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delcy rodríguez
Under Pressure From Trump, Venezuela's Leader Signs Bill Opening Oil Industry to Privatization
"Trump is deploying drone and gunboat diplomacy to coerce Venezuela into serving up its oil resources to Big Oil," said one US watchdog group.
Jan 29, 2026
Venezuelan scholars and a US watchdog group were among those expressing concern on Thursday after Venezuela's government caved to pressure from President Donald Trump and signed a bill opening up the South American country's nationalized oil industry to privatization.
After US forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores—who have both pleaded not guilty to federal narco-terrorism charges—the Trump administration installed the deposed leader's former deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, as acting president.
On Thursday, Venezuela's National Assembly—which is led by the acting president's brother, Jorge Rodríguez—approved and Delcy Rodríguez signed legislation that "promises to give private companies control over the production and sale of oil and allow for independent arbitration of disputes," according to the Associated Press.
As AP reported:
Rodríguez's government expects the changes to serve as assurances for major US oil companies that have so far hesitated about returning to the volatile country. Some of those companies lost investments when the ruling party enacted the existing law two decades ago to favor Venezuela's state-run oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA.
The revised law would modify extraction taxes, setting a royalty cap rate of 30% and allowing the executive branch to set percentages for every project based on capital investment needs, competitiveness, and other factors.
It also removes the mandate for disputes to be settled only in Venezuelan courts, which are controlled by the ruling party. Foreign investors have long viewed the involvement of independent courts as crucial to guard against future expropriation.
Malfred Gerig, a sociologist from Central University of Venezuela, said on social media that the Rodríguez siblings' United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) "has just approved the most anti-nationalist and damaging oil law since, at least, 1943. The absolute surrender of the state as an oil producer and a sudden conversion of the property rights of the Venezuelan nation into private rights of foreign companies."
Victor Lovera, an economics professor at Andres Bello Catholic University in Caracas, said that "it must be really fucking tough for the Rodríguez siblings to end up as the empire's lapdogs and open up the oil sector, taking us back to the 1970s, before the nationalization of oil. All just to cling to power for a few more months."
Trump—who returned to office a year ago with help from Big Oil's campaign cash—has made clear that his aggressive policy toward Venezuela is focused on the country's petroleum reserves, which critics have blasted as a clear effort to further enrich his donors and himself.
"Trump is deploying drone and gunboat diplomacy to coerce Venezuela into serving up its oil resources to Big Oil," said Robert Weissman, co-president of the US watchdog group Public Citizen, in a Thursday statement.
"Imperfectly, Venezuela has for most of the last century sought to manage its oil and gas reserves to advance its national interest, rather than that of outside investors," he noted. "Brutal sanctions and the threat of still more military action from the Trump regime are now forcing Venezuela to turn from that history and make its oil available to Big Oil at discount rates and to agree that investor disputes should be resolved at corporate-friendly international tribunals."
"This is imperial policy to benefit Big Oil, not Americans—and certainly not Venezuelans," Weissman stressed. "Even still, US oil companies are likely to be reluctant to invest heavily in Venezuela without US government guarantees—a likely next step in Trump’s oil imperialism, unless Congress moves proactively to block it."
Both chambers of the US Congress are narrowly controlled by Trump's Republican Party, and they have so far failed to pass war powers resolutions aimed at stopping more military action in Venezuela and the administration's bombings of boats allegedly smuggling drugs in international waters—all of which some American lawmakers and other experts have argued are illegal.
When Trump's secretary of state and acting national security adviser, Marco Rubio, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—on which he previously served—on Wednesday, he insisted that the president wasn’t planning for any more military action in Venezuela, but would take it, potentially without congressional authorization, in "self-defense."
Rubio also laid out how the United States intends to continue controlling Venezuelan oil and related profits, telling senators that Venezuela's government will submit periodic budgets, and as long as they comply with preset restrictions, the Trump administration will release funds from a US Treasury blocked account.
After the legislation passed Thursday, the Trump administration began easing sanctions on Venezuela's oil industry, with the Treasury issuing a general license authorizing certain activities involving Venezuelan-origin oil.
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‘Free Maduro!’ Thousands of Venezuelans Rally to Demand Trump Release Kidnapped President
"The empire can do whatever it wants, but we are here to tell you that we are free, independent, and sovereign," said one demonstrator.
