# Delcy Rodríguez Acting president of [[Venezuela]] since **5 January 2026**, sworn in two days after U.S. forces captured [[Nicolás Maduro]] and flew him to New York. She had been Maduro's **vice president since 2018** and his **oil minister**, and is a longstanding adherent of the *chavista* movement founded by [[Hugo Chávez]]. She is the single most important fact about why the Venezuela intervention did not produce regime change. The United States removed the head of the government; his own deputy succeeded him; the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) kept the state. The Trump administration **formally recognized her as head of state on 5 January**, over the objection of the Venezuelan opposition figures who had expected Washington to install **Edmundo González Urrutia**, widely regarded as the actual winner of the disputed 2024 election and still in exile. Her initial appointment was framed as a 90-day interim arrangement. **It expired in April 2026 and she remained in office.** Venezuela's high court had held in January that Maduro's absence — which it called a "kidnapping" — required new elections under the constitution. None have been held. ## The oil deal On **28 August 2026** [[Donald Trump]] announced the [[Venezuela Oil Government Equity Stake]], naming Rodríguez as the "Highly Respected Interim President of Venezuela" who had signed for the Venezuelan side. She described the arrangement in reciprocal terms: "Each party contributes what it does best. Venezuela contributes oil, its industry and the experience of its workers accumulated over more than 100 years. The United States contributes the capital and technology needed to recover and develop those assets." She has publicly contradicted the U.S. side on a material term, saying the leases run **25 years** where a U.S. official told Bloomberg they run **100**. That she signs the oil agreements is not incidental: she held the petroleum ministry before she held the presidency. ## Before the presidency Born 1969 in Caracas, the daughter of Jorge Antonio Rodríguez, a founder of the Socialist League who died in the custody of the intelligence police in 1976 — a fact that places her, and her brother Jorge Rodríguez (now president of the National Assembly and the regime's chief negotiator), in the chavista movement's founding martyrology. A lawyer by training, she served [[Hugo Chávez]] as labor minister (2006–07) and chief of staff, then [[Nicolás Maduro]] as minister of communication (2013–14), foreign minister (2014–17, the years of the sanctions fight and the break with the Organization of American States), and president of the 2017 Constituent Assembly, the parallel body that displaced the opposition-held legislature. She became vice president in June 2018, added the petroleum ministry in 2020 and the economy portfolio after it, and was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2018. In the [[2024 Venezuelan Presidential Election]] dispute she was the government's principal defender of the unpublished results. ## The transition Talks opened on **6 August 2026**, led on the government side by her brother and on the other by Dinorah Figuera of the 2015 National Assembly; [[María Corina Machado]] and [[Edmundo González Urrutia]] are excluded, and no election date has been set. The [[Venezuela]] page has the sequence. What her tenure demonstrates is the [[Venezuelan History Hub]]'s argument in one person: the state that [[Bolivarianism]] built is a party and a security apparatus with a presidency attached, and it survives the removal of the presidency because the people who run it — the Rodríguez siblings foremost — were never the man in New York. ## See Also - [[Venezuelan History Hub]] — why the party she inherited survived the removal of its leader - [[Bolivarianism]] · [[María Corina Machado]] — polling roughly three times her approval, and excluded from the talks - [[Venezuela]] — the intervention and the succession - [[Nicolás Maduro]] — her predecessor, in U.S. custody - [[Venezuela Oil Government Equity Stake]] — the August 2026 agreement she signed - [[Hugo Chávez]] — the movement's founder - [[Personalist Regime]] — the frame her succession tests - [[PDVSA]] — the ministry she ran before the presidency