The Diplomat
Gladys Gutiérrez Alvarado, former president of the Supreme Court of Justice of Venezuela, will foreseeably be the new ambassador of that country in Spain, to fill the vacancy left by the departure of Coromoto Godoy, appointed at the end of February as vice minister of Foreign Affairs for Europe.
The name of Gladys Gutiérrez Alvarado to take charge of the Embassy in Madrid has been proposed by the Permanent Commission on Foreign Policy, Sovereignty and Integration of the National Assembly of Venezuela and must be approved by the plenary session of the legislative chamber itself, something for which It is hoped there will be no problem.
Gladys Gutiérrez Alvarado was already the ambassador of Venezuela in Spain between 2002 and 2005, after having been consul general in Madrid for some time.
In 2006, Hugo Chávez, of whom she had been one of the defenders in the trial to which he was subjected after the frustrated coup d’état of 1992, appointed her attorney general of the Bolivarian Republic. At the end of 2010 she became a member of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice.
In 2013, after the death of Chávez, Nicolás Maduro appointed her president of the Supreme Court, a position she held until 2017. In 2020 and 2021 she was principal rector of the National Electoral Council and in 2022 she was again named president of the Supreme Court, a position in which which has been there until last January.
Once the Spanish authorities grant the required approval for his appointment, Gutiérrez Alvarado will take charge of the Embassy, where her predecessor has been less than a year as ambassador, after she began to exercise her duties in December 2022, as chargé d’affaires.
Her arrival in the Spanish capital -and at the same time the elevation of Spain’s charge d’affaires in Venezuela, Ramón Santos, to the rank of ambassador- marked the thaw in relations between Madrid and Caracas, after a time of tensions. bilateral. This tension became visible with the departure in November 2020 of the Spanish ambassador to Venezuela, Jesús Silva, to show disagreement with some actions of the Bolivarian regime.