raised his name and called for his freedom when he could not speak for himself.

He flew back to Caracas on March 27, going home to demand free and fair elections and a peaceful transition to democracy. Atlas Network is now supporting Ciudadanía Sin Límites in training a new generation of students and community leaders in the ideas of freedom.

“I’m at risk today,” he said. “Maybe I can be detained at the airport when I come back. Maybe in a few months I will be home arrested or something like that. But I have to take that risk.”

“Freedom is not free,” he said. “You have to risk yourself, you have to fight, because we live under a big authoritarian wave all around the world.”

There are still more than 700 political prisoners in Venezuela. The regime that imprisoned Jesús remains in power. Free and fair elections have not been held. The rule of law has not been restored.

Jesús Armas is going back to change that.