On July 2, 2024, a mamón tree fell on Delcy Rodríguez. The accident caused injuries to her right arm, which she frequently wore bandages on. That day, Rodríguez was in Cumanacoa, in eastern Venezuela, overseeing the damage caused by Hurricane Beryl, a gust of wind brought down the enormous tree on top of her and some of her equipment.
The accident was announced by Nicolás Maduro at a public event, in the midst of the campaign for the presidential elections of July 28 of that year. With a discordant sense of humor that has aged poorly, he said: “Delcy, while working in Cumanacoa, was hit by a missile. But she recovers from everything.”
And the statement seems true. Because a year and a half later, we see her—quite recovered—being sworn in as acting president of Venezuela after, indeed, American bombs fell on Caracas to remove Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.
Delcy Eloína Rodríguez Gómez, the woman who occupies the presidential seat in Miraflores with the unexpected backing of the United States, is one of the figures with the greatest accumulation of power within the Venezuelan ruling party and a key operator of the state’s political, repressive, and economic apparatus.
Delcy Rodríguez has been presented as a moderate, a technocrat, a “different” chavista because of her studies in France and England and her fluent English. The first is not true. This is confirmed by American columnist Eva Golinger, who spent several years in Venezuela alongside Hugo Chávez, and by former Turkish diplomat Imdat Oner, who served in Caracas and recalls a meeting with ambassadors in 2015 when Rodríguez was foreign minister: “She arrived two hours late and started yelling at the US and European diplomats. She is a radical chavista, in terms of ideology,” he told La Hora de Venezuela.
What Delcy Rodríguez is, observers and analysts agree, is pragmatic. In fact, her greatest rise within the chavista power structure has occurred since she began to pull the strings of the economic agenda. Over the years, she has become more than just the vice president: she is a central operator of the system, the figure to whom is called upon when it is necessary to confront, execute, close ranks, and secure economic lifelines.
Delcy Eloína Rodríguez Gómez was born in Caracas on May 18, 1969. Her political biography cannot be understood without a later date: July 25, 1976, when her father, Jorge Antonio Rodríguez, died in police custody after being arrested for his involvement in the kidnapping of American businessman William Niehous. The death—attributed to torture and mistreatment—became a breaking point for the family and, over time, a key element of the chavista narrative about the 1958-1998 governments. For Delcy and her brother Jorge, that history of victimization served as both a wound and a compass: politics as reparation, as justice, as revenge. In fact, she once uttered on television: “The Bolivarian Revolution, the arrival of our Commander, was our personal revenge.”
In a government where trust is managed as a scarce resource, Delcy has remained for a fundamental reason: she serves to hold the edifice together when it creaks.
Furthermore, Delcy is not just Delcy. She is part of a duo that, for years, has operated as the backbone of the revolutionary government: alongside her brother Jorge Rodríguez, president of the National Assembly, they have both been described as “political twins” of chavismo. They share origins, narratives, and ambitions.
This family alliance explains their strength. In a government where trust is managed as a scarce resource, Delcy has remained for a fundamental reason: she serves to hold the edifice together when it creaks.
That’s why, when the economy hit its lowest point and needed a boost, Rodríguez became the only high-ranking official attending business meetings, while a vast network of private initiatives was being built under her wing. Investigative journalism platforms like Armando.info have uncovered the now-acting president’s connections to a “business entourage” with ramifications in the construction, tourism, real estate, food import, and packaging sectors.
Domestically, government officials describe her as a reserved, quiet, and low-profile figure with a small but highly loyal circle of allies—allies who now stand by her in what could be the greatest paradox of her life: denouncing the American capture of Nicolás Maduro in her speeches, while in practice allowing the Trump administration to exert control over political decision-making and resuming oil sales agreements with the US.
However, the hand Delcy Rodríguez is currently wielding lacks, by far, the legal certainty, reliability, and constitutional guarantees that oil executives demand. She and her inner circle are burdened by a long history of human rights violations, economic hardship, over 800 political prisoners still incarcerated, and internal disputes.
A pillar of the dictatorship
Rodríguez served as Minister of the Presidency (2006), Minister of Communication and Information (2013-2014), Minister of Foreign Affairs (2014-2017), President of the National Constituent Assembly (2017-2018), and, since June 2018, Executive Vice President. However, one of the turning points in her career was her presidency of the National Constituent Assembly, a body created without a prior referendum and not recognized by the international community.
From her position as president of the National Constituent Assembly (ANC), she spearheaded a process that effectively nullified the National Assembly elected in 2015, concentrating legislative, judicial, and political oversight functions in a body dominated exclusively by chavismo. Under her leadership, legal instruments widely criticized by human rights organizations were approved.
