Strategies for Release

Lilian Tintori, an internationally recognized human rights advocate and the wife of former political prisoner Leopoldo López (the 2022 Robert G. Wesson Lecturer in International Relations Theory and Practice at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies), spoke candidly about her seven-year struggle to secure her husband’s release. “It is not easy,” she stated, “You become the voice of the political prisoner. You can’t talk, you have to scream in every crevice, every place, every moment you get.” 

Tintori argues that the most important aspect for release is a community of resilience, which is to provide mental health and emotional support to political prisoners’ families, as they cannot act as the voice if they feel broken themselves. At the heart of this strength, she argued, is love. In her efforts, she now distributes the Pathway to Freedom handbook, produced through her organization, the World Liberty Congress, to help families navigate the grueling road to release.

“Torture only occurs because the Maduro regime knows we are the majority,” Tintori clarified. Since the beginning of 2025, five political prisoners in Venezuela have died in custody. Tintori emphasized the importance of protecting the life of the person being detained — the human being behind the titles of activist, mayor, or opposition leader, beyond a simple number. To raise awareness about political prisoners alike, Tintori often employs the strategy of always mentioning “other political prisoners” after their loved ones’ names. This keeps the broader community of victims in public consciousness.

With international and local channels to plead for help closing, such as the EU or historically, the U.S., all three panelists stressed that silence is not an option for all communities — including academic spheres — and the broader public. Tintori testified that after public pressure, the regimes do pay attention and often send proof of life to suppress further outrage, hence helping to protect prisoners until their release.

Ways to Support A Political Prisoner 

Having been a political prisoner himself after co-founding the April 6th Youth Movement in Egypt, Waleed Shawky recounted what he believed carried him through his time behind bars — the cause he fought for. Upholding the values and vision that led to their arrest, he argued, can provide hope and dignity in the most inhumane conditions. “Being a victim is a choice as a prisoner, because you can choose to be a survivor,” Shawky asserted, “It is important to remind them of the bigger picture.” 

Echoing Tintori’s previous statements, Shawky praised the courage of the families, particularly women, who visit and support prisoners, often at great personal risk. He also warned against idolizing or victimizing political prisoners. “They’re human,” he emphasized. “Don’t cry in front of them. Be strong; they need your strength.”

Authoritarian Crackdowns and Resistance

Gulika Reddy highlighted the challenges advocates operating in authoritarian contexts face and how they navigate these challenges. She broke it down into three different categories: movements, organizations, and individuals.

• Movements are often delegitimized and co-opted. Reddy stressed the importance of engaging in grounded movement building, offering counter-narratives to sustain public trust, and fostering solidarity and collective action.

• At the organizational level, regimes may block formal registration, restrict funding, and launch physical or digital attacks — including office raids and data seizures. To survive these assaults, organizations can diversify financial models, invest in digital security, and cultivate collective care to mitigate burnout and trauma. Additionally, there is a need to adopt diverse theories of change in contexts where traditional human rights tactics prove ineffective.

• For individuals, threats include intimidation and retaliation, which can also extend to their loved ones. Reddy recommended conducting risk assessments and creating mitigation and response plans, including access to free legal aid and safe housing.

What we learned from our speakers is clear: authoritarianism thrives on silence, but freedom depends on our voices. For political prisoners around the world, solidarity, resilience, and an unwavering defense of human dignity are not just ideals; they are lifelines that can bring them home.

‘A Moral Eclipse’

In his introduction of Sandberg, Amichai Magen, the inaugural Visiting Fellow in Israel Studies at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), explained the film’s title.

“There is the obvious meaning, capturing the silence of death after the acts of violence. But there is also the silence of the international community, the complete shock experienced by Jewish communities all around the world, that on Oct. 8, some people denied this ever happened … After the screams, we experienced a moral silence, a moral eclipse. And then there is the silence of the invisible wounds, the broken minds, the broken souls, the broken families,” Magen said.

After leaving Meta a few years ago, Sandberg said she was completely committed to being private and not public anymore. “I'd had it, and it was done.” And then, Oct. 7 took place, and subsequent reports about sexual violence seemed to be met with an eerie silence.