Jan 15, 2026
Demonstrations demanding the United States release Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife continued Wednesday as thousands more people took to the streets of Caracas in a show of support for the abducted leftist leader.
Public workers led a march through Caracas, during which demonstrators chanted slogans—including "Free Maduro!"—while vowing to keep protesting until the socialist president and his wife, First Combatant Cilia Flores, return home.
“Unity is not under discussion at this time," Capital District Head of Government Nahum Fernández said during Wednesday's rally. "The person who conspires against unity conspires against Venezuela."
“The Venezuelan people are going to be in the streets and they’re going to have to hand Maduro over to the Venezuelans,” Fernández added.
Labor leader Anais Herrera demanded the US release Maduro “because he is our president and we want him back, we are in the streets and we will not rest.”
"The president prepared us for this and that is why we are in combat, in the streets with the Venezuelan working class,” she said.
Maduro and Flores were kidnapped by US special forces soldiers during a January 3 invasion backed by airstrikes and an armada of naval warships deployed along with thousands of troops off the Venezuelan coast. The US operation killed more than 100 people, including Venezuelan troops and civilians and over 30 Cuban soldiers and police officers.
The administration of US President Donald Trump has indicted Maduro for alleged conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine into the United States, conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices, and possession of such weapons. Maduro has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and has called himself a "prisoner of war."
The kidnapping and charges came amid US bombing of alleged drug-running boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, covert CIA operations, oil tanker seizures, and years of crippling economic sanctions.
Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez—who is serving as the US-backed acting president—said Wednesday that she had a long, courteous phone call with Trump, who expressed satisfaction with her move to release hundreds of prisoners held for political or national security offenses.
“This opportunity is for Venezuela and for the people of Venezuela to be able to see reflected a new moment where coexistence, where living together, where recognition of the other allows building and erecting a new spirituality,” Rodríguez said.
Trump took to his Truth Social network Wednesday to praise the "very good call" with Rodríguez.
"We are making tremendous progress, as we help Venezuela stabilize and recover," the president wrote. "Many topics were discussed, including Oil, Minerals, Trade and, of course, National Security. This partnership between the United States of America and Venezuela will be a spectacular one FOR ALL."
Amid widespread international condemnation of his aggression, Trump has openly declared his intention to control and exploit Venezuela's vast oil resources, dubiously claiming that the country owes the US for losses incurred by oil companies due to past petroleum nationalization.
Trump is scheduled to meet Thursday afternoon with Venezuelan opposition leader and recent Nobel Peace Prize recipient María Corina Machado at the White House. To the chagrin of right-wing Venezuelans and much of his base, Trump has said that Machado "doesn't have the support" to be the country's next president.
On the streets of Caracas, one protester said Wednesday, "We say to Donald Trump, that miserable invader... [that] Maduro has already proven that he is innocent."
"Nicolás is not a drug trafficker," she added. "I don't know why they haven't returned him yet."
Another demonstrator at the march said, "The empire can do whatever it wants, but we are here to tell you that we are free, independent, and sovereign."
"You can meet with whomever you want," the man said in a message meant for Trump, "but you must meet with who represents our government, and you must release Nicolás Maduro—our president—and Cilia Flores."
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Rodriguez or Trump: Who Is Really Running Venezuela?
Will Delcy Rodriguez govern the country as a compliant and coerced US puppet, or as the leader of an undefeated and independent Venezuela?
Jan 09, 2026
As the Senate voted to advance a War Powers Resolution on Venezuela on January 8th, Republican Senator Susan Collins declared that she did not agree with “a sustained engagement 'running' Venezuela.”
The world was mystified when President Donald Trump first said that the United States would “run” Venezuela. He has since made it clear that he wants to control Venezuela by imposing a US monopoly on selling its oil to the rest of the world, to trap the Venezuelan government in a subservient relationship with the United States.
The US Energy Department has published a plan to sell Venezuelan oil already seized by the United States and then to use the same system for all future Venezuelan oil exports. The US would dictate how the revenues are divided between the US and Venezuela, and continue this form of control indefinitely. Trump is planning to meet with US oil company executives on Friday, January 9th, to discuss his plan.
