Delcy Rodríguez, at least for now, has taken over as leader of Venezuela after her ally Nicolás Maduro was captured by the United States in a military operation and flown to New York City to face a criminal indictment.
On Saturday, Venezuela’s high court ordered Rodríguez to assume the role of interim president, and the leader was backed by Venezuela’s military.
Rodríguez had served as Maduro’s vice-president since 2018, overseeing much of Venezuela’s oil-dependent economy and its intelligence service, and was next in the presidential line of succession. Between 2014 and 2017, she served as the country’s foreign minister.
While Donald Trump has railed against the Maduro regime since his first term as U.S. president, Rodríguez is part of a band of senior officials in Maduro’s administration that now appear to control Venezuela, with Trump appearing to rule out an immediate role for the country’s conservative political opposition figures.
During the first Trump administration, Rodríguez was among a number of officials who faced U.S. sanctions. In 2018, the U.S. cited Rodríguez for helping Maduro “maintain power and solidify his authoritarian rule,” blocking entry to the U.S. and any financial transactions involving Rodríguez and American individuals or entities.
A year earlier, she was among those hit by sanctions from the Canadian government on similar grounds.
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Family long involved in politics
Rodríguez, a 56-year-old lawyer and politician, has had a lengthy career representing the socialist revolution started by Maduro’s predecessor, the late Hugo Chávez.
Rodríguez held a number of lower-level positions under Chávez’s government but gained prominence working under Maduro to the point of being seen as his successor. At various times, she served as the foreign affairs minister and petroleum minister, among other posts, to help stabilize Venezuela’s endemically crisis-stricken economy after years of rampant inflation and turmoil.
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Rodríguez developed strong ties with U.S. Republicans in the oil industry and on Wall Street who balked at the notion of U.S.-led regime change. The interim president also presided over an assembly promoted by Maduro in response to street protests in 2017 meant to neutralize the opposition-majority legislature.
She enjoys a close relationship with the military, which has long acted as the arbiter of political disputes in Venezuela, said Ronal Rodríguez, a spokesperson for the Venezuela Observatory of Rosario University in Bogota, Colombia.
“She has a very particular relationship with power,” he told the Associated Press. “She has developed very strong ties with elements of the armed forces and has managed to establish lines of dialogue with them, largely on a transactional basis.”
A lawyer educated in Britain and France, the interim president and her brother Jorge Rodríguez, head of the Maduro-controlled National Assembly, have leftist credentials born from tragedy. Their father, Jorge Antonio Rodríguez, was a socialist leader who died in police custody after being arrested for involvement in the kidnapping of American business owner William Niehous in 1976.
Shift in tone from initial defiance
Her rise to become interim leader of the South American country came as a surprise on Saturday morning, when Trump announced that U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had been in communication with Rodríguez. Rubio said Rodríguez was someone the administration could work with, unlike Maduro.
Trump said the U.S. would “run” Venezuela temporarily but Rubio clarified on Sunday that it would not govern the country day to day, other than enforcing an existing “oil quarantine.”
Venezuela’s then-vice-president Delcy Rodriguez speaks during a session of the National Council for Sovereignty and Peace in Caracas on Sept. 29, 2025. (Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/Reuters)
It’s too early to say if Rodríguez will pursues a rapprochement with the Trump administration or follow the same adversarial line as her predecessor.
On Saturday, she demanded that the U.S. return Maduro and called the U.S. government “extremists.”
“What is being done to Venezuela is an atrocity that violates international law,” Rodríguez said, surrounded by high-ranking civilian officials and military leaders.
On Sunday, she struck a more conciliatory tone in a social media post.
“We invite the US government to collaborate with us on an agenda of cooperation oriented towards shared development within the framework of international law to strengthen lasting community coexistence,” she wrote.
Trump was less conciliatory in an interview with The Atlantic magazine, calling on Rodríguez to provide “total access” to her country or face consequences. The U.S. president wants Venezuela to open up its oil industry and stop drug trafficking, even as most international drug experts consider a handful of its South American neighbours as much more heavily involved in cocaine production.
“If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro,” Trump was quoted as saying in the telephone interview over the weekend with The Atlantic.
Geoff Ramsey, a senior non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C., research institute, said Rodríguez’s initially firm tone with the Trump administration may have been an attempt to “save face.”
“She can’t exactly expect to score points with her revolutionary peers if she presents herself as a patsy for U.S. interests,” Ramsey said.
Uneasy calm in Venezuela
Venezuela’s constitution requires an election within 30 days whenever the president becomes “permanently unavailable” to serve. Reasons listed include death, resignation, removal from office or “abandonment” of duties as declared by the National Assembly.
That electoral timeline was rigorously followed when Chavez died of cancer in 2013. However, the loyalist Supreme Court, in its decision on Saturday, cited another provision of the charter in declaring Maduro’s absence a “temporary” one.
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Roxanna Vigil, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, says she has concerns about what comes next in Venezuela after the U.S. captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, early Saturday. Vigil says it will take years to reverse the long decline of Venezuela’s oil sector and that it’s not clear how the Trump administration intends to move forward.
In such a scenario, there is no election requirement. Instead, the vice-president, an unelected position, takes over for up to 90 days — a period that can be extended to six months with a vote by the National Assembly.
In handing temporary power to Rodríguez, the Supreme Court made no mention of the 180-day time limit, leading some to speculate she could try to remain in power.
Trump on Saturday dismissed the idea of opposition leader and most recent Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado taking over, saying she lacked support in Venezuela. Trump did not elaborate on how he came to that conclusion.
Machado was banned from the 2024 election but her ally Edmundo Gonzalez was believed to have accumulated more votes than Maduro in that contest.
Prime Minister Mark Carney in a statement on the weekend highlighted the long-held position of Liberal governments that Maduro was an illegitimate leader, but said “a peaceful, negotiated, and Venezuelan-led transition process that respects the democratic will of the Venezuelan people” was the ideal path forward.
Inside Venezuela, according to reports, Maduro opponents have kept celebrations on hold as his senior loyalists remain in power and there is no overt sign of the military turning against them.
On the streets, Venezuelans have reportedly been stocking up on food and medicines in case of instability.