“Acting president” of Venezuela Delcy Rodríguez on Thursday thanked President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio for “goodwill” in restoring bilateral ties between their countries.
Rodríguez expressed her gratitude to President Trump during the signing ceremony of Venezuela’s new Mining Law, approved last week by lawmakers from the socialist regime-controlled National Assembly. The legislation is one of the most significant reforms conducted by the Venezuelan regime following the January 3 U.S. law enforcement operation in Caracas authorized by President Trump that led to the successful arrest of Nicolás Maduro, long wanted by U.S. authorities on multiple narco-terrorism charges.
The text revoked decades’ worth of socialist restrictions imposed into the nation’s mining industry and introduced new provisions to attract foreign investment into the sector — particularly, from the United States.
“I would like to thank President Trump, the Secretary of State, and the Secretaries who have been involved in this entire process for their willingness to pursue diplomatic, economic, and cooperative relations with Venezuela adapted to a reality that allows the truth about Venezuela to be known,” Rodríguez said during her opening remarks at the signing ceremony.
For decades, Venezuela and the United States had maintained strong friendly ties — a relationship that progressively strained under the government of late socialist dictator Hugo Chávez and worsened during the rule of Nicolás Maduro, who succeeded Chávez in early 2013 when he passed away from a publicly undisclosed form of cancer.
Rodríguez, a lifelong Marxist and daughter of late Venezuelan Marxist terrorist Jorge Rodríguez, has been serving as “acting president” of Venezuela following Maduro’s downfall, having served as the deposed dictator’s vice president and oil minister at the time of his capture. Her brother, Jorge Rodríguez, is the current head of the National Assembly.
Following Maduro’s capture, Delcy Rodríguez began collaborating with the Trump administration, seeking U.S. help and investment towards restoring the nation’s socialist-mismanaged industries in exchange for sharing some of its oil and other resources with the U.S. Since then, the Venezuelan regime has cooperated with the Trump administration in implementing President Trump’s three-phase plan — stabilization, recovery, and transition — for restoring democracy in Venezuela.
The countries officially reestablished diplomatic ties in late March. Several high-ranking U.S. officials — such as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and Kyle Haustveit, Assistant Secretary for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy Office (HGEO) — have met wit Rodríguez in Caracas over the past weeks.
The new mining law, which rescinded restrictions imposed by decree during the early years of Chávez’s rule, was a reform promoted by Rodríguez during Sec. Burgum’s visit in February. It came months after lawmakers from the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) approved similarly sweeping reforms to the nation’s hydrocarbons law, allowing foreign investment into the nation’s rundown oil sector while revoking draconian socialist restrictions imposed upon the sector.
Speaking at U.S. Congress Western Hemisphere Subcommittee hearing titled “Latin America After the Fall of Maduro” on Thursday, Michael Kozak, senior bureau official in the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, told Congress that the first phase is “done” and that the second phase will see the recovery of the Venezuelan economy and a “political reconciliation.” Kozak emphasized to Congress that this not about “trusting” the regime, but rather, trusting in America’s leverage to achieve its goals, and made mention of the United States’s “very significant” control of Venezuela’s oil revenue.
On Thursday, both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank announced that they had resumed dealings with the Venezuelan regime, ending a seven-year-long rupture. Per the left-wing propaganda network Telesur, Rodríguez described the resumption of talks between the IMF and Venezuela as a “great achievement of Venezuelan diplomacy,” thanking President Trump and Secretary Rubio, as well as the United Arab Emirates, Brazil, and Qatar, for their efforts towards restoring the ties. For years, both Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro maintained a highly antagonistic stance against the IMF.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
