The Ministry of Penitentiary Services of Venezuela issued a statement stating that on Saturday, at approximately 6:33 AM local time (10:33 AM UTC), Díaz displayed “symptoms consistent with a myocardial infarction,” prompting his fellow inmates to assist him and “immediately” send him to the emergency room, where he received “primary medical care.”
Due to his condition, the ministry reported, he was transferred to the University Hospital of Caracas, where he was admitted and “passed away minutes later” after attempts to stabilize him. Díaz was “being prosecuted, with full guarantees of his rights, in accordance with the legal system and respect for human rights and his legal defense. This is evident through relevant videos and records,” the ministry also stated.
Prior to this announcement, opposition leaders María Corina Machado and Edmundo González Urrutia emphasized that this death reveals a “sustained pattern of state repression” and denounced that seven political prisoners have already died in prison since the presidential elections on July 28, 2024.
In a joint statement shared on social media, Machado and González Urrutia noted that the “circumstances” of these seven deaths “include denial of medical care, inhumane conditions, isolation, and torture, along with cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.”
Specifically regarding Díaz, they highlighted that his safety and life were “the exclusive responsibility of those who arbitrarily kept him kidnapped” in El Helicoide, the headquarters of the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (Sebin) in Caracas, and therefore, they added, it “cannot be treated as an ordinary death.”
González Urrutia further argued on social media that Díaz “should have received the medical care he needed, just like so many political prisoners who are denied a basic right that must be guaranteed without exceptions.”
The former governor — an activist of the opposition party Democratic Action and also a former councilman and mayor — was detained in November 2024 amid a political crisis following that year’s presidential elections, in which the largest opposition coalition denounced the results that led to President Nicolás Maduro’s reelection as fraudulent.
Díaz had questioned the lack of publication of the detailed results of the presidential elections and denounced the electricity crisis that Nueva Esparta experienced in November, which the government attributed to attacks by the opposition.
