How Delcy Rodríguez Courted Donald Trump And Rose To Power In Venezuela

MIAMI (AP) — As political outsider Donald Trump headed to Washington in 2017, Delcy Rodríguez noticed an opening.

Rodríguez, then Venezuelan foreign minister, told Citgo, a subsidiary of the state oil company, donate $500,000 to the president’s inauguration. As Nicolas Maduro’s socialist administration seeks to feed Venezuela, Rodríguez gambled on a deal that would open the door to American investment. Around the same time, Trump’s former campaign manager was hired as a lobbyist for Citgo, courting Republicans in Congress and trying to broker a deal. Meeting with Exxon’s president.

The attraction attack failed. A few weeks after taking office, Trump, at the urging of then-Senator. Marco Rubio has made restoring Venezuela’s democracy his focus in response to Maduro’s crackdown on dissidents. But the aid paid off for Rodríguez, making him a prominent face in U.S. business and political circles and paving the way for his own rise.

“He’s an ideologue, but he’s practical,” said Lee McClenny, a retired state official who was the top U.S. diplomat in Caracas when Rodríguez supported him. “He knew he needed to find a way to revive Venezuela’s moribund oil economy, and he seemed willing to work with the Trump administration to do it.”

Nearly a decade later, as Venezuela’s interim president, Rodríguez’s message that Venezuela is open to business appears to have convinced Trump. Since that day Maduro’s magnificent capture On Saturday, he alternately praised Rodríguez as a “kind” American partner while threatening to face the same fate as his former boss if he does not keep the ruling party in check and provide the United States with the necessary support. “full access” the country’s vast oil reserves. What neither of them mention is the elections; something the constitution stipulates must be done within 30 days of the permanent vacancy of the presidency.

This account of Rodríguez’s political rise is drawn from interviews with 10 former U.S. and Venezuelan officials, as well as businessmen from both countries who had extensive dealings with Rodríguez and, in some cases, had known him since he was a child. Most spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation from someone they described almost universally as a bookish, sometimes charming, but, above all, ruthless operator intolerant of dissent. Rodríguez did not respond to AP requests for an interview.

Rodríguez joined the leftist movement launched by Hugo Chávez late and, as president of the National Assembly, followed his older brother Jorge Rodríguez, who swore in him as interim president on Monday.

The tragedy they experienced in their childhood fostered a hard-left outlook that would remain loyal to their siblings throughout their lives. In 1976 – in the midst of the Cold War, when US oil companies, American political diversion doctors and Pentagon advisors wielded great influence in Venezuela – a little-known urban guerrilla group Kidnapped a Midwestern businessman. Rodriguez’s father, a socialist leader, was arrested for questioning and died in custody.

McClenny recalls Rodríguez bringing up the murder in their meetings and bitterly blaming the United States for leaving him fatherless at age 7. This crime would radicalize another leftist of the period, Maduro.

Years later, when Jorge Rodríguez was a top election official under Chávez, he secured his sister a position in the presidential office.

But he progressed slowly at first and clashed with his colleagues, who viewed him as an arrogant know-it-all.

In 2006, during a whirlwind international tour, Chavez removed her from the presidential plane and ordered her to fly home alone from Moscow, two former officials who attended the trip said. Chavez was upset that the delegation’s meeting schedule was disrupted, triggering a fight with Rodriguez, who was in charge of the agenda.

“It was painful to watch how Chavez talked about him,” one former official said. “He never said anything bad about women, but the whole journey home he kept saying she was arrogant, arrogant and incompetent.”

He was fired days later and never took a significant role under Chavez again.

Years later, after Chávez died of cancer in 2013 and he took over, Maduro revived Rodríguez’s career.

A lawyer trained in Britain and France, Rodríguez speaks English and has spent a lot of time in the United States. This gave him an advantage in the internal power struggles within the Chávez movement that Chávez had initiated; This movement included democratic socialists, the hard-line military factions that Chavez led in the 1992 coup attempt, and corrupt actors, some with ties to drug trafficking.

His more worldly outlook and refined tastes also made Rodríguez a favorite of the so-called “boligarchs”, a new group of elites who made their fortunes during Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution. Media mogul Raul Gorrín, an insider, worked hand in hand with Rodríguez’s back-channel efforts to repair relations with the first Trump administration and helped organize a Trump administration. secret visit Texas Republican Rep. Pete Sessions traveled to Caracas in April 2018 to meet with Maduro. A few months later, US federal prosecutors opened the first seal. two money laundering allegations Against Gorrin.

After Maduro appointed Rodríguez as vice president in 2018, he took control of several countries. Venezuela’s oil economy. He hired foreign consultants with experience in global markets to help manage the petrostate. Among them were two former finance ministers in Ecuador who helped manage a dollarized, export-driven economy under leftist Rafael Correa. Another key partner is French lawyer David Syed, who has been trying for years to renegotiate Venezuela’s foreign debt in the face of crippling U.S. sanctions that have made it impossible for Wall Street investors to get refunds.

“He sacrificed his personal life for the sake of his political career,” said a former friend.

As he amassed more power, he crushed his internal rivals. They include once-powerful Oil Minister Tareck El Aissami, who was jailed in 2024 as part of an anti-corruption crackdown spearheaded by Rodríguez.

In his de facto role as Venezuela’s chief operating officer, Rodríguez has proven to be a more flexible and reliable partner than Maduro. Some liken him to Venezuela’s Deng Xiaoping, the architect of modern China.

Hans Humes, CEO of Greylock Capital Management, said the experience will benefit him as he tries to revive the economy, unite Chavismo and protect Venezuela from stricter terms dictated by Trump. He said the formation of an opposition-led government now could trigger the kind of bloodshed that tore Iraq apart after U.S. forces toppled Saddam Hussein and installed an interim government that included many leaders who had been in exile for years.

“We found that expats who have been out of the country for a long time think that everything should be the way it was before they left,” said Humes, who has met with Maduro and Rodríguez on several occasions. “You need people who know how to operate in situations where things are not the same.”

It is unclear where Rodríguez’s more pragmatic leadership style will take Venezuelan democracy.

In a statement following Maduro’s capture, Trump said Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado lacked “respect” for governing Venezuela despite winning what the United States and other governments viewed as a landslide victory stolen by Maduro in the 2024 presidential election.

Elliott Abrams, who served as special envoy to Venezuela during the first Trump administration, said it is impossible for the president to achieve his goal of driving criminal gangs, drug traffickers and Middle Eastern terrorists from the Western Hemisphere with various factions of Chavismo sharing power.

“Nothing Trump has said suggests his administration is considering a quick move away from Delcy. No one is talking about the election,” Abrams said. “If they think Delcy is running things, they’re dead wrong.”