Venezuela to send envoy for US talks on same day Machado visits

Ben Bartenstein and Eric Martin, Bloomberg News on Jan 13, 2026

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Venezuela’s acting president plans to send an envoy to Washington to meet with senior U.S. officials on the same day that opposition leader Maria Corina Machado will be in town for her own talks in the wake of Nicolas Maduro’s ouster.

Ambassador Felix Plasencia, the chief of mission at Venezuela’s embassy in the U.K. and a former foreign minister, plans to visit Thursday at acting President Delcy Rodriguez’s behest, according to people familiar with the plans. They asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations.

Machado, the popular Nobel Peace Prize-winning opposition figure, is expected to meet with President Donald Trump on the same day, U.S. officials have said. The dueling visits come as the U.S. and Venezuela look to restore diplomatic ties after years of conflict, after Trump pledged to “run” the country by pressuring the government in Caracas with a Navy-enforced oil quarantine.

Maduro, Venezuela’s longtime leader, was captured by U.S. forces in a nighttime raid on Jan. 3 and is in the U.S. awaiting trial on narco-trafficking charges.

Venezuela’s information ministry the White House and the State Department didn’t respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.

The rival visits also underscore how various factions are jockeying to fill Venezuela’s power vacuum now that Maduro is no longer in control. Trump earlier this month opted to work with Rodriguez, Maduro’s longtime vice president and a target of U.S. sanctions. He said Machado wasn’t ready to lead even though she won more than 90% of the vote in an opposition primary in 2023.

Plasencia, a veteran diplomat, has been a close confidant of Rodriguez for years, including as her director of protocol when she was foreign affairs minister from 2014 to 2017. Plasencia then had his own turn as Maduro’s foreign affairs minister in 2021 and 2022.

An American team visited Caracas last week to explore reopening the U.S. embassy more than six years after it was closed. The Venezuelan embassy in Washington was operated by the team of Juan Guaido, whom Trump recognized as Venezuela’s interim president in 2019, until Guaido’s term as president of the national assembly ended in early 2023.

Some Trump advisers had long favored a transition to Rodríguez as an off-ramp from Maduro’s hard-line leadership. They argue that a gradual transition will be less disruptive than a transition to Machado or Edmundo González, the stand-in candidate Machado backed for the 2024 election after she was barred from running.

Venezuelan authorities on Tuesday freed at least one U.S. citizen who has already left the country, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

It marks the first known release of an American citizen since authorities in Caracas began freeing detainees as part of an effort to meet Washington’s demands following Maduro’s capture.