Venezuela’s socialist regime will send an envoy to Washington, DC on Thursday — the same day President Donald Trump is scheduled to meet with anti-socialist Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday.
According to Bloomberg, the Venezuelan regime will send current Venezuelan Ambassador to the United Kingdom Félix Plasencia. Unnamed sources with knowledge of the plans told Bloomberg that Plasencia will visit the United States on Thursday on behalf of Venezuelan “acting president” Delcy Rodríguez.
Bloomberg described Plasencia, a career diplomat, as a “close confidant” of Rodríguez, having served as her chief of protocol when she served as foreign minister for now-deposed dictator Nicolás Maduro between 2014 and 2017. Plasencia, who according to Spanish outlets is a dual citizen of Spain, also briefly served as Maduro’s foreign minister between August 2021 and May 2022. The diplomat was involved in Spain’s 2020’s Delcygate, a scandal that saw Rodríguez land at an airport in Madrid in violation of the European Union’s travel ban and sanctions imposed on her and other members of the Venezuelan socialist regime.
Prior to being stationed in London, Plasencia served as ambassador of Venezuela to Colombia in 2022 at a time when Maduro restored Venezuela’s diplomatic ties with the neighboring nation during the first days of the administration of far-left President Gustavo Petro.
Plasencia’s reportedly scheduled visit to the United States on Thursday would coincide with President Trump meeting Machado in Washington on that same day. President Trump first confirmed Machado’s upcoming visit in remarks given to Fox News host Sean Hannity last week.
“Well, I understand she’s coming in next week sometime, and I look forward to saying hello to her,” Trump said at the time.
Machado, the leader of Venezuela’s only mainstream center-right party Vente Venezuela, escaped from Venezuela in December with the help of the Trump administration, allowing her to travel to Oslo, Norway, to receive the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, which the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded her for her efforts towards restoring democracy in Venezuela.
Machado met with Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican on Monday. The Holy See did not offer any details on the meeting between Pope Leo and Machado and the pope has not publicly commented on the encounter at press time.
“I’m going to have to speak to her [Machado]. She might be involved in some aspect of it. I will have to speak to her. I think it’s very nice that she wants to come in. And that’s what I understand the reason is,” President Trump told CNN during a meeting with oil executives at the White House last week.
Although Machado has expressed her willingness to share the Nobel Peace Prize with President Trump for his support of the Venezuelan cause, the Norwegian Nobel Institute recently said that the award cannot be “revoked, shared, or transferred to others,” emphasizing that once the prize is announced, “The decision is final and stands for all time.”
According to the leftist New York Times, it is unclear which U.S. officials would receive Plasencia. Unnamed sources familiar with the visit told the Times that the “official reason” for Plasencia’s trip involves the process of reopening the Venezuelan embassy in D.C., which remains shut down since 2019 after Maduro had Venezuela cut all diplomatic ties with America.
Reports published last week indicated that the United States is undertaking preparations to reopen its embassy in Caracas should President Trump decide to do so, with a U.S. State Department delegation travelling to the Venezuelan capital to conduct initial assessments.
Rodríguez was sworn in as “acting president” of Venezuela hours after the United States carried out its law enforcement operation to capture now-deposed dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, both of whom are presently detained at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn undergoing trial proceedings on multiple narco-terrorism charges.
President Trump has told reporters over the past days that Rodríguez is cooperating with the United States and is engaged in close talks with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Locally, however, Rodríguez maintains a seemingly conflicted stance towards the United States, and has claimed that she is “in charge” of the ruling socialist regime.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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