Venezuela transition talks open in Caracas without Machado
The first formal negotiations on Venezuela's political transition opened in Caracas seven months after Nicolas Maduro's arrest. Maria Corina Machado was not invited to the table.
Talks on Venezuela’s political transition opened in Caracas on Saturday, August 1, seven months after Nicolas Maduro was seized in a US military operation. For Belgrade this is not a distant Latin American file: Venezuela is one of the states that never recognised Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence, and every change of guard in Caracas raises the question of whether that position outlives chavismo or leaves with it.
Who is at the table
The interim government is represented by Jorge Rodriguez, president of the National Assembly and brother of acting president Delcy Rodriguez. She took over after January 3, when US forces arrested Maduro and flew him to New York to face criminal charges. Until that day she had served as his vice president.
Across the table sits Dinorah Figuera, president of the National Assembly elected in 2015, the only legislature the opposition has controlled since chavismo took power in 1999. Washington treats that chamber as the last one chosen in a free and fair vote, and Figuera’s mandate in the room rests on exactly that recognition. She returned to the country only last month, after eight years in exile.
The agenda set by the State Department covers three areas:
- rebuilding democratic institutions
- strengthening the electorate
- guarantees for political participation
The first concrete step is meant to be a new and more independent national electoral council, the body that would only then call elections. The process runs under Washington’s supervision, with the State Department sponsoring the agenda, and nobody in Caracas bothers to pretend otherwise.
Why is Machado not in the room?
Maria Corina Machado, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was not invited and is not taking part. She has said she does not oppose the talks going ahead, but her Unity platform wants elections called far sooner than the current agenda allows. In May the platform published the so-called Panama Manifesto, its own transition plan, and that document remains the yardstick against which part of the opposition will judge whatever comes out of Caracas.
The dispute is about tempo. Imdat Oner, senior fellow at the Gordon Institute for Public Policy at Florida International University, explained Washington’s calculation to WLRN:
Venezuela is the only foreign policy success story for the Trump administration so far. That’s why they don’t want to push the elections so quickly this whole set-up might fail.
Oner added that he expects Delcy and Jorge Rodriguez to stretch the discussions out as long as they can and complicate them as much as they can. That is an analyst’s reading rather than an announcement, but it explains why the opposition camp outside the room keeps demanding an election date instead of a list of topics.
Resistance on the chavista side too
Supporters of both the government and the opposition took to the streets before the talks opened. Inside the Socialist Party there is pressure for the outcome to be more than a deal between two delegations. Lawmaker Francisco Arias warned that otherwise the agreement would be approved only by those who run the US government, and set a condition:
It must be a negotiation that is then submitted to the country.
What submitting it to the country would mean in practice, a referendum or a vote in the Assembly, has not been spelled out by either side.
An earthquake in the background
The negotiations are taking place in a country still digging itself out. The magnitude 7.2 and 7.5 earthquakes of June 24 killed more than 5,000 people, injured close to 17,000 and left almost 18,000 homeless, with the World Bank putting direct damage at 19.6 billion dollars. Washington pledged 300 million dollars for reconstruction and had transferred more than 180 million by July. The money now sits beside the negotiating table as leverage, even if it is not formally on it.
What already failed once
This is not the first attempt at talks between chavismo and its opponents. Norway mediated rounds in Oslo and Barbados in 2019 that collapsed without result. A fresh agreement was signed in Barbados in October 2023, ahead of the 2024 presidential election, and its fate is well known. The difference now is that neither side has ever negotiated under foreign military pressure, with a jailed president held in New York.
The first measurable test will not be a communique at the end of a round. It will be the composition of the new electoral council. Until it is clear who sits on it, everything else is an agenda item.