Why the silence? Sandberg offered that people are so politically polarized today that they want every fact to fit into their particular narrative. And for some, sexual violence may not fit into their narrative.

“What is happening is that politics — polarization and extreme politics — are blinding us to something that should be completely obvious. I shouldn't even have to say this. Rape is not resistance. Never. Under any circumstances. Rape is not resistance. It never has been, it never will be,” she said.
 

Anyone who has a mother, a sister, a daughter, a wife, or a friend should join together to unite against rape in war or elsewhere, she added.

“It threatens all of our values,” Sandberg said about Hamas’ massacres of Israelis.

In one interview that Sandberg conducted, she spoke with Ayelet Levy Sachar, the mother of 19-year-old Naama Levy, whose kidnapping that morning was filmed by Hamas. The horrific sight of her pajama bottoms, drenched in blood at the back, was a clear indicator that sexual brutality was carried out by Hamas.

‘He’s just a hero’

After the film concluded, Sandberg joined Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, and Rabbi Idit Solomon for a conversation and question-and-answer session with the audience. Gundar-Goshen is a clinical psychologist who has personally treated Nova survivors. This quarter she is lecturer and artist-in-residence at Stanford’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies. Rabbi Idit Solomon is the interim associate director at Hillel at Stanford.

Sandberg expressed heartache over the current situation in Gaza and said she is a supporter of a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians.

“War is a terrible thing. Terror is a terrible thing. Oct. 7 is a terrible thing. What happened after that is a terrible thing. None of this should happen. We have to believe in peace. We have to get to peace. But in order to have peace, you need two people who are willing to let the other side live in peace,” she said.

In the film, she spoke with Rami Davidson, who heroically saved over 100 lives at the Nova Music Festival.

“He's just a hero,” Sandberg said about her interview with Davidson near the spot of the Nova festival. They stood close to the trees where he recalled seeing naked and mutilated bodies tied to them on Oct. 7.

“And he starts crying. He said, ‘I could have saved them. He rescued over 100 people, mostly from the Nova … For 10 hours, he went in and out in his little car, rescuing people, risking his own life. And he was just crying about the ones he didn't get to.”
 

‘A threat to our values’

Sandberg urged the audience to embrace the point that such terror will never have a place in a civilized world.

“It may take time and it may take a lot of work by people like you and all the brave people who are here today. But we are going to persuade people that this is terror. We are going to get to a world where people don't tolerate this terror and recognize the threat to our values that this is,” she said.

The documentary was released for private and public use without any licensing fees. “We're trying to get everyone we can to see it,” she said. It can be viewed for free on YouTube.

Sandberg recalled a discussion with Denis Mukwege, a Congolese physician who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict. Mukwege said the most horrible aspect of sexual violence as a war tool is that it's incredibly effective and free.

“It doesn't just take real lives, but it destroys communities in many places around the world. When a woman is raped, in some cultures, she's then outcast from her society. It systematically destroys the fabric of communities. You have the single most effective tool of war, and it is available for free. You don't have to buy a bomb or a gun. That is so devastating because you realize what we're up against,” Sandberg said.

She concluded, “We will come through this. Not everyone will come through this. These people, some of these people will not. But we will come through this. And so, this event gives me hope.”

Julie Cordua, executive director of Thorn, a non-profit organization founded by Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore, spoke passionately on the topic child exploitation and sexual abuse imagery for the Stanford Program on Human Rights’ Winter Speaker Series U.S Human Rights NGOs and International Human Rights on February 4, 2015.

Cordua addressed the Stanford audience about the importance of technology for acting as the “digital defenders of children." She provided a chilling account of child sexual exploitation, first describing the problem and then going on to challenge preconceived notions about it. For example, she highlighted that in order to tackle the issue, it must first be understood that it concerns a highly vulnerable population; most child victims of sexual exploitation come from extremely abusive backgrounds and many have been sexually abused by one or more parents.

Cordua emphasized that technology innovations have contributed to a proliferation of child exploitation and sexual abuse imagery through the use of encrypted networks that make it extremely difficult to hunt down perpetrators and find victims. Cordua feels that while technology is intensifying the problem, technology is also the solution.  Examples she gave were the development of algorithms that aim to track perpetrators and their victims and advertisements that encourage pedophiles to seek help.

