Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodríguez took to the stage at the United Nations General Assembly in New York City yesterday and gave a rather bland speech, thanking US President Donald Trump for resuming “diplomatic relations and cooperation” with Venezuela.
This was certainly a different vibe than the one she chose at the same venue in September 2019. At the time, as vice president of President Nicolas Maduro’s government, she accused the United States of carrying out “economic terrorism” without the need for bombs, “rather through banks and insurance companies.”
Rodriguez in 2019 denounced the global superpower’s militarization of international relations and the punishment of millions of innocent people “to apply regime change doctrines and steal other countries’ resources,” citing US sanctions that cost Venezuela $130 billion in economic losses from 2015 to 2018 alone.
She also opined that the domination of the US political system by a “plutocratic minority” left the country unqualified to impose its model on other countries.
Seven years have passed, and America’s plutocracy has solidified under President Trump. Less than nine months after abducting President Maduro and orchestrating regime change in Venezuela, Rodriguez was seen grinning alongside fellow President Donald Trump in a photo taken in New York on Tuesday.
The kidnapped president is currently imprisoned in New York and is scheduled to stand trial in June 2027. This is despite his efforts to remind the public that, as a sitting head of state, prosecution in foreign courts violates international law.
Again, it is clearly illegal to kidnap the president of another country. But President Trump made it clear that he is the only one who decides what is and is not allowed on that day.
The abduction occurred on January 3, when the US military launched airstrikes on Venezuela, killing about 100 people and taking Maduro and his wife.
He has been accused of a series of misdeeds, including being the leader of the “Sunshine Cartel” (which, mind you, doesn’t actually exist) and being involved in a “conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.”
This is a stark condemnation from a country that used all kinds of destructive devices to bomb Venezuela, killing many people.
In any case, bald-faced hypocrisy is nothing new in countries of “plutocratic minorities.”
Now that people have more or less forgotten that there is a foreign head of state sitting in a Brooklyn prison, the corporate media’s waning interest in Maduro’s fate amounts to another coup d’état aimed at impunity in the United States.
But Mr. Maduro’s disappearance is a boon for Mr. Rodríguez, who is enabling the very theft of resources she once denounced.
Rodriguez took to the stage at the United Nations a day after President Trump. Mr. Trump used the stage to pat himself on the back for trampling on Venezuela’s sovereignty, which conveniently culminated in the White House’s announcement last month of the “largest oil deal in the history of the world,” securing U.S. majority control of Venezuela’s more than 65 billion barrels of proven oil reserves.
President Trump boasted to a worldwide audience: “To the winner is the spoils. You’ve heard it before.”
Never mind that you’re not technically supposed to admit that you attacked a country just to get oil. (Also, if we are polite, we are not allowed to threaten to annihilate Iran, which is one of President Trump’s talking points at the United Nations.)
Since January, the United States has lifted a number of coercive economic measures against Venezuela (including against Rodríguez himself), easing a brutal sanctions regime that is estimated to have already killed 100,000 Venezuelans as of 2020, according to former UN independent expert Alfredo Maurice de Zayas.
However, it is no big deal to offer sanctions in exchange for de facto colonialism.
Meanwhile, President Trump’s continued frenzied bombing of ships in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean, which a recent UN report warned could amount to crimes against humanity, suggests that the United States is far from breaking its old habits of terrorism, all the more reason why Mr. Rodriguez may have refrained from thanking American leaders for their “cooperation.”
Gregory Wilpert, founder of the website Venezuela Analysis and author of Taking Power to Change Venezuela, diplomatically told me: “I have to suspect that Delcy Rodriguez will be overly deferential to Trump in some aspects of her negotiations with him.”
Wilpert noted that Rodriguez is in a “very vulnerable position” and listed several options she faces. For example, “the Trump administration could treat her the same way it treated Mr. Maduro by trying to kidnap her, or the same way it treated Iran by targeting the highest levels of the country’s government.”
Alternatively, there has always been Cuba’s approach, which involves “a kind of economic siege” carried out “with the purpose of starving the entire country,” Wilpert said.
Rodriguez promised in his UN speech that Venezuela would hold elections at an unspecified point, but the United States does not take democracy seriously as long as the right people are in power.
And while it’s still too early to tell, Rodriguez may just be one of those people.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
