President Trump, speaking with reporters yesterday:
Q: On Venezuela, Cabello, the — the de facto number two in Venezuela right now, he seemed pretty reluctant to work with the U.S., and obviously, he’s in —
Trump: With us? They just gave us 50 million barrels of oil.
Q: The number two, the Venezuela security chief.
Trump: I know the number one. We just had a great conversation today and she’s a terrific person. I mean, she’s somebody that we’ve worked with very well. Marco Rubio is dealing with her. I dealt with her this morning. We had a call, a long call. We discussed a lot of things, and I think we’re getting along very well with Venezuela.
The “number one” in Venezuela right now is acting President Delcy Rodríguez. Back on January 5, I took a long look at her record:
She is a Maduro loyalist, a “hardline socialist,” and has close ties to Cuba’s intelligence agency. The New York Times described her “impeccable leftist credentials” as the “daughter of a Marxist guerrilla who won fame for kidnapping an American businessman.” From 2018 to 2022, Rodríguez headed SEBIN, the Venezuelan intelligence service, which the United Nations determined “repressed dissent through crimes against humanity” “including acts of torture and sexual violence. . . . The report details how orders were given by individuals at the highest political levels to lower-ranking officials. Both SEBIN and DGCIM made extensive use of sexual and gender-based violence to torture and humiliate its detainees.”
In December, imprisoned retired Venezuelan major general Cliver Antonio Alcalá Cordones sent a letter accusing “Rodriguez and her brother, National Assembly President Jorge Rodriguez of being the real leaders of the criminal network long known as the Cartel de los Soles.” In November, the U.S. government designated the Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist organization.
In June 2018, the European Union imposed sanctions on Rodríguez, declaring that she and ten other Venezuelan officials were “responsible for human rights violations and for undermining democracy and the rule of law in Venezuela.”
The U.S. Treasury Department also imposed sanctions on Rodríguez.
As I summarized, “Delcy Rodríguez is responsible for a list of crimes longer than a CVS receipt, and she is morally indistinguishable from Nicolás Maduro.”
Perhaps the circumstances in Venezuela require the U.S. to not unduly antagonize Rodríguez, as part of an effort to both cajole and strong-arm her into enacting policies that align with U.S. interests.
But is it really too much to ask that the president of the United States not call a hard-line socialist and notorious human rights abuser with deep ties to the cartels a “terrific person”? Is that really setting the bar too high?