At a Christmas dinner in 1998, the current Venezuelan ambassador to Colombia, Félix Plasencia, coincided with opposition politicians. He was a young and friendly boy for the party who seven years ago had begun his diplomatic career in the Foreign Ministry, in the last moments of the democratic era in Venezuela.
By then, Hugo Chávez was more than a commander of the Armed Forces because he had already led two coups, but his arrival at the Miraflores Palace was still an illusion. Those who exchanged words with him remember him as a subject who was in the administration of Rafael Caldera and who did not follow any political ideology.
But the diplomat had already had his first contact with the heads of the Venezuelan regime that he now represents before the government of Gustavo Petro. His connection to the autocracy is not Nicolás Maduro himself, but his second-in-command, Delcy Rodríguez. He met the vice president in the late 1990s when they both met at the Venezuelan Embassy in London, he as a career civil servant and she as a political attaché. There was born a friendship that took him to the bowels of Chavismo.
As a representative in the Petro Government, Plasencia will have to navigate the national politics with which he had fought during the last four years of the government of then President Iván Duque.
The first achievement of that management resulted in the total opening of the border on September 26, but the new Venezuelan ambassador in Colombia – sworn in this Wednesday – will have to take steps in binational justice cooperation and in the tensions of the countries. neighbors with the criticized management of Maduro.
the great diplomat
Félix Plasencia has a resume of titles and a passport of stamps. He graduated from the Central University of Venezuela in the early 1980s when that alma mater had the only international relations training program in the country and the high score on his exam to enter the diplomatic service put him in the forefront of the young people of that time who They entered the Foreign Ministry.
He studied in the United Kingdom, where he perfected his English and survived the transition of 1999 with the landing of Hugo Chávez at the Miraflores Palace. The Commander-in-Chief, the same one who had himself re-elected three times by modifying the Constitution and to whom Plasencia attributes Venezuela itself because for him his country is “the homeland of Bolívar and Chávez.”
Although with sporadic jumps, it could be said that he has been in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for 30 years, first as a silent adviser and then as a spokesman. His social networks reveal the low profile he had in the first years of his career because he only reactivated his accounts in 2019.
He was in the Foreign Ministry of Nicolás Maduro, he worked in that office when Delcy Rodríguez —who is the current vice president— assumed the portfolio and in the Jorge Arreaza era he remained in the service. He is a man who moves in the bowels of Chavismo. What’s more: he relieved his “companion in struggle”, Arreaza, in the Foreign Ministry.
As foreign minister, he was the one who granted diplomatic status to Maduro’s figurehead, Álex Saab, when the businessman from Barranquilla was in the process of being extradited to the United States for eight charges related to money laundering of Venezuelan state resources for the CLAP boxes.
Despite being the most prepared diplomatic career official in the regime, he served as foreign minister for nine months because Maduro decided to appoint Carlos Fárias, a communist militant and son of a student leader from the 60s, with whom he needed to wink. that Marxism was at the top of his regime.
From his short stint in that seat, it is also said that he tried to apply internal changes that did not permeate the institution and that ended up leading to his departure. In the end, Plasencia is an internationalist who has been dressed as a Chavista for two decades and several months to represent a regime that flouts international standards on global platforms.
The one with the Rodriguez
Being close to Delcy —the official who was elected in a contest that did not recognize the opposition— ended up connected with his brother Jorge Rodríguez, the president of the National Assembly of Venezuela .
Plasencia’s connection with the Rodríguez family was strengthened when he protected Delcy in London during the institutional crisis of April 2001, the reaffirmation of a close friendship that ended up leading him to be his deputy minister in 2016.
The diplomacy of Venezuela is the diplomacy of Maduro: the leader of the regime was Chavez’s chancellor for seven years, jumped to the vice presidency and from there to Miraflores, ignoring the constitutional mandate to call elections without him being a ballot candidate. Hence, Plasencia applies the formula of receiving a designation with “chavista and revolutionary commitment.”
An official from the Miraflores Palace described him as a “man dedicated to diplomacy, kind and very cultured.” In the last three years he was in charge of strengthening Venezuela’s relations with the multipolar world that XXI Century Socialism speaks of, a mission that took him to Cuba and China on multiple occasions and also made his landings in Qatar, Nicaragua, Jordan, Kuwait, Russia, Barbados and Mozambique.
Félix Plasencia has portraits with dictator Daniel Ortega; Chinese President Xi Jinping and former Bolivian President Evo Morales. He was the architect of the landing of Russian and Chinese troops in Venezuelan territory, a military incursion that led Colombia to put radars on the border, but his name only began to be reviewed when he was Minister of Tourism.
When he led that portfolio in January 2020, he was on the plane that took Delcy Rodríguez to the Madrid airport in Spain. She, however, did not get off the aircraft because the sanctions against her for the human rights violations perpetrated by the regime prevent her from stepping on European Union territory. He set foot on Spanish soil in her representation to meet with delegates from Pedro Sánchez.
Plasencia is Maduro’s emissary to Colombia, the Rodríguez’s messenger in a regime of Chavista personalisms that distribute their quotas in a questioned government with which Gustavo Petro has already begun to dialogue.