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Nicolas Maduro

CARACAS. — Venezuelan authorities late Saturday began releasing some of those detained during demonstrations against President Nicolas Maduro’s socialist government, a rare goodwill gesture to the opposition at the end of a politically torrid year.

Delcy Rodriguez, the president of the assembly and head of its Truth Commission investigating the protests, said that Christmas was “a moment of reconciliation” as she announced the decision to release around 80 people.

Among the first freed was Alfredo Ramos, mayor of the north-western municipality of Iribarren, who was arrested late July and handed a 15 month sentence, and a dozen police officers from Chacao municipality, an opposition stronghold of Caracas. Alfredo Romero, director of human rights NGO Foro Penal, tweeted Sunday morning that 36 prisoners have been released so far.

State television showed an image of Rodriguez meeting with the group.

“You go back to jail for the medical check and then you go home to spend Christmas with your families,” she said.

“I feel happy for my freedom,” Ramos told journalists upon his release. “It was a hard test, quite difficult.”

But he also lashed out at his sentence.

“It was an arbitrary, unjust detention — I committed no crime,” he added.

Venezuela, whose oil reserves once made it the region’s richest country, has been paralyzed in recent years by economic collapse and political conflict.

Opposition forces accuse Maduro of dismantling democratic institutions and setting up the Constituent Assembly to rubber-stamp his policies, with widespread protests breaking out this year.

Supplies of food and medicine have become scarce, taking an ever-greater toll on people’s health, and hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have chosen to emigrate.

The fate of those imprisoned has been a subject of negotiations between the government and the opposition Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) in the Dominican Republic, as both sides seek a solution to the country’s grave political and economic crisis.

A third round of talks is set for January 11 and 12. — AFP.