Delcy Rodríguez cashes in on bargain with Trump
Meeting with US president comes after a level of deference shown to Washington that most leaders would find humiliating
Geoff Dyer in London and Joe Daniels in Bogotá
Venezuelan interim president Delcy Rodríguez has had to show deference to Washington in a way most leaders would find humiliating since taking office in January after US forces captured her country’s leader.
Washington controls the country’s oil revenues, which means she has had to ask a 32-year-old state department official’s permission to spend those funds.
And she has allocated a fifth of Venezuela’s oil reserves to a private company part-owned by the Pentagon.
This week, Rodríguez will receive her reward, analysts say.
On Tuesday, she will meet US President Donald Trump in New York for the first sit-down between the two countries’ leaders since 2015.
On Wednesday, she is expected to give the first in-person UN General Assembly speech by a Venezuelan leader since 2018.
For all the colonial echoes of Washington’s demands, the trip could help Rodríguez consolidate power at home.
The stronger the personal relationship she can forge with Trump and the more his administration depends on her, the greater her capacity to delay elections that might sweep her from power.
Trump’s willingness to grant her a meeting underscores “the bargain that is at the heart of the relationship”, said Orlando Pérez, a political scientist at the University of North Texas at Dallas.
“Trump is a pragmatic, transactional leader and she is delivering on oil and many of the other things that he has been asking for.”
The symbolism is yet more striking when compared with the two other central characters in the country’s politics.
When she speaks at the UN’s Manhattan headquarters, Venezuela’s deposed former president Nicolás Maduro will be seven miles away, locked up in a Brooklyn prison on drug-trafficking charges, which he denies.
And while Rodríguez travels freely between Venezuela and the US, Nobel Prize-winning opposition leader María Corina Machado is stranded in exile in Panama, prevented from returning home and watching her political capital diminish.
For some of Venezuela’s opposition, the arrangement with Washington is starting to resemble unconditional surrender rather than the liberation they had hoped for when the US exfiltrated Maduro on January 3.
Former opposition lawmaker Américo de Grazia likened the situation to US General Douglas MacArthur ruling Japan for six years from 1945.
“Emperor Hirohito had to wait six months to be received by the general, who smoked in his face.
But he accepted MacArthur’s conditions because there was no other way to survive,” said de Grazia.
Washington’s demands have centred on Venezuela’s oil revenues, which it has been collecting since January.
The administration has created a list of approved and barred expenditures, according to people familiar with the process.
Caracas can use the money to pay schoolteachers, buy medical supplies or goods needed by the oil industry.
Heavy interventions in the foreign exchange market in recent months have also been approved.
But Washington has not allowed Venezuela to use the funds for payments to Chinese or Russian companies operating in the country, the people said.
The spending requests are handled by the US state department’s Bureau of Economic, Energy and Business Affairs, the people familiar with the process said.
Until the end of August, the bureau was run by 32-year-old Caleb Orr, an assistant secretary of state who worked in Marco Rubio’s Senate office before following him to the state department.
(Axios reported last month that Orr was to move to a senior job in the White House.)
“Caleb is actually just the sort of person you want in government, smart, hard-working, strong on detail,” said a former official who has dealt with Orr.
“But he has not long turned 30.”
The Trump administration has not disclosed how much of Venezuela’s money it has collected or how much has been sent back.
The state department told the FT the funds “constitute the property of the interim government of Venezuela” and are disbursed “in accordance with requests from the interim government of Venezuela and consistent with approved expenditure parameters”.
US officials also stress that one function of the payments system is to prevent corruption.
But they also openly admit it is a tool of political control.
“We have a lot of leverage over Venezuela,” Chris Wright, energy secretary, said earlier this month.
“We control the sale of oil outside of their country.”
That influence helped secure last month’s energy deal.
The US is taking a 35 per cent stake in North American Blue Energy Partners, a company owned by Alejandro Betancourt, a Venezuelan businessman who has faced a series of allegations about corrupt links with the government, which he has always denied.
As well as the equity stake, the US will receive 20 per cent of the oil produced by the company at cost.
The Trump administration hopes the deal will accelerate investment in the oil industry.
US interior secretary Doug Burgum said the deal was part of Washington’s push for energy dominance in the hemisphere.
It reflected “the brilliant strategy of turning Venezuela from a sanctioned adversary just a few months ago into a strategic ally”, he told Fox last week.
In exchange, Rodríguez has received regular public support from Trump.
She is “doing a very, very good job” and is “very highly respected”, he said earlier this month.
Asked about elections in Venezuela, he added: “Delcy wants it, but they’re not ready yet.”
Protesters during a march against the oil agreement between Venezuela and the US in Caracas © MIGUEL GUTIERREZ/EPA/ShutterstockIt was not inevitable that Rodríguez, who had been Maduro’s vice-president since 2018, would survive in office this long.
She disappeared from public view initially on January 3 before reappearing later in the day after tense phone calls with Washington.
The circumstances that led the Trump administration to choose her as a replacement have yet to be fully explained.
Rodríguez has sidelined some rivals and built alliances with others, successfully retaining the military’s support after axing its top leaders.
She has also managed to brush aside questions about her legal status — under the constitution, an interim president can only serve for 180 days, which expired in July.
Beyond short-term survival, many analysts believe Rodríguez’s objective has been to delay elections as long as possible.
In one recent poll, she had a minus 36 per cent approval rating.
But if she can engineer an economic recovery, she could try to present herself as an effective, technocratic heir to former president Hugo Chávez — but boasting good relations with Washington.
The government and opposition are negotiating over when to hold elections, in a process backed by Rubio, a longtime critic of Venezuela’s descent into authoritarianism.
The opposition hopes to have struck a deal by December on a roadmap for elections.
However, many in the opposition fear Rodríguez is making herself indispensable to Trump by offering highly favourable access to the country’s resources that no other leader would approve.
“We recognise the risk Trump took in pushing Maduro from power,” said Henrique Capriles, one of the leading opposition figures still in the country.
“But it is incomprehensible that you can talk about reviving the oil industry in Venezuela with the same people who destroyed it.”
Pérez, the Latin America expert, said the risk was that “the negotiations about elections get pushed a little bit into the long grass” because Rodríguez has become so important to Trump.
“Trump just does not feel any pressure from the people who are calling for setting the date for an election.”
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