The Briefing:
- Venezuela's telecom regulator Conatel ordered internet providers to restore access to at least 10 news portals, among them El Pitazo, Efecto Cocuyo, Runrunes, Crónica Uno, Caraota Digital, El Estímulo, Monitoreamos, AlbertoNews, Revista Semana and the Spanish agency EFE.
- Roughly 200 domains stay blocked, about 90 of them belonging to news organizations, and most restrictions have not moved at all.
- Network measurements published by Espacio Público show El Nacional, La Patilla, TalCual, VPItv, NTN24, Armando.info and IPYS Venezuela still failing to load — in three cases worse than before.
Venezuelans who spent years hitting a blank screen where a news site should have been found something different on the night of Sept. 16: the page loaded. Telecommunications regulator Conatel had instructed internet providers to lift the restrictions on a first group of outlets, and by the morning of Sept. 17 the order was public.
The move landed in the middle of the second round of US-promoted negotiations between Delcy Rodríguez's interim administration and part of the opposition, which opened on Sept. 15. The session scheduled for Sept. 17 covered exactly the terrain the unblocking touches: political rights, electoral guarantees for parties and the rewriting of laws that squeeze the press.
What Actually Came Back Online
Conatel's notification covered El Pitazo, Efecto Cocuyo, Runrunes, Crónica Uno, Caraota Digital, El Estímulo, Monitoreamos, AlbertoNews, Revista Semana and EFE. Access returned unevenly across CANTV, Movistar, Digitel, Inter and Net Uno, which is why the count reported by different outlets varies: El Carabobeño counted 16 restored sites including its own, other newsrooms counted 12, and the regulator's own list came to 10.
The blackout being lifted was never uniform either. Some domains had been unreachable for close to nine years; El Carabobeño dates its own cutoff to November 2023. El Pitazo lost four separate domains over time, a pattern that forced the outlet to rebuild its audience from scratch more than once.
The Measurements Tell a Harsher Story
Espacio Público ran the numbers using data from the Open Observatory of Network Interference and the result is a split screen. Crónica Uno's failure rate fell from 66% to 8%. El Carabobeño went from 65% to 8%, Caraota Digital from 68% to 18%, Efecto Cocuyo from 62% to 20%.
Then there is the other column. VPItv still fails 71% of the time. NTN24 sits at 60%. And three outlets came out of the announcement worse than they went in: TalCual, IPYS Venezuela and Infobae all registered higher interference afterward. La Patilla and El Nacional, two of the most widely read opposition sites in the country, never came back. "The unblocking is real. But it is not universal," the organization concluded.
A Right, Not a Favor
Dinorah Figuera, the former lawmaker who leads the opposition delegation at the talks, refused to treat the decision as generosity. "This is a right in a full democracy, not a concession," she said, adding that reporting without fear should be the enforcement of the law rather than a privilege. Her delegation is pressing for the remaining domains, the repeal of speech-restricting statutes and the closure of criminal cases against journalists.
The Cases That Restoring a Domain Doesn't Close
Turning a server back on costs the state nothing. Dropping a prosecution does. La Patilla editor Rory Branker spent 11 months and 15 days in detention after his arrest in February 2025, and although he walked out on Feb. 4, 2026, prosecutors charged him the following day on five counts including treason and terrorism financing. He cannot leave the country and must report to authorities roughly every 30 days; an amnesty request was rejected in April. Reporters Without Borders called the arrangement something other than freedom.
Fourteen journalists were released in a single batch on Jan. 14, 2026, most of them under similar conditions. Beyond the press, Foro Penal counted 328 people still held for political reasons at the end of August, after eight months of staggered releases.
Why Caracas Is Handing Out Wins
Rodríguez took office on Jan. 5, 2026, two days after a US special operations raid seized Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores in Caracas. Both pleaded not guilty in Manhattan federal court; their trial is scheduled for June 1, 2027. The relationship her government built with Washington since then has been transactional and fast. The US embassy in Caracas reopened on March 30 after seven years.
In late August the White House announced century-long concessions over 17 oil fields holding an estimated 65 billion barrels, awarded to North American Blue Energy Partners. Energy Secretary Chris Wright flew to Caracas days later to sign, and Chevron committed more than $7 billion over five years on Sept. 2.
Everything Except a Date
What the interim government has not produced is an election. Trump said on Sept. 2 that Rodríguez wants one but that the country is not ready yet. The constitutional clock for an interim mandate ran out months ago without a vote being called.
Opposition leader María Corina Machado, the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, announced in May that she would run and return from exile before the end of 2026. No date has been set for either.
Ten domains came back. The other 190 are still an argument, and so is the ballot.
