ANALYSIS Acting President Delcy Rodríguez is a dark, hardline "architect" of Venezuela's dictatorship — so why has the Trump administration bet she'll lead the country to the light of democracy after Nicolás Maduro's stunning U.S. military ouster?
One night 20 years ago, two top aides to then-Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez walked angrily into a restaurant in the upscale Chacao district of Caracas. As soon as they sat down, they started venting about a meeting they’d just had with Chávez’s chief of staff, Delcy Rodríguez.
They were part of a camp inside the Miraflores presidential palace urging Chávez to steer his socialist revolution’s relations with the U.S. in a less confrontational direction.
Rodríguez, however, had convinced Chávez to project even more anti-yanqui animosity — such as forging stronger ties to pariahs like Iran and North Korea.
“North Korea!” said one of the exasperated Chávez aides, relating how she'd berated them that day. “She wants to tear down everything we’re doing to make him a more credible international leader.”
Chávez in fact would, later that year, call then U.S. President George W. Bush “the devil” at the U.N. And his Chavista regime, until and after he died in 2013, would move sharply to the more authoritarian left — thanks in no small part to Rodríguez’s dogmatic influence.
Rodríguez’s strident crusade — even Chávez eventually dumped her as chief of staff because she was so argumentative toward him — was born largely of vindictive bitterness over the case of her father, Jorge Antonio Rodríguez, a founder of Venezuela’s Socialist League who died under torture in prison in 1976. And she carried it into her most recent post as Venezuela’s vice president.
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As a result, for many Venezuela watchers — who are wondering how the U.S. is going to manage the country after American special forces captured dictator Nicolás Maduro in Caracas early Saturday morning — Rodríguez’s hardline Chavista background makes it something of a mystery that the Trump administration has endorsed her as Venezuela’s acting president. (She was officially sworn in there on Monday.)
Has she, as some U.S. officials seem to believe, morphed more politically and economically moderate? Skeptics aren't convinced.
“She was clearly complicit in the human rights abuses of the Maduro regime over the past decade,” says Enrique Roig, a former deputy assistant secretary at the State Department for democracy and human rights in Latin America, who is now vice president of external relations at the nonprofit Human Rights First.
“I don’t think you can give her a clean bill of health just because [as vice president] she seemed to effectively manage Venezuela’s oil sector for the past year or so. I mean, will she and the other remaining leaders of this regime now release all the political prisoners? Or will they continue to go after the democratic opposition in Venezuela?
“The command-and-control structure for that whole repressive system has not gone away — and the fact that people inside Venezuela are lying low right now even after Maduro’s arrest is a good indication of that.”
On Monday, in fact, the Chavista regime called for a witch-hunting roundup inside Venezuela of anyone suspected of aiding or supporting Maduro's capture.
Calming facilitator or savvy saboteur
So the big question, says Roig, becomes whether Rodríguez will be the calming facilitator of a democratic transition in post-Maduro Venezuela — or a savvy saboteur angling for regime survival.
The Trump administration is betting Rodríguez — along with her brother, Venezuelan National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez — will be the more pragmatic, U.S.-compliant administrator in that command-and-control structure.
That wager is focused particularly on her reported willingness to help the U.S. gain access to Venezuela’s oil reserves, the world’s largest, and keeping Venezuela’s military and its paramilitary street goons from lashing out after Maduro’s overthrow.
Together the Rodríguez siblings constitute one part of a triumvirate left in Maduro’s wake, which includes Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello — a former military honcho and fierce regime hardliner — and the defense minister, Gen. Vladimir Padrino.
Both Cabello and Padrino, like Maduro, are under indictment in the U.S. for drug trafficking.
The Trump administration’s hope is that Delcy Rodríguez can keep the regime in line with U.S. wishes and so keep the country stable through a process of transition to new elections.
Venezuelan voters would likely, according to polls, make democratic opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado the next president — even though Trump astonishingly disparaged Machado on Saturday as he praised Delcy Rodríguez, deepening the impression that he cares more about oil than democracy.
(Maduro in 2024 stole the presidential election he clearly lost to democratic opposition candidate Edmundo González, who was filling in for Machado after Maduro barred her from running.)
But whether Delcy Rodríguez and the Chavista hierarchy she’s supposed to control are on board with that plan is questionable for now.
“[Delcy] has certainly been as involved as Maduro was in creating this oppressive and corrupt structure that is profoundly anti-democratic, profoundly anti-human rights."Latin America expert Douglas Farah.
On Saturday Delcy Rodríguez seemed to reject the arrangement, insisting Maduro had been “kidnapped” and that Venezuela would never be a “colony” of the U.S. Then, on Sunday evening, she struck a more conciliatory tone, urging “collaboration” between the regime, the opposition and the U.S.
Either way, as one political analyst in Venezuela who knows Delcy Rodríguez (and asked not to be identified) pointed out to WLRN, she is “very mercurial. She can very easily fly off the handle.”
Other analysts say it’s doubtful she can exert the sort of authority over the Cabello and Padrino factions the U.S. believes she can.
“Understanding her as the power figure in this scenario is a mistake,” says veteran Latin America expert Douglas Farah, president of IBI Consultants in Washington, who a few years ago took part in a war games exercise at the U.S. military’s Southern Command, or Southcom, in Miami, focusing on regime change in Venezuela.
“She has certainly been as involved as Maduro was in creating this oppressive and corrupt structure that is profoundly anti-democratic, profoundly anti-human rights,” Farah says. “She has been one of its most important intellectual architects [as] this regime moved through time.
“But it’s a mistake to think she is the decider in this particular situation, and I think that is where the Trump administration may run into significant issues, believing she can deliver things that she can’t.”
If Delcy Rodríguez does have trouble mollifying her regime partners, especially when it comes to getting them to respect human rights as well as U.S. oil interests, it raises the likelihood that Trump — who on Sunday warned her she'll "pay a big price" if she doesn't play ball — may have to resort to further military action in Venezuela.
But that's a Catch-22: it would likely undermine the transition stability his administration is trying to maintain.
Mid-term elections leverage
The bottom line is that Delcy Rodríguez and the other Chavista holdovers realize that to completely bring down the regime’s administrative and military edifice may require a full-blown U.S. military invasion of Venezuela, with tens of thousands of occupation boots on the ground.
Because that would be politically disastrous for Trump at home in the U.S., especially with 2026 mid-term elections coming up, the lingering Venezuela regime may have leverage to linger longer.
“Right now those regime leaders are probably negotiating among themselves,” says Farah.
“Diosdado will want to take a more confrontational route. Delcy’s trying to not get bombed again by the U.S. Padrino knows his military is not an effective fighting force, but they control extractive sectors like gold and oil that they’re not easily going to abandon.
“So I think we’re looking at a process of seeing how far they can go in defying Trump while paying lip service to keeping him relatively happy — while assuming, as I think many people do, that he’ll lose interest [in a democratic transition] now that he has the Maduro political trophy.”
Another top former U.S. diplomat in Latin America who has dealt with Delcy Rodríguez, and who asked not be identified, insists that, for all her dark ideological steeliness, she is in the end “a smarter and more effective administrator” than the rest of the regime hierarchy.
Which is why, the diplomat says, the Trump administration has decided it can work with her.
All the rest of Venezuela, the U.S. and the world can do, meanwhile, is hope that Trump's sketchy Delcy deal works.
