www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/04/delcy-rodriguez-tightrope-venezuela-interim-leader ( http://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/04/delcy-rodriguez-tightrope-venezuela-interim-leader )
Delcy Rodríguez strikes defiant tone but must walk tightrope as Venezuela’s interim leader Rory Carroll The Guardian Sun 4 Jan 2026 Technocrat must accommodate US demands while shoring up a regime that is hated by many Venezuelans In her first speech as Venezuela’s interim leader, Delcy Rodríguez lambasted the US and pledged fealty to Nicolás Maduro. But the Trump administration has made a cold calculation: she will bow to Washington. Rodríguez is a political veteran who served as Maduro’s vice-president and oil minister and defended the regime against accusations of terrorism, drug-running and election-stealing, yet for now she is Donald Trump’s favoured option to lead Venezuela. “She’s essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” Trump said. The US president has not ruled out deploying ground troops but appears to want to “run” Venezuela through Rodríguez, who finds herself in charge of a regime shocked and demoralised by the abduction of Maduro yet still in power. The 56-year-old former labour lawyer struck a defiant tone in her televised speech on Saturday night. She condemned the abduction of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and demanded their return.“What is being done to Venezuela is an atrocity that violates international law. History and justice will make the extremists who promoted this armed aggression pay,” she said. “There is only one president in Venezuela and his name is Nicolás Maduro.” In a crisis that blends political theatre, military power and economic calculation, the defiance may have been to some extent performative – a sop to the Bolivarian revolution’s humiliated loyalists, especially those in the armed forces, while Rodríguez consolidates her position. To stay in power – assuming that is her goal – she must accommodate US demands while shoring up an authoritarian regime that is despised by many Venezuelans. One wrong step could trigger an internal putsch, a street uprising or another blast of US firepower. Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, elaborated on Trump’s declaration that the US would run the South American country. “It means we set the terms. President Trump sets the terms,” he said. “It means the drugs stop flowing, it means the oil that was taken from us is returned, ultimately, and that criminals are not sent to the United States.” That implied a puppet ruler of a vassal state, but Rodríguez has some room to manoeuvre. Where Venezuelan opposition figures see an apparatchik of Maduro’s dictatorship, the Trump administration sees a potential business partner. A senior official told the New York Times: “I’m not claiming that she’s the permanent solution to the country’s problems, but she’s certainly someone we think we can work at a much more professional level than we were able to do with [Maduro].” The English-speaking technocrat impressed Trump’s team with her management of Venezuela’s oil industry and intermediaries convinced the administration that she would protect and champion future American energy investments in the country, the paper reported. For Trump that was enough to ditch an alternative candidate to replace Maduro: María Corina Machado. The opposition leader mobilised Edmundo González’s winning presidential campaign last year – Maduro ignored the result – and won the Nobel peace prize. Machado dedicated that prize to Trump as she courted the US leader and supported the Pentagon’s military buildup in the Caribbean – but on Saturday Trump said she lacked support and that it would be “very tough” for her to lead Venezuela. Millions of Venezuelans revere Machado but she is unacceptable to the military hierarchy that props up the regime, said one informed source in Caracas. The result, for now, is that leadership of a revolution launched by Hugo Chávez in 1999 and taken up by Maduro in 2013 now falls to a softly spoken woman with a reputation as a flinty pragmatist. When she was a child, her father, a Marxist activist, died during interrogation by Venezuelan authorities over his role in the kidnap of a US citizen. That US forces then kidnapped her boss is an irony doubtless not lost on Rodríguez. A student leader, she studied law in Caracas and Paris and joined Chávez’s government in 2003, following the path of her brother, Jorge Rodríguez, a psychiatrist who served as vice-president and is currently head of the national assembly. Under Maduro she was promoted to senior posts, including foreign minister, and became vice-president in 2018. Her bright outfits stood out on podiums filled with military uniforms but no one doubted her commitment and her portfolio expanded to include the economy and oil. Unlike many of Maduro’s inner circle, Rodríguez has not been indicted for drug trafficking or other charges in the US. Trump’s team hope it has found a market-friendly technocrat who can steer the regime while taking direction from Washington. For Rodríguez, a vertiginous tightrope awaits. Venezuela’s opposition leaders, despite being sidelined by Trump, sense opportunity. “Today we are prepared to assert our mandate and seize power,” said Machado. Having tasted military success, Trump seems hungry for more chances to use force. What is left of the Bolivarian revolution – a socialist experiment that morphed into quasi-capitalism – still needs rhetorical justification. Rodríguez said Venezuela “will never again be anyone’s colony – neither of old empires, nor of new empires, nor of empires in decline”. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#40015): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/40015 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/117071130/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