Trump’s plan would cut off Venezuela’s trade with China, Russia, Iran and other countries, and force it to spend its oil revenues on goods and services from the United States. This new form of economic colonialism would also prevent Venezuela from continuing to spend the bulk of its oil revenues on its generous system of social spending, which has lifted millions of Venezuelans out of poverty.
However, on January 7th, the New York Times reported that Venezuela has other plans. “Venezuela’s state-run oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, confirmed for the first time that it was negotiating the 'sale' of crude oil to the United States,” the Times reported. “It said in a statement on social media that it was using 'frameworks similar to those currently in effect with international companies, such as Chevron, and is based on a strictly commercial transaction.'”
Dealing with Trump is a difficult challenge for Delcy Rodriguez and other Latin American leaders, but they should all understand by now that caving to Trump or letting him pick them off one by one is a path to ruin.
Trump has threatened further military action to remove acting president Delcy Rodriguez from office if she does not comply with US plans for Venezuela. But Trump has already bowed to reality in his decision to cooperate with Rodriguez, recognizing that Maria Corina Machado, the previous US favorite, does not have popular support in Venezuela. The very presence of Delcy Rodriguez as acting president exposes the failure of Trump’s regime change operation and his well-grounded reluctance to unleash yet another unwinnable US war.
After the US invasion and abduction of President Maduro on January 3rd, Delcy Rodriguez was sworn in as Acting President, reaffirming her loyalty to President Maduro and taking charge of running the country in his absence. But who is Delcy Rodriguez, and how is she likely to govern Venezuela? As a compliant and coerced US puppet, or as the leader of an undefeated and independent Venezuela?
Delcy Rodriguez was seven years old in 1976, when her father was tortured and beaten to death as a political prisoner in Venezuela. Jorge Antonio Rodriguez was the 34-year-old co-founder of the Socialist League, a leftist political party, whom the government accused of a leading role in the kidnapping of William Niehous, a suspected CIA officer working under cover as an Owens Corning executive.
Jorge Rodríguez was arrested and died in state custody after interrogation by Venezuelan intelligence agents. While the official cause of death was listed as a heart attack, his autopsy found that he had suffered severe injuries consistent with torture, including seven broken ribs, a collapsed chest, and a detached liver.
Delcy studied law in Caracas and Paris and became a labor lawyer, while her older brother Jorge became a psychiatrist. Delcy and her mother, Delcy Gomez, were in London during the failed US-backed coup in Venezuela in 2003, and they denounced the coup from the Venezuelan embassy in interviews with the BBC and CNN.
Delcy and her older brother Jorge soon joined Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian government, and rose to a series of senior positions under Chavez and then Maduro: Delcy served as Foreign Minister from 2014 to 2017, and Economy and Finance Minister from 2020 to 2024, as well as Oil Minister and Vice President; Jorge was Vice President for a year under Chavez and then Mayor of Caracas for 8 years.
On January 5th 2026, it fell to Jorge, now the president of the National Assembly, to swear in his sister as acting president, after the illegal US invasion and abduction of President Maduro. Delcy Rodriguez told her people and the world,
“I come as the executive vice president of the constitutional president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro Moros, to take the oath of office. I come with pain for the suffering that has been caused to the Venezuelan people after an illegitimate military aggression against our homeland. I come with pain for the kidnapping of two heroes who are being held hostage in the United States of America, President Nicolas Maduro and the first combatant, first lady of our country, Cilia Flores. I come with pain, but I must say that I also come with honor to swear in the name of all Venezuelans. I come to swear by our father, liberator Simon Bolivar.”
In other public statements, acting president Rodriguez has struck a fine balance between fierce assertions of Venezuela’s independence and a pragmatic readiness to cooperate peacefully with the United States.
On January 3rd, Delcy Rodriguez declared that Venezuela would “never again be anyone’s colony.” However, after chairing her first cabinet meeting the next day, she said that Venezuela was looking for a “balanced and respectful” relationship with the United States. She went on to say, “We extend an invitation to the government of the US to work jointly on an agenda of cooperation, aimed at shared development, within the framework of international law, and that strengthens lasting peaceful coexistence,”
In a direct message to Trump, Rodriguez wrote, “President Donald Trump: our peoples and our region deserve peace and dialogue, not war. That has always been President Nicolás Maduro’s conviction and it is that of all Venezuela at this moment. This is the Venezuela I believe in and to which I have dedicated my life. My dream is for Venezuela to become a great power where all decent Venezuelans can come together. Venezuela has the right to peace, development, sovereignty and a future.”
