The US’s New Approach to Venezuela Is Starting to Bear Fruit

On a Saturday morning in late November, a top deputy to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and a leader of a group of opposition parties met at a hotel in Mexico City to announce they’d reached a deal to unlock billions of dollars in frozen funds to rebuild the country’s crumbling infrastructure. The breakthrough agreement between bitter rivals was promptly blessed by the administration of President Joe Biden, which eased some sanctions hours later, allowing US driller Chevron Corp. to pump more oil in the country.

It was the most tangible evidence yet that Washington and its allies in Venezuela have changed course when it comes to Maduro, an authoritarian leader so despised only a few years ago that the Trump administration put a $15 million reward out for his arrest and slapped sanctions on his administration.