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The teams of María Corina Machado and Marco Rubio began formal negotiations in Chicago this Monday to define the dates, phases, and key players of the democratic transition in Venezuela, as sources involved in the process revealed to El Español.
Meetings are held at one of the main regional offices of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in that city in the state of Illinois, the same agency handling the charges against Nicolás Maduro in the federal court of New York, where the former dictator faces charges of narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine following his capture on January 3, 2026, at Fort Tiuna in Caracas.
The negotiating team consists of 12 members —three women and nine men— organized into three working groups with specific functions: Control, Finance, and Political and Social Action.
The Finance Committee will be led by Machado herself, the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner and the most prominent figure of the Venezuelan opposition in the last two decades.
The Control Board is in the hands of Ismael García, the historic union leader who started in chavismo and has been building legal cases against the regime for years. Machado herself described him in a recent interview as someone who "knows the monster from the inside".
The Political and Social Action group is led by a high-ranking U.S. official whose identity has yet to be revealed, while Omar González heads the political component and Carlos Blanco serves as the coordinator among the three groups.
Blanco, an economist and former minister for State Reform during the second term of Carlos Andrés Pérez, is a professor at Boston University and one of the closest strategic advisors to Machado. A source close to him describes him as "a key figure, practically the ideologue of Machado."
The three committees will not work in parallel but rather in a coordinated manner, and the process also includes meetings with financial entities and large companies to ensure the country's economic stability during the transition.
The most controversial point of the process is the possibility of a partial amnesty for certain regime actors in exchange for their collaboration in the transition, an issue that generates resistance within the opposition itself.
Machado left Madrid this Monday with a roadmap in hand after meeting with Alberto Núñez Feijóo and Santiago Abascal, and after being honored by the City Council and the Community of Madrid.
He did not meet with the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, whose position on Venezuela, through the figure of former President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, has shifted towards less confrontational stances with chavismo.
Rubio acts under the direct mandate of Donald Trump and has outlined a three-phase transition plan: stabilization, economic recovery and full democratic transition with free elections before the end of 2026.
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