Cardinal Baltazar Porras, emeritus archbishop of Caracas, has recovered his Venezuelan passport one and a half months after the regime annulled it and prevented him from leaving the country. The restitution of the document took place last Friday, according to The Pillar, after weeks of negotiations and diplomatic pressures.
Passport withdrawal after denouncing human rights violations
Cardinal Porras was prevented from leaving Venezuela on December 10, after he had publicly demanded the release of political prisoners and denounced the human rights situation in the country. Since then, Venezuelan authorities would have prohibited him from traveling abroad.
The cardinal himself confirmed the return of the passport through a post on his Instagram account, in which he wrote: “Today again with my passport, after complying with the regular procedures as a citizen”.
Diplomatic pressures and negotiations with the Holy See
According to various diplomatic sources and from Caracas cited by The Pillar, the cardinal’s situation was addressed in conversations between several diplomatic delegations and the Vatican Secretariat of State in recent weeks. The sources assure that various foreign representations pressured the Venezuelan regime to allow Porras to travel again as a gesture of goodwill.
Although the cardinal has been the object of threats for decades, the pressure on him intensified after the canonization of the first two Venezuelan saints, last October. During an event in Rome, Porras then described the country’s situation as “morally unacceptable”.
Previous restrictions on his pastoral travels
After those statements, Venezuelan authorities prevented him from traveling to Isnotú, the birthplace of one of the new saints, where he was scheduled to celebrate a Mass. According to the cardinal himself, he was initially blocked at Caracas airport and, later, forced to return to the capital after trying to continue the journey by land.
On December 10, when he was about to fly to Madrid to participate in an event where he was to be named Protector of the Military and Hospitaller Order of Saint Lazarus of Jerusalem, he was detained for two hours at Simón Bolívar International Airport. According to a source close to him cited by The Pillar, he was threatened, subjected to checks with drug-sniffing dogs, and his passport was annulled on the spot.
In a statement addressed to the Venezuelan bishops, Porras stated that an official informed him that he appeared as “deceased” in the passport system. He also denounced that he was forced to sign a document justifying the travel ban for an alleged non-compliance with regulations and that he was threatened with arrest.
A gesture in a changing political context
The return of the passport comes four weeks after the capture of former dictator Nicolás Maduro by the United States. Since then, the Venezuelan regime has released more than 200 political prisoners and student protests have been recorded without violent repression, something unusual in recent decades.
In addition, some political leaders and activists have come out of hiding and certain media outlets have begun to reduce self-censorship. In this new context, Pope Leo XIV received opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado in a private audience on January 12, an unprecedented gesture during the previous pontificate.