Tensions continue to mark ties between Washington and Caracas, even though U.S. and Venezuelan diplomats have been engaged in talks for almost half a year, the South Amercian country's charge d'affaires in Washington told Reuters.

"It is a work in progress," said Maximilien Sánchez Arvelaiz, who leads the Venezuelan mission in the American capital ever since the United States expelled then-Ambassador Bernardo Álvarez Herrera in 2013 over President Hugo Chávez's refusal to accept the new U.S. mission chief in Caracas. "It's not like we now understand each other better," Sánchez Arvelaiz added.

Nevertheless, the diplomat told El Universal that American negotiators would travel to the Venezuelan capital in the coming weeks in an effort to reach a rapprochement leading to a new appointment of ambassadors on both sides.

But it was critical that the United States do not interfere in his country's internal affairs, the charge insisted, according to Radio Macondo. Concerns voiced by U.S. officials over the jailing of prominent opposition figures merely illustrate "a lack of knowledge about the reality in Venezuela," Sánchez Arvelaiz charged.

Relations between the two countries, which had been tense throughout the Chávez's administrations and did not improve under his embattled successor, Nicolás Maduro, further soured when the Obama administration in March declared Venezuela a threat to U.S. national security.

President Barack Obama on March 9 had issued an executive order saying that the volatile political and economic situation in Venezuela represented an "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States"; Washington imposed sanctions against seven high-ranking Venezuelan officials, prompting a furious reaction in Caracas, according to the Christian Science Monitor.

"President Barack Obama, in the name of the U.S. imperialist elite, has decided to personally take on the task of defeating my government, intervening in Venezuela, and controlling it from the (United States)," Maduro charged in response. "Obama today took the most aggressive, unjust and poisonous step that the (United States) has ever taken against Venezuela," the president added.