Delcy Rodríguez strikes defiant tone but must walk tightrope as Venezuela’s interim leader | Venezuela

In his first speech as Venezuela’s interim leader, Delcy Rodríguez harshly criticized the United States and pledged loyalty to Nicolás Maduro. But the Trump administration made a cold calculation: It will bow to Washington.

For now, Rodríguez is Donald Trump’s preferred choice to lead Venezuela, although he is a former political figure who served as Maduro’s vice president and oil minister and defended the regime against accusations of terrorism, drug trafficking and election theft. “He’s actually willing to do the things that we think are necessary to make Venezuela great again,” Trump said.

The US president has not ruled out deploying ground troops, but he appears to want to “rule” Venezuela through Rodríguez, who finds himself in charge of a regime shaken and demoralized by Maduro’s kidnapping but still in power.

The 56-year-old former labor lawyer struck a defiant tone in his televised speech Saturday night. He condemned the kidnapping of Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores and demanded their return.

“What happened to Venezuela is an atrocity that violates international law. History and justice will make the extremists who encouraged this armed attack pay the price,” he said. “There is only one president in Venezuela, and his name is Nicolás Maduro.”

In a crisis that blends political theatre, military might and economic calculations, this challenge may be performative to some extent; While it comes as a blow to the humiliated loyalists of the Bolivarian revolution, especially those in the armed forces, Rodríguez consolidates his position.

To stay in power—assuming that is his goal—he must meet U.S. demands while supporting the authoritarian regime that many Venezuelans hate. One wrong step could trigger a domestic coup, a street riot or another burst of U.S. firepower.

US defense secretary Pete Hegseth detailed Trump’s statement that the US will govern the South American country. “This means we set the terms. President Trump sets the terms,” ​​he said. “This means the flow of drugs stops, the oil taken from us is eventually returned, and criminals are not sent to the United States.”

This amounted to a puppet ruler of a vassal state, but Rodríguez has room to maneuver. While Venezuelan opposition figures see it as an apparatchik of the Maduro dictatorship, the Trump administration sees it as a potential business partner.

a senior official he told the New York Times: “I don’t claim to be a permanent solution to the country’s problems, but he is definitely someone we think we can work with on a much more professional level than we ever have before. [Maduro].”

The English-speaking technocrat impressed Trump’s team with his management of Venezuela’s oil industry, and intermediaries convinced the administration that Trump would protect and support future American energy investments in the country, the newspaper reported.

For Trump, this was enough to abandon the alternative candidate to replace Maduro: María Corina Machado. The opposition leader galvanized Edmundo González’s winning presidential campaign last year – Maduro ignored the outcome – and won the Nobel peace prize.

Machado dedicated this award to Trump for courting the US leader and supporting the Pentagon’s military build-up in the Caribbean; but on Saturday Trump said he had no support and that it would be “very difficult” for him to govern Venezuela. A knowledgeable source in Caracas said millions of Venezuelans respect Machado, but he is unacceptable to the military hierarchy that supports the regime.

For now, the result is this: leadership of the revolution launched by Hugo Chavez in 1999 and assumed by Maduro in 2013 now falls to a soft-spoken woman with a reputation as a tough pragmatist. When he was a child, his father, a Marxist activist, died during interrogation by Venezuelan authorities for his role in the kidnapping of a US citizen. US forces later kidnapped his boss, an irony that Rodríguez no doubt did not miss.

A student leader, he studied law in Caracas and Paris and joined the Chávez government in 2003, following in the footsteps of his psychiatrist brother Jorge Rodríguez, who served as vice president and is now president of the national assembly.

He was promoted to senior posts under Maduro, including minister of foreign affairs, and became vice president in 2018. His bright outfits stood out on catwalks full of military uniforms, but no one doubted his determination and his portfolio expanded to include economics and oil.

Unlike most of Maduro’s inner circle, Rodríguez has not been charged with drug trafficking or other charges in the United States. Trump’s team hopes to find a market-friendly technocrat who can steer the regime while taking direction from Washington. A dizzying rope awaits Rodríguez.

Venezuela’s opposition leaders recognize the opportunity, even though they have been sidelined by Trump. “Today we are ready to assert our authority and seize power,” Machado said. Having tasted military success, Trump seems hungry for the chance to use more force.

What remains of the Bolivarian revolution, a socialist experiment that evolved into quasi-capitalism, still needs rhetorical justification. Rodríguez said that Venezuela “will never again be anyone’s colony; neither old empires, nor new empires, nor declining empires.”