MIAMI — At the exact moment seven years ago that the United States lowered its flag over its embassy in Caracas and severed diplomatic relations with Venezuela, Chargé d’Affaires Laura Dogu stood in the same compound Saturday morning and raised it again.
“This morning, on March 14, 2026, at the same time, my team and I raised the American flag—exactly seven years after it was lowered,” Dogu wrote in a post on the embassy’s official social media channels. “A new era for U.S.-Venezuela relations has begun. Onward with Venezuela.”
The flag was raised ten days after the formal restoration of diplomatic relations between Washington and Caracas—a process set in motion by the U.S. military operation that captured former President Nicolás Maduro in January and installed acting President Delcy Rodríguez, who has maintained open channels with the Trump administration since taking office.
The moment drew immediate and emotional reactions from Caracas residents who gathered outside the embassy compound. “It’s a good thing, really, what a joy,” said Caracas resident Luz Verónica López. “Other countries must come back too because that’s what we need—progress, to move forward with good relations with the rest of the world, as it should be.”
Alessandro Di Benedetto, another Caracas resident who witnessed the flag-raising, said: “I found several people here surprised and happy because today they raised the U.S. flag at the embassy. This is positive—this is another step.”
The embassy’s reopening is the most visible symbol yet of a bilateral relationship that has transformed at an extraordinary pace since January 3. In the ten weeks since Maduro’s removal, the two countries have signed two oil deals worth more than $1 billion, a gold supply agreement with commodity trader Trafigura, and a framework for U.S. energy companies to begin exploring Venezuela’s oil sector.
Rodríguez signed into law a reform bill this week that will pave the way for increased privatization of Venezuela’s nationalized oil sector—a direct concession to Washington’s demand for access to the country’s reserves, the largest in the world.
On Friday, Rodríguez also announced an amnesty bill aimed at releasing hundreds of political prisoners and said she would shut down El Helicoide—one of Venezuela’s most notorious secret service detention centers in Caracas—to be replaced with a sports and cultural center in the nation’s capital.
The back-to-back concessions on the eve of the flag-raising suggest Caracas is moving deliberately to demonstrate good faith ahead of what both sides describe as a still-fragile normalization process.
The Trump administration has openly discussed controlling Venezuela’s resources “indefinitely.”
“We’re going to run it, essentially,” Trump said of Venezuela in his January 3 speech. Proceeds from U.S.-led oil sales are currently deposited in a U.S.-controlled bank account, to be divided between the two countries—a financial arrangement that critics describe as coercive but that the Rodríguez government has accepted as the price of normalization.
Despite the ceremony and the optimism surrounding the flag-raising, large segments of Venezuelan society and the political establishment remain critical of Trump, his decision to forcefully remove Maduro from office, and growing American influence in the country’s oil industry.
For Miami’s Venezuelan diaspora community—which has lived through twenty years of exile, economic ruin, and political despair—Saturday’s flag-raising is a photograph that many believed they would never see.
Whether it represents the beginning of a genuine democratic transition or a new form of foreign economic dependency is the question Venezuela will spend the next decade answering.
Sociedad Media will continue to cover the ongoing political transformation in Venezuela post-Maduro. For any stories or general inquiries, please contact the outlet via info@sociedadmedia.com
From Maduro’s Fixer to Washington’s Witness: Alex Saab Faces His Second Extradition to the United States
MIAMI — The Colombian-born businessman who once served as Nicolás Maduro’s most powerful financial operator—pardoned by President Biden in 2023, celebrated as a national hero in Caracas, and elevated to minister by the regime he had served for a decade—is now sitting in a Venezuelan intelligence cell waiting to be handed over to the United States for the second time.
Alex Saab, a once-powerful financial fixer for former Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, who vanished from public view last month, is likely to be extradited soon to the United States following intense negotiations between U.S. officials, and Venezuela’s interim government led by Delcy Rodríguez, according to sources familiar with discussions who spoke to the Miami Herald.
Saab was captured on February 4 in a joint 2 a.m. operation between Venezuela’s Bolivarian National Intelligence Service and the FBI—just weeks after Rodríguez removed him from his post as minister of industry and national production following Maduro’s capture.
Alongside Saab, Venezuelan media magnate and Globovisión owner Raúl Gorrín Belisario was also apprehended.
Saab’s trajectory is one of the most extraordinary in modern Latin American political history. Born in Barranquilla in 1971 of Lebanese descent, he built a business network with the Chavismo regime in the early 2000s, primarily through the CLAP food subsidy program—widely criticized for diverting public funds—and was later appointed as a “special Venezuelan envoy” for diplomatic and humanitarian efforts, a status Caracas used to claim diplomatic immunity on his behalf.
Saab was first arrested in Cape Verde in June 2020 during a fuel stop while flying from Venezuela to Iran, held for more than three years in U.S. custody on bribery charges, and released in December 2023 when President Biden granted him clemency as part of a prisoner exchange with the Maduro government.
Saab returned to Venezuela to a hero’s welcome—Maduro praised his loyalty to the socialist revolution and feted him publicly—before appointing him industry minister.
Saab’s extradition has emerged as a central bargaining chip in the broader diplomatic negotiations between Washington and Caracas. Sources told the Miami Herald that the regime made it known they would be willing to hand over Saab if the United States granted certain concessions, an arrangement that places his extradition squarely within the larger political and economic deal-making framework reshaping U.S.-Venezuela relations.
U.S. prosecutors have continued to pursue investigations involving Saab beyond the original money-laundering case — particularly allegations tied to Venezuela’s CLAP food program. His potential testimony carries enormous consequences: prosecutors believe Saab possesses privileged information about the financial mechanisms that allowed the Chavista government to move resources abroad despite international sanctions, and could provide critical evidence in the ongoing prosecutions of Maduro himself and his wife, Cilia Flores, who face criminal charges in New York.
His case directly tests President Trump’s sway over Venezuela’s new rulers—a relationship that has moved fast but remains fragile, with the Rodríguez government navigating between cooperation with Washington and maintaining internal credibility with factions of Venezuela’s armed forces that benefited from the Maduro-era corruption networks Saab helped operate.
No official confirmation of a final extradition date has been issued by either government.
Saab’s lawyer has denied the arrest as “fake news”—a claim contradicted by U.S. law enforcement officials, Reuters, and multiple corroborating reports from Colombian and Venezuelan media.
A U.S. official confirmed to Reuters that Saab is expected to be extradited to the U.S. in the coming days. When that transfer is completed, it will mark one of the most consequential judicial developments in the Venezuela transition period—and the beginning of a legal process that could expose the inner financial architecture of two decades of Chavismo to an American federal courtroom.
