Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodriguez, put out a statement Sunday night inviting the U.S. to “collaborate with us on an agenda of cooperation oriented towards a shared development within the framework of international law to strengthen lasting community coexistence.”
The statement is significantly more conciliatory than Rodriguez’s previous remarks given after President Donald Trump threatened the former vice president with the fate of her former boss. “If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro,” Trump had said on Sunday.
After the U.S. abducted Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro in a nighttime raid early Saturday morning, Trump told reporters that he had spoken with Rodriguez and that “she’s essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again.”
But in a speech given on Venezuelan state TV Saturday, Rodriguez sounded a note of defiance. “We will never return to being a colony of any empire…. What is happening to Venezuela is barbarity,” she said. “There is only one president of this country, and his name is Nicolas Maduro Moro.”
It remains unclear to what extent the Venezuelan government will cooperate with the U.S. after Maduro’s kidnapping, or whether the U.S. will “run the country” as Trump claimed.
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