Helen Stacy, director of the Program on Human Rights, queried Cordua on Thorn’s relationship with the government and private sector, as well as on Thorn’s approach for testing the efficacy of their programs. Cordua responded that Thorn does not apply for government funds so as to maintain independence over their projects but that they actively cultivate strong relationships with politicians and law enforcers. In relation to evaluation metrics, Cordua acknowledged that metrics are especially difficult in such a cryptic field as it is nearly impossible to know what numbers they are dealing with from the onset. Questions from the audience included effective strategies for changing the conversation of pedophilia in the public sphere, the emotional stamina required for pursuing such work, and strategies for connecting with and providing a safe platform for victims of child sexual exploitation.

Dana Phelps, Program Associate, Program on Human Rights

As if the alleged Iranian plan to kill Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the U.S. wasn’t strange and sinister enough, it offered an outlandish twist: American officials say the Iranian plotters wanted to hire a Mexican drug cartel to carry out the murder.

The charges laid out earlier this week are raising questions about how the United States should respond to Iran, skepticism about the Mexican underworld’s possible involvement and concerns about the growing, borderless network of global terrorism.

Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, a law professor and co-director of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and Beatriz Magaloni, an associate professor of political science and affiliated faculty of FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, discuss the developing events.

President Obama is vowing to impose tougher sanctions on Iran. What good will they do?

Cuéllar: Countries use sanctions to achieve multiple goals. Sanctions often put pressure on the regime and disrupt the regime’s capacity to move money, pay for resources, and offer goods and services on the international market. Even if they are imperfectly enforced, sanctions can affect particular individuals or organizations within states. Separately, sanctions signal the resolve of the nation imposing them, and thus the United States can force discussion among governments and diplomats regarding how the international community will respond to a state violating international norms.

Do Mexican drug cartels have the ability and willingness to be the hired guns in global terrorist operations?

Magaloni: Drug cartels are increasingly diversifying their portfolios of crime. They’re not exclusively engaging in the trading of drugs. They’re also engaged in many other criminal activities, including kidnapping, and extortion. And some have engaged in human trafficking.

Can this extend to acts of terror beyond Mexico? At this moment – with the evidence I see – I find it difficult to believe.

Mexican drug gangs do not seem to have that much capacity to operate in the U.S. There is an implicit agreement between government officials in some states and the cartels, and that’s what allows them to operate, often with impunity. But right now, I don’t think they can orchestrate the same type of terror once they cross the border because they do not have the same networks in the US.

How do you expect the criminal case to play out?

Cuéllar:  The criminal complaint alleges that accused individuals sought the assistance of a Mexican drug cartel. Instead of negotiating with that organization, however, the accused ended up interacting with a confidential informant working for American law enforcement agencies. Prosecutors will nonetheless focus on the motivation of the accused and the possibility that individuals with such goals might succeed in forging alliances with transnational criminal organizations in the future.  

How is the criminal activity in Mexico affecting security in the region?

Cuéllar: Although Mexico is a country that faces considerable challenges involving security and state capacity, it is certainly not Somalia or Afghanistan. And the Attorney General indicated that the Mexican government worked closely with U.S. authorities investigating the alleged criminal conspiracy. Nonetheless, Mexico has become a focal point for the activity of certain large criminal organizations with the ability to operate across large territories and to harness different forms of expertise. 

While these criminal networks certainly affect the security environment in both Mexico and the United States, there is often something of a paradox in the nature of the threat they pose. The organizations with the greatest capacity to engage in complicated operations across borders tend to be the ones with the tightest hold on lucrative pieces of the drug trade. And they are probably the most skeptical of getting involved in something that will draw a massive response from the United States.

What may complicate the situation is that some of the criminal organizations are beginning to fragment in response to changing dynamics in illicit markets and conflict with Mexican authorities. Fragmentation tends to weaken hierarchies, disrupting the ability of leaders to discipline the subordinates capable of engaging in violent activity. Continuing fragmentation may further affect the security context, as individuals and smaller organizations compete for resources and seek new markets for illicit activity.