Tundu Lissu, leader of Tanzania’s main opposition party Chadema, arrives at the Kisutu Resident Magistrates’ Court in Dar es Salaam on 19 May 2025. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Anthony Siame) 
In 2014, I was arrested in Venezuela for calling on my fellow citizens to protest peacefully against dictatorship. A year later, in 2015, I was sentenced to 14 years in prison. My supposed crimes were not acts of violence or conspiracy, but my words – my speeches demanding democratic change. My case reached a level of absurdity and manipulation that speaks for itself: the judge argued that I had the power to send “subliminal messages” to the Venezuelan people, and for this I was condemned.
I endured seven years behind bars and under house arrest before managing to escape. Even now, in freedom, I carry the weight of those who remain unjustly imprisoned. Today, there are thousands of political prisoners in Venezuela and hundreds of thousands more across the world whose only “crime” is to speak truth to power and to demand democracy.
My brother in struggle, Tundu Lissu of Tanzania, stands today where I once stood: in the dock, accused of treason for words spoken in defence of democracy. His case is even more severe. In Tanzania, treason carries the death penalty. For daring to call for electoral reform, for daring to imagine a more just and democratic future, Tundu faces not only the possibility of years in prison, but the possibility of execution.
Read more: My treason trial is a death sentence for Tanzania’s democracy
Tundu and I are bound by more than the similarities of our persecution. We are both founding members of the Platform of African Democrats, a transnational initiative uniting political leaders across Africa who fight to keep alive the flame of democracy under authoritarian assault. We also serve together in the World Liberty Congress, a global coalition of dissidents, human rights defenders and democratic leaders from every continent. Our purpose is simple yet urgent: to ensure that authoritarian regimes cannot suffocate freedom through censorship, repression and criminalisation of dissent.
What unites us is stronger than any prison wall or courtroom sentence: the conviction that words are not crimes, and that truth is not treason. Yet this is precisely the pattern we see across the globe. Authoritarians fear speech more than force, because speech inspires people to rise, to question, to imagine freedom. And so they turn words into weapons against their own people, prosecuting dissent as though it were a threat to national security.
I know first-hand how this playbook works. My trial in Caracas was described by international observers as a farce, orchestrated to remove a voice the regime feared. In Tanzania, Tundu is denied fair legal representation, held in harsh conditions, and faces a judiciary under political pressure. Different countries, same pattern: the use of courts not to deliver justice, but to extinguish it.
The stakes could not be higher. My imprisonment was meant to intimidate a generation of Venezuelans. Tundu’s possible death sentence is meant to frighten not only his party but every Tanzanian citizen who dreams of democracy. And yet, history shows that words – once spoken – cannot be imprisoned forever. They live in the people who hear them, who carry them, and who eventually act upon them.
The world must not turn away. To defend Tundu Lissu is to defend every political prisoner, in Venezuela, in Africa and beyond. To stand with him is to affirm that democracy cannot survive if words are treated as crimes, and that freedom cannot be prosecuted. DM
Leopoldo López is a Venezuelan opposition leader, economist and sociologist. He was elected mayor of the Chacao Municipality of Caracas in 2000, and is the national coordinator of another political party, Voluntad Popular, which he founded in 2009.