Venezuelan Cardinal Baltazar Porras detained, passport cancelled at airport as Maduro regime intensifies pressure on outspoken critic of government abuses.
Newsroom (10/12/2025 Gaudium Press ) Cardinal Baltazar Porras, Archbishop Emeritus of Caracas and one of the Venezuelan regime’s most persistent clerical critics, was detained for two hours by police at Simón Bolívar International Airport on Wednesday and informed that his Venezuelan passport had been annulled on the spot, effectively banning him from leaving the country.
The cardinal had arrived at the airport to board a flight to Madrid, where he was scheduled to be installed as Protector of the Military and Hospitaller Order of Saint Lazarus of Jerusalem. Despite presenting both his Venezuelan and Vatican passports, authorities refused to allow him to travel.
“Earlier today, 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 Cardinal Porras told The Pillar. “They annulled his Venezuelan passport, and didn’t allow him to board the flight despite the fact that he also has a Vatican passport.” The source added that Venezuelan officials insist a citizen holding dual nationality must exit the country on a Venezuelan document, yet cancelled that same document during the incident.
During the detention, Porras’s phone was confiscated and he was prevented from contacting anyone. Authorities verbally notified him that he is now formally prohibited from leaving Venezuela until further notice.
The incident marks the latest in a series of intensifying measures against the 81-year-old cardinal since October, when he publicly described the situation in Venezuela as “morally unacceptable” during a Rome conference ahead of the canonization of the country’s first two saints, St. José Gregorio Hernández and St. Carmen Rendiles.
Pressure on Porras had already escalated in the weeks surrounding the October 19 canonization ceremony. Days before the event, Venezuela’s bishops issued a pastoral letter demanding the release of more than 800 political prisoners. At an October 17 commemoration in Rome, Porras denounced growing poverty, militarized governance, corruption, the erosion of institutional independence, and the disregard for the popular will.
President Nicolás Maduro responded on October 21 by accusing the cardinal of “conspiring” to sabotage Hernández’s canonization and falsely claiming that Pope Francis had been unaware of the new saint until Maduro himself informed him.
A planned Mass of Thanksgiving in Caracas, expected to draw over 50,000 faithful a week after the canonizations, was abruptly cancelled. While the Archdiocese cited space and security concerns, sources told The Pillar the real reason was intelligence reports that the regime intended to flood the event with government supporters and turn it into a pro-Maduro rally.
On October 26, Porras was prevented from traveling to Isnotú, Hernández’s birthplace, for the saint’s feast-day Mass. After being blocked from a commercial flight to nearby Valera, he arranged a private aircraft, only for authorities to force the pilot to land elsewhere, citing fabricated weather closures. When the cardinal attempted to complete the journey by road, armed forces turned him back to the capital.
The Vatican itself broke with its customary diplomatic reserve in the days following the canonizations. During an October 20 thanksgiving Mass attended by the Venezuelan government’s official delegation, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Holy See’s Secretary of State, delivered an unusually direct rebuke, urging authorities to “listen to the words of the Lord, who calls you to open unjust prisons, to break the chains of oppression, to set the oppressed free, to break all chains.”
Wednesday’s airport detention and passport annulment represent the most concrete restriction yet imposed on Cardinal Porras, widely regarded as the Venezuelan hierarchy’s most outspoken voice against the Maduro government’s human-rights record and disputed 2024 electoral process. As of publication, neither the Venezuelan government nor the Archdiocese of Caracas has issued an official statement on the incident.
- Raju Hasmukh with files from The Pillar
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