Venezuelan mother María Concepción Sánchez suffered a massive stroke on Thursday after socialist regime officials told her that they would not release her political prisoner son, Joan Enrique Cruz Sánchez.
Per the Venezuelan outlet El Pitazo, Sánchez currently remains in critical condition at a hospital in San Juan de los Morros, Guarico.
Sánchez is one of hundreds of relatives of Venezuela’s political prisoners and has spent the past months in a tense state of uncertainty over the fate of her son, Joan Enrique Cruz Sánchez. Relatives of María Concepción Sánchez confided to El Pitazo that the anguished mother’s health has been severely affected after living through “unbearable” emotional strain for months, hoping to see her son free. Per the relatives, she suffered a stroke after she found out that Cruz Sánchez was not among the political prisoners released by the Venezuelan regime this week.
Venezuelan outlets reported that Joan Enrique Cruz Sánchez — who remains detained at press time — is one of the 170 oil workers of the Venezuelan state-owned oil company PDVSA who were arrested in a case locally known as PDVSA-Obrero (“PDVSA-Worker”). El Pitazo explained that Cruz Sánchez and the other oil workers involved in the case were unjustly detained by the Venezuelan socialist regime between 2024 and 2025 for denouncing irregularities at PDVSA, demanding decent working conditions, or refusing to sign documents they believed violated local laws.
The Venezuelan socialist regime has reportedly accused the oil workers — as well as police officers and individuals who have no relation to PDVSA — of “sabotage, contraband, corruption, and trafficking of strategic materials.” The accused individuals and their families have repeatedly denied the accusations and the socialist regime’s claims that they are “terrorists.”
Cruz Sánchez and many of the PDVSA-Obrero individuals have remain detained at the Yare II prison in the state of Miranda. Throughout this week, the Venezuelan regime reportedly released 27 individuals linked to the PDVSA-Obrero case from the Yare II prison in batches. Cruz Sánchez was not among the released.
María Concepción Sánchez, who reportedly remains in critical condition as press time is the latest case of an anguished Venezuelan mother suffering intense strain this month. Carmen Navas, an 82-year-old Venezuelan mother, passed away on Sunday, May 17 — ten days after the Venezuelan regime admitted that her son, political prisoner Víctor Hugo Quero Navas, had been dead since July 2025. Navas spent 16 months desperately searching for Quero Navas after he went missing in January 2025 when he was unjustly arrested by Venezuelan law enforcement officials. Venezuelan authorities reportedly refused to inform Navas on the whereabouts of her son on numerous occasions over the past 16 months.
The Venezuelan socialist regime did not include political prisoners linked to the PDVSA-Obrero case among those eligible to benefit from its “amnesty” law approved in February. The “amnesty” law was approved a little over a month after the Venezuelan regime began releasing political prisoners following the arrest of dictator Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces on January 3. The legislation has been widely criticized for not being a general amnesty law that could provide freedom to all of the nation’s political prisoners. Instead, it limited the “amnesty” benefits to individuals linked to specific moments in Venezuela’s 27-year-old political crisis.
This week, Jorge Rodríguez, the head of the National Assembly and brother of “acting President” Delcy Rodríguez, announced that the Venezuelan regime would release a new group of 300 political prisoners. He made the announcement days after Donald Trump told reporters that he would secure the release of all political prisoners of the socialist regime in Venezuela.
Jorge Rodríguez also announced that three ex-police officers, widely described as the longest-serving political prisoners of the socialist regime, would be among those released this week. The three men, who served under the now-defunct Metropolitan Police of Caracas, were released after having unjustly spent 23 years in prison.
Despite Rodríguez’s claims that 300 more political prisoners would be released throughout this week, Gonzalo Himiob, Vice president of the non-government human rights organization Foro Penal, said on a social media post that only 38 political prisoners — 36 men and 2 women — have been confirmed as released as of Friday morning.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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