
Venezuela has resumed direct shipments of oil to China after U.S. sanctions sent the trade underground for more than a year, according to Refinitiv Eikon vessel-tracking data and internal documents from state company Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA).

Amid a breakdown in relations and absence of US diplomats in Venezuela, Washington has named its first ambassador for the South American country for the first time in a decade. However he will carry out his duties from the capital of neighboring Colombia, Bogotá.

Iran believes the U.S. government no longer can “control what’s happening in the world” or show other countries how to protect citizens’ rights, the Iranian foreign minister said on Thursday during a visit to ally Venezuela.

After more than six years in confinement, Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López is a free man and has been reunited with his family in Madrid. López arrived Sunday in the Spanish capital following what aides described as a whirlwind escape from the Spanish ambassador's residence in Caracas where he had been holed up since leading a failed U.S.-backed military putsch against Nicolas Maduro in April 2019.

Bolivia's former president Evo Morales has traveled to Venezuela from Argentina, where he was living in exile, according to media reports.

Prominent opposition activist Leopoldo López has abandoned the Spanish ambassador's residence in Caracas and left Venezuela after years of frustrated efforts to oust the nation's socialist president, his party said Saturday.

Venezuela plans to vaccinate citizens with Russian and Chinese coronavirus vaccines, which could arrive in the South American nation in December or January, President Nicolas Maduro said.

The resignation of the Argentine ambassador to Russia, Alicia Castro, in protest over the decision of the government of President Alberto Fernandez to condemn the Venezuelan regime for repeated human rights violations, “constitutes a dramatic turn in our foreign policy and does not differ at all with what would have been voted by ex-president Macri”.

The United Nations Human Rights Council on Tuesday extended by two years the mandate of investigators who have documented executions, disappearances, and torture in Venezuela that they say may amount to crimes against humanity.

International efforts to overthrow Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro “have worked,” Admiral Craig Faller, head of the U.S. Southern Command, said Monday but added that it will take time to get results.