This was also the period when Delcy Rodríguez held the pro tempore presidency of Mercosur, and when Venezuela ceased to be a member of the organization for violating the Accession Protocol.
In this context, the then Foreign Minister was involved in an unforgettable incident: In December 2016, she was denied entry to the organization’s meeting held in Buenos Aires, but she made headlines by appearing with her arm in a sling, allegedly due to injuries she suffered when she was prevented from entering the meeting. “I was beaten by a police officer (…) the offenses and physical abuse that can occur within Mercosur against a nation and its foreign minister are shameful,” Rodríguez stated at the time.
Investigations indicate that, days before the ‘Delcygate’ trip, Delcy Rodríguez facilitated the sale of 104 Venezuelan gold bars valued at more than $60 million to Spanish businesspeople.
Delcy Rodríguez’s record on human rights ranges from her participation in the creation of a repressive legal framework to her role as one of the main perpetrators of one of the most intense waves of repression during the chavista era. During her tenure in the National Constituent Assembly, regulatory frameworks and decisions were promoted and consolidated that facilitated the repression and criminalization of dissent.
Among them are the Constitutional Law Against Hatred (2017), systematically used to criminally prosecute opposition members, journalists, activists, and citizens for expressions on social media, with sentences of up to 20 years in prison. She provided critical support for permanent states of emergency, which suspended constitutional guarantees and allowed for arrests without a warrant. Delcy Rodríguez also helped to legitimize civil-military control of public order, consolidating the use of military courts and intelligence agencies against civilians.
As Executive Vice President of the Republic, she had direct authority over Ministries and security agencies. Between 2018 and April 2021, under her chain of command, the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN) was documented as responsible for arbitrary detentions, torture, enforced disappearances, and mass surveillance.
The UN Human Rights Council’s Fact-Finding Mission concluded in 2020 that there were “reasonable grounds to believe” that Rodríguez knew or should have known about crimes committed by the State and failed to act to prevent them, despite her position of authority. These conclusions were reiterated and expanded in subsequent resolutions that kept the international investigation into Venezuela active.
Corruption, gold, and international schemes
Beyond her role in the chain of command of human rights violations, Delcy Rodríguez has been linked to transnational corruption schemes involving gold, foreign businesspeople, and opaque financial circuits.
On January 20, 2020, Rodríguez (sanctioned by the European Union from 2018) entered Spain despite the existing travel ban and met with then-Minister José Luis Ábalos (currently in jail), triggering the scandal known as Delcygate. Investigations indicate that, days before the trip, she facilitated the sale of 104 Venezuelan gold bars valued at more than $60 million to Spanish businesspeople. The Civil Guard found communications between Rodríguez and businessman Víctor de Aldama that directly link the vice president to this transaction.
This case is part of a broader pattern of illegal extraction and international money laundering of Venezuelan gold through shell companies, a scheme that reinforces corruption and the evasion of financial controls. In the political and media sphere, the Delcygate scandal has also been linked to other controversies in Spain, such as the state bailout of the airline Plus Ultra, which has ties to figures associated with Chavismo, although there is no direct legal evidence implicating Rodríguez.
It is impossible to forget that Venezuela’s current interim president spearheaded a scandalous pact with dangerous gang members in 2017.
Another key figure is Jorge Giménez. This Venezuelan businessman and president of the Venezuelan Football Federation (FVF), is the subject of an investigation by Armando.info, which exposes him as an operative for the chavista regime and a trusted associate of Rodríguez. He is implicated in opaque contracts linked to the CLAP program and PDVSA, with debts and irregular agreements exceeding $1.2 billion. Furthermore, he appears in chats related to the Spanish case as a direct interlocutor of his “boss,” solidifying the connection between Venezuelan political power and international corruption networks.
The Associated Press recently published a report revealing that the DEA has been investigating Rodríguez for years. “Rodriguez has been on the radar of the US Drug Enforcement Administration for years, and in 2022 she was even labeled a ‘priority target,’ a designation the DEA reserves for suspects believed to have a ‘significant impact’ on drug trafficking, according to records obtained by the AP and more than half a dozen current and former US law enforcement officials,” the publication states.
Although the same publication clarifies that the United States has never accused Rodríguez of any crime and notes that she “is not among the more than a dozen Venezuelan officials—from Maduro’s inner circle—accused of drug trafficking along with the ousted president,” it is impossible to forget that Venezuela’s current interim president spearheaded a scandalous pact with dangerous gang members in 2017.
That year, while dozens of students protesting against the repression of Nicolás Maduro’s government were being killed in the streets of the country’s main cities, Rodríguez, then president of the National Assembly, led the task of negotiating with criminal groups to keep them calm and prevent them from rising up against the government.