Delcy Rodríguez’s 90-day term as “acting president” of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela officially expired earlier this month—but don’t expect her to go anywhere. Her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro Moros, currently languishing in a New York prison after his sequestration in a daring night raid by American troops, is well on his way to becoming an afterthought, despite legally still holding the post of president of Venezuela. He will not be greatly missed.
In his place, his erstwhile vice president is well on her way to making the presidential palace a comfortable, and permanent, home. Her administration is quietly consolidating power, promoting loyalists to key positions and beginning the process of dismantling the institutional structure Maduro inherited from Hugo Chávez and made his own.
Last month, Rodríguez dismissed Minister of Defense Vladimir Padrino López, widely considered one of the most powerful men in the government, who held that post since being elevated to it by Maduro in 2014. His replacement, Gen. Gustavo González López, served for several years as the head of Venezuela’s sinister Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN)—an agency that falls under the purview of the Office of the Vice President, where Delcy Rodríguez has served since mid-2018. Their collaboration appears to have been profitable to both parties: the new defense minister has been tasked with reforming the armed forces for the dawning new era and has gone about it with considerable promptness. The clumsy ideological slogans of the Bolivarian Revolution, which once graced all communications from the Ministry of Defense—¡Chávez vive, la lucha sigue! (Chávez lives, the fight continues!) for example— have all disappeared. Only the professional and innocuous ¡Venceremos! (We will triumph!) has been retained as a motto of the country’s armed forces.
Along with the replacement of Vladimir Padrino, Rodríguez has made a number of lower-profile changes in the government. The high command of the military has been almost entirely shaken up—no great surprise after its humiliating failure in January—and Rodríguez has replaced the heads of nearly half of all the ministries in her cabinet, including the ministers responsible for transportation, hydrocarbons, electric power, labor, housing, and communications.
Emblematic of the changes is her dismissal of Eduardo Piñate as minister of Labor. Piñate, a fervent Marxist and a socialist agitator since the 1970s, became an important political figure in Venezuela after the Bolivarian Revolution. He was appointed by Maduro to serve as the presidential secretary of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), the legislative arm of Maduro’s movement, and served as minister of education, minister of labor, and governor of his home state of Apure before being appointed secretary of labor for a second time in 2024. Considered one of Maduro’s “strongmen,” along with figures like Diosdado Cabello and Jorge Rodríguez, he now finds himself on the outside. His replacement, Carlos Castillo, is a lawyer specializing in labor law who also serves as a judge on Venezuela’s highest court.
In addition to making personnel changes, Rodríguez is working hard on revising the rotten Bolivarian socialist economic structures that have sunk Venezuela into squalid poverty (all under the watchful eye of Uncle Sam and his pacific gunboat fleet). The most pressing matter concerns revitalizing Venezuela’s crumbling oilfields, a process Rodríguez began promptly by passing a new law opening up the oil and gas industry for private investment in January. The legal and regulatory regime is still far from what most oil companies would consider acceptable, but the country has taken the first few steps on the long road to unwinding Chavista expropriations and the nationalization of Venezuelan energy resources.
But the changes are not limited to the energy industry. On Thursday, the Venezuelan legislature approved a new law opening up the country’s mining industry as well, raising the prospect of expansive ventures in largely unexploited Venezuelan mineral resources. Venezuela has some of the world’s largest gold reserves and a wealth of other vital minerals, including rare earths. American interest in the sector is clear—Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum visited Venezuela with dozens of mining executives in March—and would provide an opportunity for the country to vastly expand an essentially untapped sector of its economy. The endeavor is likely to prove much more difficult than it first appears—the Orinoco Belt, Venezuela’s mining region, is largely controlled by criminal organizations and drug cartels that profit from illegal gold mining—but could prove lucrative in the long-term.
The U.S. has reciprocated Delcy Rodríguez’s efforts to open the country and cooperate economically with American business. In March, it officially recognized her as Venezuela’s leader (a courtesy not extended to Maduro, who both the Trump and Biden administrations maintained was an illegitimate president after 2019) and announced that the two countries would reestablish formal diplomatic ties after seven years of suspension. Going further still, on April 1 the Treasury Department lifted its sanctions on Rodríguez—part of the process of allowing the president to take over the American subsidiaries of Venezuela’s state oil corporation, but no doubt a significant benefit to Rodríguez personally as well.
The ongoing transformation in bilateral relations has raised hopes and fears among Venezuela’s people and the opposition at home and abroad. The loosening economic measures and the promise of American investment are producing the first hope for meaningful economic recovery the country has had in a long time, a desperately needed prospect for the suffering populace.
But there are also concerns from opposition politicians that the institutional legitimacy afforded by an economic boom and cooperation with the Americans could serve to legitimize and entrench her government, rendering a return to vigorous democratic competition impossible. It is likely for this reason that María Corina Machado, having been disappointed in her hopes to receive help from the Trump administration to supplant the Chavista government, is planning a dramatic return to the country regardless of the wishes of the United States.
Either way, Delcy Rodríguez and the Trump administration appear perfectly content with their current partnership. It may continue for a long time yet.
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