Trump administration officials were on the first nonstop commercial flight between the U.S. and Venezuela in seven years when it took off Thursday from Miami, bound for Caracas.
National Energy Dominance Council’s Jarrod Agen led the U.S. team, and Venezuela’s newly appointed Ambassador to the U.S., Félix Plasencia, was also on board the American Airlines flight.
Agen told CBS News that a White House team traveling to Caracas plans to push along some agreements between U.S. companies and Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA and some of its mining companies. HKN Energy, a company backed by Ross Perot Jr., as well as Hunt Energy, are among the new American entrants to the Venezuelan market. Agen expected to meet with interim Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez, too.
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The trip comes nearly four months after U.S. forces seized Rodríguez’s predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife in a daring special forces raid. Both were extradited to New York to face drug trafficking charges and have since pleaded not guilty.
Since Maduro’s removal from power, the administration has sought to incentivize U.S. investment in Venezuela’s oil sector, rolling back sanctions to allow American oil companies to spend on infrastructure and production. Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum have also led delegations to Venezuela, which holds the world’s largest oil reserves.
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“The economic opening in Venezuela is on a bullet train. The democratic process is on a chicken cart,” former U.S. official Juan Gonzalez told CBS News, upon returning from a business trip to Caracas. Gonzalez served as the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs during the Biden administration. He said it was stunning to see the old posters of Maduro in Caracas being taken down and said Chavismo — the left-wing socialist ideology of Hugo Chávez and Nicolas Maduro — as dead and gone. But at this point, the Maduro regime remains intact — albeit minus Maduro himself.
Chevron, America’s second largest energy company, has continuously operated in Venezuela, including under the Maduro regime. The Trump administration has tried to urge the Rodríguez government to make regulatory changes to help usher in more investment to stabilize the country’s economy.
In an interview that will air on “Face the Nation” Sunday, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth said that progress has indeed been made by Rodríguez regarding changes to the country’s hydrocarbon laws, which effectively change the terms under which companies can invest in Venezuela.
“It still needs some work. It’s probably not enough to bring in the level of investment that would be desirable,” Wirth told CBS News. He spoke with CBS News before a meeting at the White House last week.
Venezuelan oil is the type of heavy crude that refineries along the Gulf Coast of the U.S. are designed to process. He said he supports changes to the system to increase energy production in Venezuela but described it as a “work in progress.” Wirth said Chevron maintains great employees in Venezuela but acknowledged that some of what he described as a very talented workforce had fled the country over the past two decades of Chavismo.
Wirth also told CBS News that he speaks to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and has heard him discuss the need to hold elections in due course in Venezuela. He did not share a timeline for that democratic transition. The U.S. has reestablished its diplomatic presence in Caracas and has appointed career foreign service officer John Barrett as chargé d’affaires.
The Trump administration has been tightlipped about the timeline for elections to be held. Multiple U.S. and Venezuelan officials indicated that it could be two to three years before the country is prepared for elections. The Trump administration has made stabilization of the country a top priority, with democracy a secondary goal. Rodríguez appears to be planning to finish out the remainder of Maduro’s six-year term, which could mean elections in 2030.
Opposition leader María Corina Machado told “Face the Nation” in February that a secure and precise timeline for a transition away from the Maduro regime is needed before exiles will feel safe enough to return. She has at least twice consulted with President Trump and recently with Rubio about her future plans to return to Venezuela. She confidently told CBS News that “I will be president when the time comes.”
Machado’s party won the last presidential election in 2024, according to the State Department, which assessed that 12 million Venezuelans peacefully went to the polls. Nonetheless, the Maduro-controlled National Electoral Council declared Maduro the winner, and his representatives then sought to arrest Edmundo Gonzalez (who stood in for Machado in the race) and Machado as part of what the U.S. described as a scheme to hold onto power.
Rodríguez – who was Maduro’s vice president — was officially recognized by the Trump administration as the “sole head of state” in March, nearly three months after a lightning U.S. military raid snatched Maduro in January and took him into U.S. custody on narcotrafficking charges linked to Cartel de los Soles.
The U.S. lifted sanctions on Rodríguez earlier this month, though Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello retains a $25 million U.S. government bounty on his head for his role in Cartel de los Soles, which is the same drug trafficking organization that the U.S. designated as a terror group. He ran Maduro’s repressive security apparatus but today remains a key figure in the government. Cabello, once Maduro’s chief thug, can now be seen sitting across from high level Trump officials in meetings discussing business deals.
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