Venezuela’s interim government and a group of opposition politicians announced on Tuesday that they will begin formal talks on 1 August aimed at strengthening democratic institutions and the country’s electoral system, in a move backed by the United States but overshadowed by the exclusion of the opposition’s most prominent leader, María Corina Machado.
The negotiations come as the country reels from twin earthquakes that struck northern Venezuela on 24 June, killing more than 4,700 people and exposing what many citizens see as a botched government response. The death toll keeps rising as more bodies are found beneath the rubble. Jorge Rodríguez, who heads the government-controlled National Assembly and whose sister Delcy Rodríguez serves as interim president, cited the devastation as the reason for the talks. “Only through unity can we move forward with reconstruction and maintain peace,” his brief statement said.
The announcement was made almost simultaneously by the opposition group and by Jorge Rodríguez. The opposition group is made up of former lawmakers who were elected to the National Assembly in 2015, the last time opposition parties won a majority in the legislative body. The opposition team will be led by Dinorah Figuera, a former lawmaker who returned to Venezuela in June after nearly eight years in exile in Spain. She said she had traveled to her home country on invitation from the US State Department, with the aim of pushing for the renewal of the National Electoral Council, known as the CNE. The opposition statement was more detailed than Rodríguez’s and expressly referred to the support the United States has lent since the quakes, which it said showed that “Venezuela is not alone.”
A fractured opposition
The choice caught the opposition by surprise. Only weeks earlier, a coalition of parties had decided that Machado would lead negotiations over new elections. Machado is the country’s most popular opposition figure and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, but the Trump administration now seems to favour Figuera as the person to negotiate a democratic transition. Machado announced that the parties in the opposition coalition would meet on Wednesday to define a public position on the announcement.
Machado slipped out of Venezuela secretly in November to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for her work promoting democracy and dedicated the award to US President Donald Trump. She tried to return after the earthquakes. She failed to enter the country. Trump has denied that his administration blocked her efforts, though US media quoted unnamed officials as describing her attempts as “potentially disruptive” to post-earthquake rescue and reconstruction efforts. The White House has discouraged her from returning, reportedly out of concern that it could lead to civil unrest.
The weight of the past
The political landscape shifted dramatically in January, when US troops seized Nicolás Maduro in a dawn raid on Caracas and took him to New York to face drug-trafficking charges. Delcy Rodríguez, a Maduro loyalist who served as his vice-president, has been in power since then with the backing of the Trump administration, much to the frustration of the opposition, which had hoped Maduro’s ouster would be followed by a change of government. Washington has called the shots since. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio reposted the opposition’s statement on social media and, according to the New York Times, has in effect been running Venezuela from Washington as a “de facto viceroy.”
The CNE, dominated by Maduro loyalists for years, declared Maduro the winner of the 2024 presidential election even though voting tallies gathered by electoral observers and verified independently showed an overwhelming victory for opposition candidate Edmundo González. Maduro and his PSUV party had tightened their grip on all branches of government. National Assembly elections held since 2015 have either been boycotted by the opposition or widely dismissed as neither free nor fair. The 2015 assembly was the first and only opposition-controlled congress elected under Chavismo, the leftwing movement named after its founder, Hugo Chávez. Many of those opposition members were eventually imprisoned or forced into exile.
Despite the release of scores of political prisoners following Maduro’s ouster, 372 remain behind bars, according to a tally by prisoners’ rights group Foro Penal. Opposition politicians and critics of the Maduro government have faced persecution for years. The opposition group said the priority of the talks would be strengthening democratic institutions and the electoral system, as well as providing guarantees for political participation.
A week before the earthquakes, Figuera held her first meeting with Jorge Rodríguez. The US State Department praised that meeting as the beginning of a roadmap for a political dialogue on a democratic transition. No timetable for new elections exists. Even within the opposition, the expectation is that rebuilding the electoral system would take at least eight months.