“The last time I flew out of Venezuela was right at the start of August 2024, just after the disputed presidential election,” the Guardian’s Latin America correspondent, Tom Phillips, tells Annie Kelly.

“It was a moment of real turmoil. There was a huge wave of repression that was unfolding as Nicolás Maduro tried to silence any kind of dissent to his bogus claim to have won that election. Thousands were thrown in prison, many were going underground, and journalists were racing to get out of the country.”

When Tom returned to Venezuela at the end of April, four months after the US abduction of Maduro, the country felt very different. “It was uplifting in some sense to see political activism taking place again, people coming out of hiding, hundreds of political prisoners being released.”

But Venezuelans also spoke of their anxiety that the political shift could be a mirage.

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