‘A new chapter’: first commercial fight from US since 2019 lands in Venezuela | Venezuela
US and Venezuelan officials hailed a new era in diplomatic relations as the first direct commercial flight between the two countries in more than seven years touched down in Caracas.
Nearly four months ago, US special forces attacked helicopters and planes took to the skies over the Venezuelan capital after Donald Trump ordered the capture of president Nicolás Maduro.
It was a very different kind of plane heading into Venezuela’s Simón Bolívar international airport on Thursday afternoon: an American Airlines passenger plane from Miami, heralding the beginning of a strange new chapter in long toxic relations between Caracas and Washington.
“This is a historic day,” José Freig, the carrier’s vice president of international operations, said before handing a model of one of his company’s planes to Venezuelan transportation minister Jacqueline Faría.
Speaking in Spanish, John Barrett, the US chargé d’affaires in Venezuela, hailed a “historic milestone”: “We are witnessing the rebuilding of our economic ties, the reopening of Venezuela to global trade, and the reconnection of our peoples.”
Barrett called the new flight a “direct result” of Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s three-phase plan for post-Maduro Venezuela: Stabilize Venezuela, revive its moribund economy and eventually secure a political transition to democracy. “We’re just getting started,” Barrett told dozens of journalists gathered on the runway before Flight 3599 touched down at 1:15 p.m. local time.
“This country wants to connect to the world, and it is a great pleasure for us to open its doors to the whole world once again,” Faria said.
The airport has long been a symbol of Venezuela’s devastating migration crisis: Millions have fled abroad due to the country’s economic collapse and political repression under Maduro; Foreign journalists and Venezuelan activists were frequently deported or interrogated as they attempted to enter or leave the increasingly authoritarian state.
But on Thursday, as the US plane approached Venezuela’s northern coast and Venezuelan passengers lined up for the return flight, the mood was much lighter.
A Venezuelan saxophonist celebrated the moment with muzak renditions of Frank Sinatra’s New York, New York, Bill Wither’s Ain’t No Sunshine and Hotel California by the Eagles. Top Venezuelan diplomat Oliver Blanco said: “We are writing a new chapter in living together [and] Economic opening.”
Félix Plasencia, Venezuela’s top diplomat to the United States and former ambassador to London, told reporters: “We are excited to have you here for this first flight… and it should be the first of many flights.”
The new route will make travel between the United States and Venezuela easier, said Eloy Montenegro, a 71-year-old civil engineer flying to Miami, as he prepared to check in.
Regarding the deterioration of relations between the two countries for years, Montenegro said: “This should never have happened, but it did. And now things are much better.”
“But that’s politics and it’s none of my business,” he added diplomatically, before moving past an arch of red, blue and white balloons towards the check-in desk.
The last US commercial flight from Caracas was in March 2019; Relations have collapsed amid Trump’s effort to remove Maduro from power with a campaign of maximum pressure and threats. Other U.S. airlines had already grounded flights as a result of the political and social unrest sweeping Venezuela amid one of the world’s worst economic collapses outside the war zone.
The new partnership between the White House and its longstanding anti-imperialist foes in Caracas represents a once-improbable return to the diplomatic handbrake.
Since Maduro’s capture, his vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, came to power with Trump’s blessing and has overseen a series of major economic concessions spanning Venezuela’s oil and mining industries.
Trump has repeatedly praised the actions of Rodríguez, whom he warned would face a worse fate than Maduro if he refused to toe the line.
John Feeley, the senior former U.S. diplomat to Latin America and ambassador to Panama, said of Venezuela’s highly unusual new relationship with the United States: “I see it as a viceroyalty.” “Delcy is a powerful king-like figure who extracts rent from overseas territories and is the person in charge of ensuring that the king or the crown, or in this case Washington, gets his due.”
Marco Rubio has called for the restoration of diplomatic ties that were severed in early 2019.
Many people doubt that the third phase of the plan (the political transition towards democracy) will occur; The Rodriguez administration is apparently in no rush to give up power or call new elections. “This is not the time for an election,” Diosdado Cabello, the powerful interior minister, said on the eve of the plane’s arrival.
Feeley, who resigned as secretary of state during Trump’s first term, did not completely rule out that U.S. intervention in Venezuela, after years of economic chaos, international isolation and increasingly autocratic rule, could ultimately benefit that country’s people.
“We can never predict the future with any certainty, and I … do not want to preclude the possibility that this unconstitutional and illegal action by the United States may still not result in a net positive outcome for democracy for the Venezuelan people. I want to believe that it can,” Feeley said.
“[But] I am pessimistic because of the history of the Trump team and Donald Trump himself and their attitudes towards democracy. If Donald Trump is an autocratic style president in the United States, what makes him conclude that he would promote democracy in another country?
