Maduro's regime announces it is once again accepting repatriations from the US to Venezuela

Venezuela agreed Saturday to resume flights of deportees by the United States, according to AFP. These flights were suspended a month ago. Since then, both governments have been pointing fingers at each other for boycotting the deportation agreement reached in January.

"We have agreed to resume with the U.S. government the repatriation of Venezuelan migrants with an initial flight tomorrow, Sunday, March 23," said the president of the National Assembly and chief negotiator of the Venezuelan government, Jorge Rodriguez, in a statement picked up by AFP.

The announcement comes a week after the deportation of 238 Venezuelans to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a maximum security prison in El Salvador, an event that President Nicolás Maduro called a kidnapping.

This same Thursday, it was learned that the White House had requested the intervention of Marco Rubio in the negotiations to unblock the halt in deportations to Venezuela. Also on Thursday, a plane arrived from Mexico to Caracas, however it contained 311 Venezuelan immigrants that had been stranded in Mexico. They never entered the United States and therefore had no connection to the repatriation agreements between the United States and Venezuela.

The pace of the deportations has been questioned by the federal government, and as retaliation, it revoked the license that allowed the U.S. oil company Chevron to operate in Venezuela.

Caracas, meanwhile, claimed Thursday that the U.S. State Department was "blocking" repatriation flights to the country.

Both countries broke diplomatic relations in 2019 during the first Trump administration, which imposed an oil embargo after considering Maduro's first reelection in May 2018 fraudulent.

Washington also did not recognize Maduro's proclamation for a third term after elections held last July with few guarantees and without showing the electoral records in a transparent manner.

The United States is accusing Venezuelans that were sent to El Salvador of belonging to the fearsome Tren de Aragua gang that emerged in Venezuela and was declared a terrorist organization by Trump.