MIAMI - During a White House cabinet meeting on Thursday, President Trump announced plans to reopen “all commercial airspace” over Venezuela, also adding that U.S. citizens will be able to visit the South American pariah state and will be safe from persecution and reprisals at the hands of the Venezuelan government.
The remarks come almost one month after a U.S. assault on the Venezuelan capital, where special forces operators conducted a nighttime raid into a military compound in Caracas, capturing the now deposed dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and extraditing the pair to New York City on trafficking and conspiracy charges.
Relations between the administration in Washington and the interim government of Delcy Rodríguez have since cooled following the operation that resulted in the deaths of dozens of Cuban and Venezuelan security personnel tasked with protecting Maduro.
Rodríguez, 56, is now cornered between having to satisfy the more hardline Chavista elements of the de facto Venezuelan regime and bowing to the demands of her benefactors in Washington, who, according to Rodríguez, gave her and the second-in-command, Minister of the Interior Diosdado Cabello, an ultimatum of 15 minutes to comply with U.S. demands post-Maduro, “or they would kill us.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, when speaking before a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, defended the work of the administration’s cooperation with the interim government of Delcy Rodríguez. Rubio highlighted to members the necessity of providing ”short-term stability” in Venezuela following the fall of Maduro in an effort to avoid a drawn-out “civil war” in the country, risking competing elements of the left-over Maduro regime vie for power in MiraFlores, Venezuela’s presidential palace in Caracas.
Rubio laid out the landscape for the transition, noting that following the “Stability Phase” of the U.S. plan to transition the country to more democratic governance comes the “Recovery Phase”, which, according to the administration in Washington, will allow U.S. and Western companies and private investors to enter the Venezuelan market; restructure the ailing P.D.V.S.A. (Venezuela’s state-run oil company); gradually move Venezuela away from Chinese and Russian dependence; and turn around a crippled economy that has helped to turn almost eight million Venezuelan citizens into migrants who were forced to flee their country and find refuge elsewhere.
Return of U.S. Airlines
American Airlines announced on Thursday that it plans to resume flights to Venezuela “pending government approval and subject to security assessments.”
In November of last year, the White House ordered the closure of airspace in and around Venezuela as tensions between the two governments were heating up. Since early 2025, the Pentagon has been targeting suspected drug boats traveling through international waters in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific Oceans, killing at least 100 people. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a security notice warning all airlines and pilots to avoid Venezuelan airspace, citing a “worsening security situation.”
In 2017, major U.S. airlines, Delta and United Airlines, canceled all operations to Venezuela, followed by American Airlines due to worsening political instability and security concerns. In 2019, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced an “indefinite suspension” of all commercial passenger flights between the U.S. and Venezuela.
If the U.S. government approves a resumption of U.S. flights to Venezuela, American Airlines will be the first U.S. company to move ahead with plans to reconnect flights with the South American nation after the fall of Nicolás Maduro.
