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Delcy Rodríguez balances Trump's demands amid military-backed coalition
Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as Venezuela's interim president shortly after the US seized Nicolás Maduro. (Reuters: Leonardo Fernandez Viloria)
More than a week after the US up-ended Venezuela's political order, the country has not entered a democratic transition, nor collapsed into chaos.
Instead, the Maduro regime remains intact — with interim leader Delcy Rodríguez now presiding over a country caught between a revolutionary past and an American-managed future.
The Trump administration has opted for control over rupture, postponing democratic elections indefinitely while it focuses on convincing American companies to spend billions to rebuild the country's oil infrastructure.
Leading her country through a largely unpredictable period of US influence will require Rodríguez to bridge two opposing forces: an internal Chavismo regime that benefits from the status quo, and an external, capitalist United States hell-bent on controlling the country's dominant income source.
Delcy Rodríguez's rise to political heavyweight
Before president Nicolás Maduro was seized by the US earlier this year, Rodríguez spent years as his deputy, and has therefore retained the backing of key parts of a regime that oversees Venezuela's economy.
Regime control, rather than change, allowed the US to avoid a power vacuum that could have led to a lengthy US occupation, as it has in past US attempts to overthrow undemocratic governments,.
Roxanna Vigil, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the regime remaining in power was a clear sign the US prioritised control over "true stability".
Donald Trump and Marco Rubio have said they expect Venezuela's interim government to cooperate with the US. (Reuters: Kevin Lamarque)
"Stability for Venezuela would mean, in my view, a democratically elected government," she said.
"They've gone through a significant humanitarian crisis where 8 million Venezuelans have fled, [and] a significant economic crisis where their oil sector has been on the decline."
Rodríguez has been described as a cunning, intelligent and cutthroat politician who cemented her political power under Maduro.
Her childhood was defined by the death of her father, Jorge Antonio Rodríguez, a leftist guerilla fighter who founded the revolutionary Socialist League Party. He died in custody in 1976 after being detained for allegedly kidnapping an American. Rodríguez was 7 years old at the time and grew up convinced the US was responsible for his death.
She is a lawyer who studied in the United Kingdom and France, speaks English, and has spent time in the US. Her international background set her apart from inward-looking politicians and curried her favour with Venezuela's business elite.
Under Maduro, she became vice-president in 2018 and managed the country's oil industry amid a wave of new US sanctions.
Before that, she served as finance minister, communications minister, and foreign minister. In 2017, she established connections within the Trump government, according to reporting by AP, and directed state oil company Citgo to donate $US500,000 from its coffers to Trump's inauguration.
She also hired a former Trump staffer as a lobbyist for Citgo, and tried to meet with the head of the US oil company Exxon.
How long can Rodríguez maintain control?
Rodríguez began her leadership by publicly defying Trump's assertion that she would comply with the US, but since then has done just that.
Venezuela has announced the release of political prisoners, received Washington officials in Caracas for talks, and stated Venezuelan diplomats are set to visit America.
Trump said last weekend his government was "working well with the leadership" of Venezuela, and that Rodríguez in particular had been "very good".
Delcy Rodríguez's brother Jorge (right) was seen as Nicolás Maduro's right-hand man.
He has also continued to declare he is in control of the country. In a post on Truth Social, Trump shared a screenshot of a spoof Wikipedia page calling him the "Acting President of Venezuela".
Vigil said ceding effective control of the country's most valuable asset to the US meant the new leader would need to contain the resentment it would inflame within her own coalition.
"I think that is going to set up a situation where you are likely to see some sort of power struggle within the regime itself," she said.
"That's the biggest risk; instability within the regime itself, that then bleeds over to instability for the country."
For decades, Venezuela has been ruled by an authoritarian, socialist regime that began under Hugo Chávez. Some analysts now say it has split into two factions within the United Socialist Party.
Rebecca Hanson, Venezuela expert at the University of Florida, said on one side is the civilian faction, led by Rodríguez and her brother Jorge Rodríguez, who is also the head of the Venezuelan National Assembly. It favours a technocratic approach with policies that can improve the country's economic competitiveness.
"Jorge has really been Maduro's right-hand man for a long period of time," Hanson said.
"Delcy herself was really charged with helping to … recover the economy after the economic crisis a number of years ago, and she seemed to be very successful at that."
While the civilian faction is defined by its pragmatism, the military faction is guided by its nationalistic, ideological roots.
Its members are involved in both legal and illicit industries, including oil, gold and drug trafficking, Hanson said. They are effectively led by internal affairs minister Diosdado Cabello, who also controls the police forces and prisons, and defence minister Padrino Lopez.
Cabello is also named as a co-conspirator in Maduro's US indictment.
Diosdado Cabello (left) and Vladimir Padrino Lopez control the majority of Venezuela's armed forces. (Reuters: Leonardo Fernandez Viloria)
"They very much are dependent on Chavismo continuing to stay in power, to continue to have access to those resources."
The two factions appear to be presenting a united front in the face of enormous US pressure, but that could quickly turn.
"There's been a lot of tension between these two factions for a number of years," Hanson said, with their leaders having little trust in one another.
If the alliance between the two breaks, a coup d'etat could ensue, which could be followed by the US deploying ground forces, and guerilla warfare breaking out between armed groups.
One of those groups would be the country's "colectivos": armed, loyalist paramilitary groups used by the government to suppress dissent.
Intimidatory tactics have already been used with one colectivo leader promising "revenge" for those who celebrated Maduro's capture in a social media post shortly after it happened.
"That's the absolute worst case scenario … massive violence that involves multiple actors, multiple armed actors across the board," Hanson said.
Pentagon war games show disastrous outcomes for Venezuelan people
Douglas Farah runs a Washington-based national security consultancy and worked with the Pentagon for about a decade, including during Trump's first administration. He said Venezuela's ruling coalition was more likely to fracture over economics than ideology.
"As long as there's enough to keep everyone's needs met at a minimum level, they stay together," he said.
Douglas Farah says if daily life in Venezuela gets worse it will turn them against the US. (Reuters/Maxwell Briceno)
As part of his work, Farah ran war games at the Pentagon during Trump's first term, modelling long-term intervention in Venezuela. Two scenarios saw Maduro removed from office via his own regime; one left him in power.
All, he said, ended disastrously for ordinary Venezuelans because none allowed the military to be sidelined and humanitarian aid delivered without "significant struggles".
He predicts US control of Venezuela's oil industry, combined with food and medical shortages, will push the country toward chaos, fracturing the armed forces and civilian society.
"You need a modicum of economic stability for people to really take to the streets," he said.
In such a collapse, Farah said Rodriguez would likely retain control of Caracas, perhaps an airport, "and probably nothing else", as power devolved to armed groups and fragmenting Venezuela into multiple de facto states centred on its five major cities, where 80 per cent of the population lives.
All-in-all, "a worse outcome than [the US] not having done anything at all".
Hanson also said a viable opposition in the country would be a long way off when the two dominant political parties "have long sought to eliminate" one another.
"I don't really think there's any kind of way forward until both sides agree to participate in the political sphere in some kind of a way that is not characterised by this fight to the death mentality that both the opposition and Chavismo have had for years."
Additional reporting by Emilie Gramenz and Brad Ryan in Washington DC
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