The US operation to capture President Nicolás Maduro at the weekend and spirit him out of Venezuela for trial in New York left in charge a woman Washington already knew well: vice-president Delcy Rodríguez.
Rodríguez, a canny political operator, was envisaged as head of a transitional government in secret talks that her politician brother, Jorge, led with Washington last year about a post-Maduro future, said two people familiar with the discussions. At that time, the negotiations had involved Maduro going safely into exile.
The Trump administration had been “telegraphing that they were building [this transition] around Delcy for some time now”, said an investor in Venezuela. “They don’t see her being a lapdog, but she was always the one who was most constructive in all the negotiations with the US.”
The 56-year-old’s ascent has left her walking a tightrope. On the one hand, she must placate domestic audiences. At the same time, she faces alternate praise and threats from Trump, who on Sunday said that if Venezuela’s new leaders “don’t behave, we will do a second strike” and that Rodríguez could “face a situation probably worse than Maduro”.
On Sunday night, Rodríguez struck a conciliatory tone towards the US, in a statement on social media, saying her government’s “priority” was “to move toward a balanced and respectful international relationship between the United States and Venezuela”.
But at an impromptu cabinet meeting on Saturday afternoon, she swore fealty to the ousted Maduro while flanked by top military and political officials, in an early sign of her need to keep Venezuelan hardliners on side — as well as possibly her own ideological intransigence.
“There is only one president in this country, and his name is Nicolás Maduro,” Rodríguez said.
The Venezuelan Supreme Court bestowed on her presidential powers on an acting basis.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio, who has acknowledged being in contact with Rodríguez, on Sunday appeared to recognise that her remarks were designed for domestic consumption.
“We’re going to make an assessment on the basis of what they do, not what they say publicly in the interim, not what they’ve done in the past in many cases, but what they do moving forward,” Rubio said of Venezuela’s de facto leadership. “So we’re going to find out.”
One diplomat in Caracas said Rodríguez’s belligerent comments were aimed at consolidating power and pacifying hardline ideologues. “She is at the more open end of the regime scale, but she’s still not an easy sell domestically or internationally,” the person said.
During the Biden administration, Rodríguez impressed executives with her pragmatism and grasp of detail when she led talks with international oil companies, including Chevron, which led to them being granted limited licences to operate in Venezuela.
“The US has assessed the state of play and they have come to the conclusion that the only bench with any technical, political and territorial capability to deliver is Delcy and her team,” said a person with business ties in Venezuela.
Born in Caracas in 1969 to a leftwing guerrilla father who founded a Marxist political party, Rodríguez has a reputation in Venezuela as a shrewd political operator and no-nonsense economic troubleshooter.
That reputation seems to have made her the acceptable face of chavismo, the Venezuelan socialism named for Maduro’s predecessor, in Washington’s view. Still, people who know her say she is a committed Chavista, even if moderate relative to others.
“When I first met her, I spent two hours sitting on the veranda talking with her. She described for me in detail her father’s death at the hands of the security services. He was suffocated in his cell with tear gas,” said a former senior US official.
“She told the story with an intensity and almost a ferocity, which made it clear to me that she considered herself part of a revolutionary family and one that had made the ultimate sacrifice for the greater good of the revolution.”
Initially a relative minnow in Venezuela’s hierarchy under Hugo Chávez, she rose to prominence after Maduro came to power in 2013, helped by her brother Jorge, a trained psychiatrist who heads the national assembly and became Maduro’s chief political adviser. Both siblings speak English — something high-profile Chavistas often play down — while Delcy also speaks French.
The siblings became pillars of Maduro’s regime known for their loyalty. They also helped oversee fraudulent elections in 2024 that saw Maduro re-elected despite the opposition candidate winning by an independently verified margin of two-to-one.
“Delcy Rodríguez is a very intelligent and skilled negotiator, and has a tight grasp of the details,” said one former regional leader who dealt with Rodríguez several times. “There is a reason Maduro trusted her.”
Rodríguez became foreign minister in 2014 and minister of finance and energy from 2020, overseeing Venezuela’s main industry, oil. Brought in to stave off an economic collapse and turn around cratering oil production, she cut deals with US and other international energy companies and oversaw a loosening of price and currency controls.
Sanctioned in 2017 and 2018 by the US, Canada and the EU for undermining democracy and abusing the rule of law, she caused uproar in Spain in 2020 with a clandestine visit to Madrid in a Turkish-flagged plane. The root of the scandal, known in Spain as Delcygate, involved the alleged sale of more than $68mn worth of gold bars to a Spanish businessman that Rodríguez facilitated, according to Spanish prosecutors.
At the same time, the Rodríguez siblings’ roles leading negotiations with international investors and the US under both the Biden and second Trump administrations put them in a powerful position to argue in Washington that they are the only people inside Venezuela capable of delivering quickly what the Americans want.
Ali Moshiri, a former executive at Chevron who is raising funds to invest in Venezuela’s oil sector, said Rodríguez was not “very motivated” by ideology and that her reforms of hydrocarbon laws allowed Chevron to return to Venezuela after being shut out by US sanctions.
“She is very well qualified, knows the oil business well, and also the flexibility that investors need,” he said. “She could lead a transition administration but she needs help from the US, especially on sanctions relief.”
Her international exposure also led to the transition proposal that Rodríguez, her brother and other senior Venezuelan officials made to the US last year.
The idea was to present a “more acceptable” alternative to Maduro’s regime while giving him a safe exit to a third country, said people familiar with the situation. Although the talks ultimately came to nothing, they showed that the Trump administration’s first choice was not to remove Maduro by force.
Even after Maduro’s removal, his regime remains in place, including its two main security officials: Vladimir Padrino López, head of the armed forces, and Diosdado Cabello, minister of the interior and head of the country’s feared informal militias known as colectivos.
They, not Rodríguez, hold direct sway over the security forces. There is also deep distrust between the civilian and military sides. As a sign of that, Cabello was listening in the room as Rodríguez spoke to Rubio, according to one person with connections to Venezuela’s ruling elite.
Nicholas Watson, managing director at Teneo, a consultancy, said that “Delcy’s only advantage is that she can probably trust her own brother Jorge”, but as both represent the civilian wing of chavismo, “it would be logical if they sought an alliance with actors from the security sphere to reinforce their position”.
Neither Rodríguez nor a Venezuelan government spokesperson responded to a request for comment.
In backing Rodríguez to run the government, the Trump administration also appears to have sidelined Venezuela’s democratic opposition and its main leader María Corina Machado, who won last year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Her ally Edmundo González was regarded as the winner of the 2024 election.
In an interview with CBS, Rubio said that he had “admiration” for both Machado and González but neither was in a position to unseat the Chavista government that has been in power for more than a quarter century.
Another problem, people said, was that Machado and González lack any credibility with Venezuela’s security forces and Washington wanted someone to be able to take charge of the situation immediately.
“We have short-term things that have to be addressed right away,” Rubio said on Sunday. “We all want to have a bright future for Venezuela. All these things are good . . . But we’re talking about what happens over the next two to three weeks, and the next two to three months.”
Vanessa Neumann, a Venezuelan defence industry entrepreneur and former opposition envoy with close ties to the US security establishment, said: “Washington seems to be thinking that some sort of US praetorian guard will surround Delcy and start to increase [oil] production and prosperity.
“The question is, will it work? I think Delcy is going to dance the tango with Team Trump and then she’s going to be stabbed in the back by Diosdado and Padrino López, and then Trump will be back in a kinetic sense.”