(MENAFN- The Rio Times) Just hours after headlines suggested Colombia was backing a negotiated exit for Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro, Bogotá has moved to deny it.

A late-night communiqué from the Foreign Ministry insists that reports of Colombian support for a“safe exit” plan for Maduro“do not correspond” to what Foreign Minister Rosa Yolanda Villavicencio said in a recent interview, and stresses that Colombia does not interfere in Venezuela's internal affairs.

The clarification came after Bloomberg and several Colombian outlets reported that Villavicencio, speaking in Madrid, considered a transition plan“the healthiest option” to avoid a United States military intervention.

In that interview, she described a scenario in which Maduro could hand power to a transitional government tasked with organizing new elections, in exchange for guarantees that he would not go to prison.

Colombian media and social networks amplified her comments, portraying them as an official endorsement of a negotiated exit.



Under pressure, the Foreign Ministry now says those stories took her words out of context.
Colombia Walks Back Support For Maduro Exit Plan As Venezuela Tensions Rise
The statement reaffirms respect for Venezuelan sovereignty and warns that the long, complicated relationship between the two countries“cannot be damaged” by misreported or“decontextualized” information.

Pro-government voices in Caracas and Colombia's own left-wing base had already accused critics of trying to use Villavicencio's remarks to undermine President Gustavo Petro's policy of non-intervention.

All this is playing out against a dangerous backdrop. The Trump administration has deployed a large naval force to the Caribbean and launched repeated airstrikes on boats it labels drug-trafficking vessels, killing dozens of people in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.

Washington is openly debating whether to expand those operations into Venezuelan territory. Any escalation could trigger a new wave of refugees from a country that has already seen nearly 8 million people flee, with close to 3 million now in Colombia.

In simple terms, Colombia is trying to walk a tightrope: signalling that a peaceful transition in Venezuela would be welcome, while publicly denying that it is engineering Maduro's exit.

For the region, the stakes are enormous: the difference between a messy war on one side of the border, or a long and fragile diplomatic push for change.

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