CIA chief visits Maduro successor as Machado vows to become Venezuela’s president | Venezuela
The CIA chief, whose agents are said to have played a key role in kidnapping Nicolás Maduro, flew to Venezuela to meet the successor of sidelined opposition leader María Corina Machado and vowed to become the country’s first elected female president.
Machado’s comments were published Friday, a day after he handed over his Nobel peace prize medal to Donald Trump in recognition of what he described as a principled and decisive move against Maduro, whom US special forces kidnapped on January 3.
The conservative politician predicted freedom would come to South America after years of economic turmoil and authoritarianism under Maduro. “And I believe that when the time is right, I will be elected president of Venezuela, the first female president of Venezuela.” said Fox News.
Despite Machado’s optimism, experts say Trump has marginalized the opposition movement as his pre-dawn attack on Caracas sparks hopes for imminent democratic change.
Instead of bringing to power Machado, whose opposition movement is believed to have defeated Maduro in the 2024 presidential election, Trump anointed Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, calling him “a great person.” Rodríguez rules as acting president with the support of other key Maduro allies, including feared interior minister Diosdado Cabello, and has vowed to improve ties with the United States.
“I’m sure the opposition is biting their tongue because this is so cruel for them,” said Eva Golinger, a U.S. lawyer who advised Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez. “They’re on the sidelines… They have no part in what’s going on. They’re out of the game for now.”
Trump’s decision to support Rodríguez was reportedly based partly on personal hostility towards Machado and partly on the CIA’s advice that he could not prevent a dangerous security collapse by containing the military and armed pro-regime paramilitary groups.
Trump officials have been open about their decision to make deals with Maduro’s closest allies, many of whom have been implicated in serious human rights abuses.
U.S. energy secretary Chris Wright told CBS News on Sunday: “We have to work with gun-owning people today to move the country to a representative government and a better station. But in the meantime, what you have to prevent is the collapse of the nation.”
Golinger believed Machado was hoping to get back into Trump’s schemes by presenting his 18-carat medal in a gold frame to a man obsessed with “all things gilded and gold.”
But Rodríguez was skeptical that the move would work, noting that his administration had already fulfilled one of Trump’s key demands: opening up Venezuela’s vast oil reserves to U.S. companies. The first US deportation plane since Maduro’s capture landed in Caracas on Friday, carrying 199 Venezuelans.
Golinger said, “Delcy is giving him everything he wants. He has no reason to disrupt the situation, and he certainly won’t let María Corina Machado come in and try to shake things up.”
“I’m sure he sees her as weak. he came [to Washington] and he knelt down and gave him the Nobel peace prize… and went out the back door … I’d put money on the fact that Delcy would get an official welcome if he came to the White House.”
İmdat Öner, a former Turkish diplomat in Venezuela and a faculty member at Florida International University’s Jack D Gordon public policy institute, was also skeptical that Machado’s gift would change Trump’s mind.
“They completely trust the Trump administration… [that] Trump would remove the entire regime from power and lead to opposition. But this did not happen,” he said.
“Machado’s hands are tied… He certainly understands that he is already sidelined and will not be part of the game,” he said, adding that the idea of him becoming president is “completely out of the question” for now.
If Machado’s visit to the White House was widely seen as a humiliation for the Nobel laureate, CIA director John Ratcliffe’s arrival in Caracas on Thursday was also seen as an embarrassing moment for Rodríguez and members of his “interim administration.”
Less than two weeks earlier, Ratcliffe’s agents had played a key role in infiltrating Maduro’s inner circle, locating him and thus capturing him from what was supposed to be Venezuela’s most fortified address. According to the information obtained, he was so powerful that they even knew what food Maduro ate and which pets he kept.
A US official he told the New York Times Ratcliffe had traveled to Caracas “to convey the message that the United States expects a better working relationship” with the embattled remnants of the Maduro regime led by Rodriguez.
Speaking in the state of the union speech Maduro is waiting to deliver, Rodríguez said their country had the “right” to have good relations with the United States and was willing to travel to Washington to meet with representatives of the “deadly nuclear power.”
“The excuse of any anti-imperialist socialist movement [has] I really just got robbed. This is ridiculous,” Golinger said.
“You cannot claim to be a sovereign anti-imperialist movement in the morning and then accept the director of the CIA… 10 days ago they bombed Caracas and extraordinarily delivered the sitting head of state.
“This is just nonsense… what we are witnessing is a blatant betrayal of everything that exists. [the Chavismo] It meant movement.”
