Washington has stepped on the accelerator to renew Venezuela’s Supreme Tribunal. It is its first major democratizing initiative in the country and the main task of the negotiation table between the 2015 National Assembly and the government of Delcy Rodríguez, which meets again this Wednesday. The goal is to have a new court by December, but beyond the outline the United States published last week, nothing is as yet known about the timetables, the profiles sought, the procedures to challenge appointments and how civil society will take part in a process crucial to a country that is supposedly moving toward a democratic transition.

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The government of acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez has handed Álvaro Pulido — Álex Saab’s Colombian-born associate who had been held in Caracas since 2023 — over to the United States. The transfer was announced Sunday on X by U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, while the Venezuelan government has remained silent on the case.

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A military contingent blocked the bridge over Lake Maracaibo on Monday in the Venezuelan oil capital to prevent a workers’ protest from closing the road. In Guayana, in front of the state-run basic industries, workers erected a barricade to demand better wages. In Caracas, a group protested for the release of political prisoners after news emerged of a death in the women’s prison run by the National Institute for Women’s Guidance (INOF). Over the weekend people took to the streets to demand a date for elections and the return of opposition leader María Corina Machado. Almost every night during a sweltering September, in inland cities such as Maracay, Guanare, Barinas, Valencia, and Maracaibo, people have expressed on the streets their frustration over blackouts that are increasingly prolonged, lasting up to 10 or 12 hours a day.

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The heirs of Oswaldo Cisneros, once one of Venezuela’s richest men, received unusual news last April: strangers were touring their oil fields in the Orinoco Belt. On paper, they remained the legitimate operators of the assets, but it soon became clear that, even as those visits took place in plain sight, a plan was being put in motion to take the fields away from them.

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