Alan McPherson, who chairs the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy at Temple University in the US, calls Delcy Rodriguez “a pragmatist who helped stabilize the Venezuelan economy in recent times.” However, speaking to Al Jazeera, he cautioned that any perceived humiliation by the Trump administration or demands seen as excessive could “backfire and end the cooperation,” making the relationship a “difficult balance to achieve.”
After the US invasion on January 3rd, at least a dozen oil tankers set sail from Venezuela with their location transponders turned off, carrying 12 million barrels of oil, mostly to China, effectively breaking the US blockade. But then, on January 7th, US forces boarded and seized two more oil tankers with links to Venezuela, one in the Caribbean and a Russian one in the north Atlantic that they had been tracking for some time, making it clear that Trump is still intent on selectively enforcing the US blockade.
Chevron has recalled American employees to work in Venezuela and resumed normal shipments to US refineries after a four-day pause. But other US oil companies are not eager to charge into Venezuela, where Trump’s actions have so far only increased the political risks for any new US investments, amid a global surplus of oil supplies, low prices, and a world transitioning to cleaner, renewable energy.
Meanwhile, the US Department of Justice is scrambling to make a case against President Maduro, after Trump’s lawless war plan led to Maduro’s illegal arrest as the leader of a non-existent drug cartel in a foreign country where US domestic law does not apply. In his first court appearance in New York, Maduro identified himself as the president of Venezuela and a prisoner of war.
Continuing to seize ships at sea and trying to shake down Venezuela for control of its oil revenues are not the “balanced and respectful” relationship that Delcy Rodriguez and the government of Venezuela are looking for, and the US position is not as strong as Trump and Rubio’s threats suggest. Under the influence of neocons like Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham, Trump has marched the US to the brink of a war in Latin America that very few Americans support and that most of the world is united against.
Mutual respect and cooperation with Rodriguez and other progressive Latin American leaders, like Lula in Brazil, Gustavo Petro in Colombia, and Mexico’s Claudia Scheinbaum, offer Trump face-saving ways out of the ever-escalating crisis that he and his clueless advisers have blundered into.
Trump has an eminently viable alternative to being manipulated into war by Marco Rubio: what the Chinese like to call “win-win cooperation.” Most Americans would favor that over the zero-sum game of hegemonic imperialism into which Rubio and Trump are draining our hard-earned tax dollars.
The main obstacle to the peaceful cooperation that Trump says he wants is his own blind belief in US militarism and military supremacy. He wants to redirect US imperialism away from Europe, Asia, and Africa toward Latin America, but this is no more winnable or any more legitimate under international law, and it’s just as unpopular with the American people.
If anything, there is greater public opposition to US aggression “in our backyard” than to US wars 10,000 miles away. Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia are our close neighbors, and the consequences of plunging them into violence and chaos are more obvious to most Americans than the equally appalling human costs of more distant US wars.
Trump understands that endless war is unpopular, but he still seems to believe that he can get away with “one and done” operations like bombing Iran and kidnapping President Maduro and his first lady. These attacks, however, have only solved imaginary problems—Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons and Maduro’s non-existent drug cartel—while exacerbating long-standing regional crises that US policy is largely responsible for, and which have no military solutions.
Dealing with Trump is a difficult challenge for Delcy Rodriguez and other Latin American leaders, but they should all understand by now that caving to Trump or letting him pick them off one by one is a path to ruin. The world must stand together to deter aggression and defend the basic principles and rules of the UN Charter, under which all countries agree to settle disputes peacefully and not to threaten or use military force against each other. Any chance for a more peaceful world depends on finally starting to take those commitments seriously, as Trump’s predecessors also failed to do.
There is a growing movement organizing nationwide protests to tell Trump that the American people reject his wars and threats of war against our neighbors in Latin America and around the world. This is a critical moment to raise your voice and help to turn the tide against endless war.
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