Venezuela’s new dictator is a regime loyalist—and America’s hostage

DELCY RODRÍGUEZ was 19 when she swore she would leave Venezuela. It was 1988 and Carlos Andrés Pérez had been elected for a second term as president. She locked herself in a bathroom and wept. She hated the country’s political elite and its clubby two-party system. When she went to study in Europe, she told everyone she could that revolution was coming. In 1998, it arrived. Hugo Chávez, a former lieutenant-colonel and a fire-breathing socialist, won Venezuela’s presidential election. “You were a prophetess,” said Nicolás Maduro, Chávez’s successor, to Ms Rodríguez on his podcast in 2024.

The fate of chavismo—and Venezuela’s regime—now rests, at least in part, with her. On January 3rd American special forces snatched Mr Maduro from his safehouse in Caracas, the capital. Two days later Ms Rodríguez, Mr Maduro’s vice-president since 2018, was sworn in as acting leader. Ms Rodríguez is oscillating between an emollient tone, calling for a “co-operation agenda” with the United States, and raging against its “terrible military aggression” to assuage hardliners. She has good reason to work with Mr Trump: the American president has promised to treat her “worse than Maduro” unless she does his bidding.

Before the raid, American intelligence reportedly concluded that Ms Rodríguez was among those most capable of stabilising Venezuela were Mr Maduro to fall. Rumours stir that she may have helped their operation. Working with the Trump administration goes against the revolutionary convictions she claims to have held since childhood. Still, Ms Rodríguez may hope that doing so could keep the regime, however weak, in power—and stymie the democratic opposition, whom Mr Trump has sidelined.

Ms Rodríguez’s career has been defined by a professed ideological commitment to the “revolution” that Chávez began, combined with a ruthless pragmatism to ensure she and her cabal stay in power. She has some revolutionary pedigree. Her father, Jorge Antonio Rodríguez, was a Marxist guerrilla who helped abduct an American businessman in 1976, during Pérez’s first term as president. Two of his co-conspirators later worked in Chávez’s government, but he was arrested shortly after the kidnapping. He died under torture by the security services. His “martyrdom”, as Ms Rodríguez has called it, marked her and her brother, also called Jorge, who now leads the National Assembly. “We always grew up with his example,” she said in 2018. Building a socialist state, she explained, was their “personal revenge”.

In the 1980s she studied law, in her telling, “to do justice in her father’s case”. After graduating she went to study in Paris, where she learned French, then to Britain, where she learned English. Some in Caracas call her “cosmopolitan”—a stark contrast to Mr Maduro, who flaunts his lack of English to present himself as a man of the people. In 2002, when Chávez was ousted by the army in a short-lived coup, Ms Rodríguez was in London and protested at the Venezuelan embassy, where she was working. After that she returned to Venezuela to work for Chávez. She still calls him the comandante.

Mr Maduro’s ascent to the presidency in 2013, after Chávez’s death, paved the way for her rise. The president had been close to the Rodríguez siblings for decades. (Jorge Rodríguez junior went with him to visit Chávez in prison in 1993, one year after the colonel launched an ill-fated attempt to depose and, if necessary, kill Peréz, the president, and seize power.)

First Mr Maduro made Ms Rodríguez his communications minister, then put her in charge of foreign affairs. As Venezuela’s top diplomat she lashed out at Latin American leaders who criticised Mr Maduro as he transformed Chávez’s hybrid regime into a fully fledged dictatorship. When Mercosur, the region’s trade bloc, suspended Venezuela, Ms Rodríguez appeared at a summit in Buenos Aires and vowed to storm it “by the door or the window”, according to Argentina’s then foreign minister.

Meanwhile Venezuela’s economy was collapsing. A drop in the oil price in 2014, following the United States’ shale boom, knocked a hole in the government’s revenues. The economy contracted by three-quarters between 2014 and 2021. Inflation peaked at an annualised 130,000% in 2018. Food became scarce.

Ms Rodríguez became vice-president in June that year. Some 2.3m Venezuelans had left the country since 2014 (the number is now nearly 8m). The country had just held an election that Mr Maduro flagrantly stole. Protests erupted and in January 2019 the opposition declared Juan Guaidó, the head of the National Assembly, the interim president. Ms Rodríguez, who took over as head of SEBIN, a state intelligence agency, when she became vice-president, had a hand in a crackdown. The agency detained Mr Guaidó’s chief of staff and several other opposition figures. SEBIN’s grisly methods—detailed by the United Nations—have earned Ms Rodríguez the moniker of “torturer-in-chief” in opposition circles. As Venezuelans went hungry, she justified the regime’s decision to block American food aid by claiming it was a poisonous “biological weapon”.

At the same time, she has a reputation as perhaps the regime’s top technocrat. As finance minister from 2020 to 2024 and then oil minister, Ms Rodríguez set aside a raft of socialist principles to rescue the economy. The government scrapped price controls, which had emptied supermarket shelves, and allowed Venezuelans to use the dollar instead of the bolívar. She also created incentives for foreign firms to invest—an “anti-blockade” scheme that in effect ushered in a capitalist free-for-all for Russian and Iranian companies. Venezuelan business figures say she responds to messages in the early hours or late at night; colleagues call her a workaholic. “I have her on speed-dial,” says a Western diplomat, only half-jokingly.

In the days following Mr Maduro’s abduction, Ms Rodríguez’s regime has shown a characteristic mix of ruthlessness and flexibility. Armed goons, mostly controlled by Diosdado Cabello, the interior minister, patrol the streets to deter opposition supporters. Meanwhile her government appears to have agreed to hand over or sell some 30m-50m barrels of oil to the United States (though the details remain unclear). It has sought both to consolidate its power and accommodate Mr Trump’s mercantile demands, perhaps in the hope that it simply outlasts his term (or his attention span). Ms Rodríguez has spent her career working for truculent strongmen. Now in Mr Trump she has a tough new boss, whose demands she must balance with those of the hardliners around her.■