Tell Delcy Rodríguez: You’re Fired
Maduro’s vice president is wrong for Venezuela. If there’s a deal with her, Trump should void it.
By Thor Halvorssen
For my fellow Venezuelans across the political spectrum, Jan. 3, 2026, was a day of stunned disbelief and cautious hope.
The arrest of Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces shattered the illusion of the regime’s invincibility.
What’s likely to follow is the implosion of a criminal government enterprise.
Reports indicate the Trump administration has struck a deal with Delcy Rodríguez, Mr. Maduro’s iron-fisted vice president, positioning her as a transitional leader.
She has, it seems, convinced U.S. officials that she can dismantle the Maduro dictatorship, which would have to include demobilizing the armed militias, disbanding the dreaded secret police and ending the regime’s drug empire.
But this is a fantasy.
Ms. Rodríguez will fail spectacularly, leading to the final unraveling.
Venezuela isn’t like Mexico, where a state coexists uneasily with cartels.
Here, the cartel is the state.
Factions—enriched generals, intelligence chiefs and narco-traffickers—won’t surrender power in a Washington-brokered deal.
Ms. Rodríguez herself faces insurmountable obstacles, beginning with her utter lack of legitimacy.
Never elected vice president, she has less authority than Mr. Maduro, the usurper who appointed her.
Hatred for Ms. Rodríguez among Venezuelans is visceral.
As vice president overseeing the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service, she headed a system cited by the United Nations for crimes against humanity.
Victor Navarro, a survivor of the Helicoide—Venezuela’s largest torture center and the intelligence service’s notorious headquarters—accuses her, among others, of systematizing violence and repression.
Nobel Peace laureate María Corina Machado calls her “one of the main architects of torture” in Venezuela.
When the New York Times profiled Ms. Rodríguez as a “moderate,” a backlash erupted: Thousands on X ridiculed the paper for whitewashing her bloodstained record.
Venezuela’s remaining 863 political prisoners, including 176 from Mr. Maduro’s armed forces, must be released.
In 2025 Venezuelans were jailed for complaining about delayed household gas deliveries, for criticizing Mr. Maduro on WhatsApp, and for printing anti-Chávez T-shirts.
Once freedom of expression is restored, the emboldened population will protest Ms. Rodríguez and her henchmen.
What then?
Will she arrest them again?
One positive sign is that Marcel Granier, the heroic media executive whose popular RCTV was expropriated in 2007 amid nationwide student protests, hopes to relaunch radio and TV stations.
Will the regime shut him down?
No Venezuelan has escaped the regime’s cruelty: Nearly nine million people, or more than one-third of the population, have fled since Hugo Chávez’s era began.
Imagine the population of New York City or London vanishing; that’s the scale of the exodus driven by starvation, violence and despair.
Such rejection fueled the opposition’s triumphs.
María Corina Machado, emphasizing family reunification, won her primary with 93% support.
Her stand-in, Edmundo González, received more than 67% in the 2024 election, dwarfing Mr. Maduro’s fraud.
Adding disenfranchised emigrants who “voted with their feet,” the anti-Maduro vote exceeds 85%.
The rest often voted from fear, coerced by threats.
Once the state terror fades, the peaceful protests of Venezuelans will grow loud.
Social media already shows Chávez statues toppled by jubilant crowds.
People are uniting in optimism, buoyed by President Trump’s promise of freedom.
Mr. Maduro’s arrest won’t undo 25 years of devastation.
The country’s infrastructure is crumbling, and the state-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela, is in ruins.
Hospitals, once regional models, lack basic supplies; patients die from treatable ailments amid blackouts and medicine shortages.
Mothers feed babies with scraps scavenged from trash cans.
Schools peddle propaganda, glorifying Chávez and erasing Venezuelans’ democratic history.
Economically, the country is a shambles.
Millions of small businesses have been destroyed by price controls, socialist policies and expropriations.
The devalued currency yielded hyperinflation of 344,509% in 2019.
Chávez professed love for the poor (perhaps that’s why he multiplied them), with poverty exceeding 90% at its peak.
Like Cuba, the regime exiled professionals, leaving a controllable underclass.
Public employment surged over this same period to account for more than 20% of jobs, bloating the loyal bureaucracy.
The integrity of the armed forces has been shattered. Chávez promoted not by merit but by fealty, placing loyalists atop state-owned enterprises.
The Chávez-Maduro regime squandered the greatest oil boom in Venezuelan history.
In 25 years, oil revenue surpassed the total earned from the discovery of oil in 1914 until Chávez took power in 1999—which the regime used to buy international support.
It sought to manipulate dozens of elections across the globe and disbursed more than $100 billion in favors: from nearly $500 million in subsidized heating oil for Boston and other U.S. cities to discounted bus passes for low-income Londoners under Mayor Ken Livingstone.
Cuba and other dictatorships received tens of billions of dollars worth of free oil.
As Venezuelans starved, leaders and cronies stashed more than $1 trillion abroad.
In addition to American rivals such as China, Iran and Russia, various democratic governments have decried supposed U.S. violations of international law in arresting Mr. Maduro.
But such carping falls flat among Venezuelans.
Venezuelans also largely dismiss concerns about Mr. Trump’s oil-sector comments as they focus on how Mr. Maduro’s arrest—and the threat of a second wave of military action—will fracture the regime and pave the way for a democratic transition.
If U.S. oil concessions pay for liberation, their thinking goes, it’s worth it.
For 25 years, Venezuela’s oil wealth enriched elites, not its people.
Ms. Rodríguez, according to sources, siphoned profits through networks of international and domestic businessmen while building PR machinery to sanitize her image.
This is evident in today’s news cycle, where her allies now celebrate her ascent.
The downfall of Ms. Rodríguez’s interim government will expose the regime’s rot.
Her shaky authority is unsustainable.
The path from dictatorship to democracy is fraught, but with the illusion broken and the people empowered, freedom is finally within reach.
Mr. Halvorssen is CEO of the Human Rights Foundation.
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