And it advances without the opposition’s widely popular leader and 2025 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, María Corina Machado, at the table. The two agreed on an agenda with “clear and verifiable goals” and had their first face-to-face this Thursday in Caracas. Everything suggests Washington is laying the groundwork for phase three – transition – of its Venezuela roadmap: a stage focused on negotiating the restoration of political institutions. Distrust in the Chavista-controlled institutions has stalled the massive investments on Venezuela’s oil sector promised by Trump earlier this year. It is a hybrid mechanism to solve three problems at once: the deficit of institutional representation, the tangle of the country’s external assets, and the runway to a future electoral transition to reestablish Venezuela’s democracy.