Ambassador Laura Dogu met with Venezuela’s “acting President” Delcy Rodríguez and her brother Jorge on Monday, hours after arriving in the country amid the ongoing reopening process of the U.S. embassy in Caracas.
“Today I met with Delcy Rodríguez and Jorge Rodríguez to reiterate the three phases that Secretary Marco Rubio has proposed for Venezuela: stabilization, economic recovery and reconciliation, and transition,” Dogu wrote on the U.S. embassy’s social media accounts on Monday evening.
Dogu referred to the three-phase roadman towards restoring democracy in Venezuela following the downfall of socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro on January. Sec. Rubio detailed the proposal last week during his hearing before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on U.S. Policy Towards Venezuela.
Venezuelan Communications Minster Miguel Ángel Pérez Pirela detailed on social media that the encounter between Dogu, Delcy, and Jorge Rodríguez — who leads the socialist-controlled National Assembly — occurred at the Miraflores presidential palace on the afternoon hours of Monday.
The Minster did not disclose further details of the encounter and simply asserted that it was “carried out within the framework of the working agenda between the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and the United States of America.”
The encounter took place on the eve of the first month anniversary of the U.S. law enforcement operation in Caracas that resulted in the arrest of socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. Both are presently at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, awaiting trial on multiple narco-terrorism charges.
The meeting also coincided with the 27th anniversary of February 2, 1999, the day late socialist Hugo Chávez’s tenure first took office. The Venezuelan socialists effusively mark February 2 as the start of the “Bolivarian Revolution.”
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Dogu arrived in Venezuela over the weekend and is presently serving as the Chargé d’Affaires of the Venezuela Affairs Unit (VAU), a unit that has been operating at the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá, Colombia since 2019 after Maduro had Venezuela cut off diplomatic ties with the U.S. At press time, Dogu and other U.S. officials are undergoing the required proceedings towards a reopening of the U.S. embassy in Caracas after seven years.
Moments after the meeting, Venezuelan Foreign Minster Yván Gil informed that Rodríguez appointed Ambassador Félix Plasencia as the country’s new envoy to the United States. Plasencia, a career diplomat, is widely described as a “close confidant” of Rodríguez and had been serving as Venezuela’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom.
Gil asserted that Plasencia’s designation aims to promote “constructive cooperation and advancing bilateral relations.”
“Its mission will be to respectfully address both the interests and differences between our nations, covering energy, political, and economic issues.
Plasencia, accompanied by his team, will soon travel to the United States, ushering in a new era in which Venezuela is committed to defending international law,” Gil wrote on social media.
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