Venezuela leader’s first foreign trip abruptly canceled

Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodriguez delivers a speech during a presidential address to Parliament at the National Assembly in Caracas on January 15, 2026. US President Donald Trump is scheduled to meet on January 15 with Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, whose pro-democracy movement he has sidelined since toppling her country’s leader, and whose Nobel Peace Prize he openly envies. (Photo by Federico PARRA / AFP)

The first foreign visit of Venezuela’s US-backed interim leader since taking power was abruptly canceled on Thursday, just hours before she was due to arrive in Colombia.

Delcy Rodriguez Rodriguez was due to travel to the border town of Cucuta on Friday for a summit with Colombian President Gustavo Petro.

“Everything is canceled,” a Colombian foreign ministry source told AFP.

An AFP reporter in Cucuta saw a stage that was erected for the event being dismantled.

It was not immediately clear why the trip had been abandoned.

Rodriguez took power in January when her former boss, Nicolas Maduro, was captured by US forces and spirited to the United States to face trial.

Since then, she has faced down anti-American hardliners to embark on a series of US-backed reforms.

She has opened Venezuela’s vast oil industry to foreign investment, sacked officials suspected of corruption, released scores of political prisoners, and, according to Bogota, begun pushing Colombian rebels back across the border.

Cucuta, which lies in a border area, is home to numerous drug-running left-wing guerrilla groups — which Colombia has accused Venezuela of funding and protecting.

The meeting was to mark a thaw in relations between the two South American neighbors.

In a sign of how abruptly the meeting was canceled, US President Donald Trump had wished Petro luck for the meeting during a call on Thursday.

Vicente Torrijos, a former Colombian presidential advisor on relations with Venezuela, said Trump had likely pressed for the meeting to “turn former adversaries into functional allies.”

Colombia did not recognize the legitimacy of elections that returned Rodriguez’s allies to power in 2024.

AFP