Bend so as not to break. It’s the only trump card he has in his hand. Delcy Rodriguez to keep the structure of Chavismo standing in the face of pressure from Donald Trumpas demonstrated this Thursday with the release of “a significant number” of political prisoners, both Venezuelan and foreign.
The tenant of the White House intends to turn Venezuela into a kind of protectorate with the necessary collaboration of the interim president and the president of the National Assembly, Jorge Rodriguezhis brother and great political ally, in charge of announcing the releases.
They were the secretaries of state, Marco Rubioand Energy, Chris Wrightwho detailed Trump’s plans more precisely. Rubio specified for the first time that the White House plan in the Caribbean country consists of three phases: stabilization, reconstruction and transition. In short, total control over internal politics.
That control, Trump himself pointed out in an interview published this Thursday in the pages of The New York Timeswill last for “several years” because the Delcy Government provides its Administration with “everything we consider necessary.”
Wright had been in charge of advancing that the United States would sell Venezuelan oil “indefinitely.” According to the Secretary of Energy, the income will first go to “accounts controlled by the United States Government” and then return to Venezuela in order to “benefit the Venezuelan people.”
“We are going to use oil and we are going to take oil. We are going to lower oil prices and we are going to give money to Venezuela, which desperately needs it,” Trump later remarked in the aforementioned interview with the Times. Even clearer was his vice president J.D. Vance. “We now control the incredible natural resources of Venezuela,” he summarized in Fox News.
Delcy and the Chavismo leadership do not, for the moment, have too many objections. What’s more, the president in charge says she is willing to collaborate with the United States with the sole condition that “all parties benefit.” Maduro’s capture seems to have been relegated to the background.
In Washington they are satisfied with the performance of Delcy, who also holds the Hydrocarbons portfolio, but they are aware that their plans can only go ahead if, in this phase, the regime does not collapse. Avoid internal fracture at all costs after Nicolas Maduro It is, paradoxically, a priority objective.
Power centers
The former American ambassador in Caracas, James Storywhich ended its diplomatic mission in 2023, says that there are “three great centers of power in the country.” The first rests on the Rodríguez brothers, in charge of piloting the transition.
“They are two survivors, two pragmatists who play the card of moderation,” he explains in conversation with this newspaper. Orlando J. Perezprofessor of Political Science at the University of North Texas.
The Minister of Defense, Vladimir Padrino.
The second nucleus is made up of the Minister of Defense, Vladimir Padrino Lópezhighest authority of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB). And the third, Diosdado HairMinister of the Interior and number two of the ruling party, today in low hours.
As Story explained in the forum organized by the Atlantic Council to analyze the capture of Maduro, the host of the program With the gavel giving “controls the groups together with [el jefe de policía y actual gobernador del estado de Táchira] Freddy Bernal and, of course, it also controls the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN) and the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence.”
“Leaving someone like Diosdado Cabello loose is going to generate a complication,” warned the former US ambassador. “About the role that Diosdado and Padrino have played this week, the key thing is that both have operated as pivots of internal control in a post-Maduro scenario,” says Pérez in dialogue with EL ESPAÑOL.
“Cabello, due to his partisan weight and his link with security apparatuses and informal networks, including collectives, has sought to project authority and dissuade fissures within hard Chavismo,” explains the professor at the University of North Texas, a specialist in Latin American politics.
“Padrino, as Minister of Defense, is the anchor of the chain of command: if he moves—or if they perceive that he moves—the internal balance changes immediately because the FANB remains the final arbiter when the political center weakens,” insists the analyst.
The White House keeps them at bay with veiled, and not so veiled, threats. “That strategy makes sense,” says Pérez. “Washington can capture Maduro, but if real power is fragmented between Cabello, Padrino, intelligence services and local armed actors, what follows is not transition but armed competition for resources, impunity and territorial control.”
“Therefore, the visible pattern is selective pressure, in the form of threats, public or leaked warnings and signaling of costs, combined with tacit incentives so that they do not blow up the board in the middle of the rearrangement. In simple terms: the United States is better off with containment of the intra-elite conflict, not a war of succession,” he condenses.