Venezuela restores Cardinal Porras’ passport

Several diplomatic delegations had pressured the regime to restore the passport, sources told The Pillar.

Cardinal Baltazar Porras obtained a new passport Friday, a month and a half after the Venezuelan regime cancelled his passport and barred him from leaving the country.

Cardinal Porras stands with his new passport on Jan. 30, 2026. Credit: Instagram

Porras, the archbishop emeritus of Caracas, was barred from leaving the country on Dec. 10 after he repeatedly called for the release of political prisoners in Venezuela and advocated for human rights in the country.

On Friday, Porras posted a picture on his Instagram account which read, “Today again with my passport after complying with regular procedures as a citizen.”

The return of Porras’ passport had come up in conversations between several diplomatic delegations and the Vatican secretariat of state in recent weeks, various diplomatic and Caracas sources told The Pillar.

Sources said several diplomatic delegations in Venezuela had pressured the regime to allow Porras to travel abroad again as a gesture of goodwill.

Porras had spent decades being threatened by the Venezuelan regime. However, pressure increased with the canonization of the first two Venezuelan saints last October, when Porras said during a conference in Rome that the situation in Venezuela is “morally unacceptable.”

Later in October, Porras said he was barred from travelling to Isnotú, the hometown of one of the new Venezuelan saints, where he was scheduled to celebrate Mass.

The cardinal said Venezuelan authorities prevented him from boarding his flight in Caracas. When he boarded a private flight, he said, the pilot was forced to land in a different city because authorities said the destination airport was closed due to poor weather conditions.

Porras said he decided to continue the last leg of the trip by land, but members of the armed forces prevented him from doing so, forcing him instead to return to Caracas.

Then, on Dec. 10, Porras went to the Simón Bolívar International Airport near Caracas to board a flight to Madrid. He was expected to take part in a ceremony at which he would be appointed Protector of the Military and Hospitaller Order of Saint Lazarus of Jerusalem.

“Police at the airport detained him for two hours, threatened him, and even brought the drug detection dogs to check him,” a source close to Porras told The Pillar back in December.

“They annulled his Venezuelan passport, and didn’t allow him to board the flight despite the fact that he also has a Vatican passport. Authorities say you have to leave the country with a Venezuelan passport if you’re a Venezuelan national with a second nationality, but his passport was annulled on the spot, so he couldn’t leave,” the source added.

In a statement sent out to Venezuelan bishops and obtained by The Pillar, Porras said that a Venezuelan official informed him in the airport that he appeared as “deceased” in the passport system.

Porras said that he was forced to sign a document saying that he was banned from traveling due to “non-compliance with travel regulations” and was threatened with arrest after asking to take a picture of the document.

The restoration of Porras’ passport comes four weeks after the U.S. capture of former dictator Nicolás Maduro.

The United States has said - and most Latin American countries expect - that Venezuela will make a transition to democracy.

Since Maduro’s capture, the Venezuelan regime has released more than 200 political prisoners, while university students have held small-scale protests without being violently repressed — something unseen in the past 27 years.

In recent weeks, a handful of politicians and activists have emerged from hiding, while some television channels have cautiously begun to shed the self-censorship imposed on them in recent years.

Pope Leo XIV also received Nobel peace prize award winner and opposition leader María Corina Machado in a private audience on Jan. 12, something that had not happened under his predecessor.