As Nicolás Maduro sat blindfolded on an American warship, the question of who would succeed him as ruler of Venezuela was already being answered by the US president.
“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” President Trump announced at Mar-a-Lago in Florida. “We don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years.”
Together with Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, and other key administration officials, Trump said he would work with Delcy Rodríguez, the Venezuelan vice-president and a key Maduro ally, who Trump said had been sworn in as leader, to run the country.
Later on Saturday, Venezuela’s Supreme Court ordered Rodríguez become the country’s interim leader.
Rodríguez is from a powerful left-wing family in Venezuela. Her father, Jorge, was a politician and Marxist guerrilla fighter who became famous for the kidnapping of an American businessman in the 1970s. The businessman was later released, but Jorge was killed by Venezuelan intelligence agents who were torturing him under interrogation.
After a life spent working to advance socialism and fighting US imperialism, Rodríguez, a former lawyer and diplomat, now appears to be being strong-armed by Trump into leading her country as an American puppet state, with the threat of full-scale military invasion if she does not co-operate.
“She had a long conversation with Marco and she said, ‘We’ll do whatever you need’. I think she was quite gracious, but she really doesn’t have a choice,” Trump said, later adding that she was “essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again”.
Marco Rubio addresses the media on Saturday
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Rodríguez appeared on Venezuelan television on Saturday to demand the “immediate release of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores”, insisting that Maduro was “the only president of Venezuela”.
A source close to the Venezuelan government said that Rodríguez’s insistence that Maduro was still in power could be related to the fine print of the country’s constitution. Should Maduro be overthrown, Rodríguez would automatically be constitutionally bound to call elections within a short period of time.
Yet, if she could argue that she was ruling in Maduro’s stead on a temporary basis, she could stay in power for a longer time, after which the national assembly, which is headed by her brother and where their party has a majority, could determine whether she could stay in power.
“I think that’s just for internal purposes,” the source said, referring to Rodríguez’s speech on TV. “She can’t be too open about that internally. It could expose her … There are still very extreme factions [in Venezuela], a lot of national sentiment … she has to manage the internal dynamics … she can’t just all of a sudden say she’s a puppet.”
Sources close to Rodríguez said she had been offered deals to push Maduro aside by the US in recent months, including via the US special envoy Richard Grenell and by a prominent Miami lobbyist, but she refused them.
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The source said: “It’s quite clear that Delcy is now running the show, that she’s in contact with Rubio, that she’d been sworn in; he clearly stated that [María] Machado [the leader of the opposition] doesn’t have any support.”
They later added: “It’s good news Delcy is in control because it means there can be stability and things can happen without further violence, and she’s somebody who is very pragmatic as well in terms of how she deals with things.”
Yet Rodríguez and her brother are only one faction within the Venezuelan regime, albeit a powerful one. Diosdado Cabello, the interior, justice and peace minister, is a hardliner who is one of Maduro’s chief enforcers. He is a rival of Rodríguez and her brother, who are considered more moderate.
Vladimir Padrino López, the defence minister who is the country’s top-ranking military officer, is also a key player and was still in Caracas on Saturday.
Maduro and Vladimir Padrino López in November
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The fact that Maduro’s inner circle were left behind during the raid that whisked the president and his wife from the country prompted theories among Venezuelans that key regime figures had been part of the US plot.
What was immediately clear was that for Trump, the most important next step was not democracy but stability that would allow US oil firms to enter the country and start work.
When asked how long he would run Venezuela, and when elections would take place, Trump said it would take a “pretty good time”. He said: “We’re going to run the country right … It’s going to run very … judiciously, very fairly. It’s going to make a lot of money. We’re going to give money to the people.”
The democratic opposition movement appeared to have been frozen out of the transition process, with Trump saying on Saturday afternoon that he had not spoken to Machado, a Nobel peace prize laureate, and that she didn’t have enough “respect” from the Venezuelan people to rule.
Earlier on Saturday morning, Machado had issued a statement claiming that “the hour of freedom has arrived” and calling for her ally Edmundo González Urrutia, who won elections in 2024 that were stolen by Maduro, to take power.
Edmundo González Urrutia and María Machado in 2024
FEDERICO PARRA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Machado had been living in hiding in Venezuela since Maduro overturned her opposition alliance’s victory in the 2024 elections. Last month she escaped Venezuela in a dramatic operation that involved her travelling in disguise — and being caught in a storm at sea — to accept the Nobel peace prize in Oslo.
As the US attack began on Saturday morning, it quickly became clear that the Venezuelan democratic opposition had been sidelined by the US. Minutes after the attack on Caracas began, a representative for Machado sent a text to a Sunday Times journalist asking them whether they had any information on what was happening.