Who “runs” Venezuela now? For now, Washington – having ousted dancing strongman Nicolás Maduro – has turned to his vice-president, 56-year-old Delcy Rodríguez, a regime heavyweight who has previously served as minister of both finance and oil under Maduro.
The move sidelines Venezuelan opposition leaders Maria Corina Machado and her ally Edmundo González, who is widely believed to have won the July 2024 presidential election in which Maduro claimed victory.
At first glance, Rodríguez is a strange choice. A lifelong socialist revolutionary, she became so powerful within the regime that Maduro used to call her his “tigress.” Her father was a Marxist revolutionary who died in custody in Venezuela in the 1970s. Her brother Jorge is the head of Venezuela’s parliament. The Rodríguez siblings have immense influence over both the oil and intelligence sectors.
And there’s part of your answer.
Let’s look at the pros and cons of dealing with Delcy.
The pros. In a word, who else was there? Trump’s decision to sideline Machado and González played poorly for many Venezuelans who had hoped for their immediate return. But imposing Machado and González on a military and a court system shaped for more than two decades by Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez would have risked an immediate and possibly violent backlash. Seeking to remove all elements of the regime at once, by contrast, would have risked chaos. Leaving Delcy and her brother in charge gives the Americans, for now, a local leader with influence and continuity.
“I think it’s actually very pragmatic,” says Risa Grais-Targow, a longtime Venezuela watcher at Eurasia Group. “This was the only way to avoid the power vacuum scenario.”
What’s more, Rodriguez, for all her revolutionary bonafides, is still seen abroad as a relative moderate within the regime, and one who is well known to the international oil sector. That too is a critical consideration, given Trump’s openly stated aim of seizing Venezuela’s vast oil resources for the benefit of US firms.
The cons: Delcy in the middle. Pragmatic though it may be, dealing with Delcy could still go wrong as Rodríguez finds herself caught between three enormous millstones.
First, the expectations of the Trump administration that she’ll open Venezuela’s oil sector to US investment, cut ties with US rivals like Russia and China and, possibly, move towards free elections that could dislodge the regime more broadly. If she doesn’t move fast enough, Trump has threatened her with a fate “worse” than Maduro’s.
That cuts against the second set of expectations: those of the military men and regime lifers around her who have gotten very comfortable (and rich) within a corrupt and repressive regime and will not want to be booted out, impoverished, or humiliated by Washington. Factional clashes within the regime over deference to the US could quickly turn violent.
And that leads to the third challenge for Delcy: the expectations of the Venezuelan people and opposition, many of whom want to vote in a new government as soon as possible. While the ouster of Maduro has been met with joy by millions of Venezuelans, there is lots of apprehension about what comes next.
At a protest outside the New York courthouse where Maduro was arraigned yesterday, a young man from Venezuela named Daniel told GZERO Media that “Venezuela is scared because the regime is still in power. Delcy needs to do the right thing and do an orderly transition, maybe hold new elections.”
If that doesn’t happen fast enough, street protests could flare again in Venezuela – forcing the US backed government either to suppress them with violence or give way in a potentially unstable transition that would be opposed by parts of the military or security services.
The bottom line: Having opted for the extraordinary and risky step of toppling Maduro, the Trump administration’s best option may be to deal with his deputy. But how long can a strategy of regime change without regime change really last?
