Live podcast: Dissent Lab with Jesus Armas

Each episode features a modern-day Havel: The Vaclav Havel Center presents this unforgettable series.

March 23 at 7pm, Bohemian National Hall

Vaclav Havel was a writer, human rights activist, and eventual world leader whose political fight for freedom in what was once Czechoslovakia helped bring about the 1989 Velvet Revolution. As the 21st Century finds many governments tilting away from democracy and the protection of human rights, people across the world want to know how to move forward.

This podcast features conversations with contemporary dissidents who have faced imprisonment, torture, and exile. They all follow in the footsteps of Havel, fighting to free their people from oppression and bring democracy to their homelands. Each episode features a modern-day Havel, who has personally resisted authoritarians and authoritarianism — at great personal cost. These are lessons that can’t be learned in a history class.

The Vaclav Havel Center presents this unforgettable series Dissent Lab:

Dissent Lab, our new series featuring dissidents from around the world. This series is designed to hear from those who are struggling against authoritarians and authoritarianism in the spirit of Vaclav Havel.

The inaugural discussion features Jesús Armas, a leading Venezuelan dissident who was imprisoned in December 2014 and held for 13 months. His crime: supporting Venezuela’s democratic opposition and insisting that Nicolás Maduro had lost the 2024 presidential election.

Armas is a trained engineer who founded the NGO Ciudadanía Sin Límites (Citizenship Without Limits), working to improve water and energy access and transparency in Caracas’s most vulnerable communities. Armas was a key organizer of María Corina Machado and Edmundo González’s 2024 presidential campaign. Armas first entered politics as a student leader during the 2007 protests against the Chávez government’s crackdown on independent media. He was later elected to the Caracas city council.

Armas will be interviewed at the Bohemian National Hall screening room by U.S. journalist Peter Green, a former New York Times correspondent who covered the Velvet Revolution and the birth of the Czech Republic.