US holds secret indictment of Delcy Rodriguez, top opposition journo claims

A US-funded opposition journalist revealed the Trump DOJ has crafted a secret indictment of Venezuela’s Acting President to “hold it over her head,” and will execute it if she “derails.”

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Delcy Rodríguez stepped in as Acting President following a deadly US military raid on Caracas this January 3 which left over 100 dead, including 32 Cuban military officers, and resulted in the kidnapping of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. In an interview with The Atlantic the following day, US President Donald Trump recognized Rodríguez as the new leader, but warned, “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.” 

Since then, Rodríguez has presided over the passage of an Organic Law on Hydrocarbons which rolled back the socialist reforms the late President Hugo Chavez made to the country’s state oil company, PDVSA. In a January 16 speech to Venezuela’s National Council of Economic Productivity, Rodríguez explained the impetus for the new law: 

“Enough time has passed, and Venezuela has been subjected to an unprecedented economic blockade. Well, recently, there has been a military aggression unprecedented in our history, and Venezuela must move forward…without compromising historical principles or compromising Venezuelan dignity. And in that direction, we have made the decision, seeing the successful results of the business models contemplated in the organic anti-blockade law, to take the models that are there and incorporate them into the Organic Law on Hydrocarbons.”

While the law allows Venezuela to draw new revenue streams from an oil sector that has withstood years of punishing sanctions, the Trump administration has assumed custody of Venezuela’s oil revenue at the point of a gun, holding the profits in a private account in Qatar which is not accountable to Congress.

Rodríguez and her older brother, Jorge, have both served in influential roles under Maduro, with Delcy Rodriguez operating as Vice President while overseeing hydrocarbon policy. In 2018, she initiated a project to survive Trump’s “maximum pressure” policy, successfully guiding an Organic Anti-Blockade law through the Constituent Assembly which reformed PDVSA. Since Maduro’s abduction, the Rodríguez siblings have been under mounting pressure to accommodate onerous demands from Washington in order to prevent a destabilizing process of regime change. Looming behind every move is the memory of their father, Jorge Antonio Rodríguez, a leftist militant who was tortured to death in prison by CIA-trained interrogators under a pro-US government in 1976.

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The mainstream media have also focused on the updating of Venezuela’s existing law ruling over the nation’s oil industry — the Hydrocarbons Law — which is deliberately misrepresented as US-forced privatisation.

The law was unanimously approved by the National Assembly and strongly supported by the labour movement and is, in fact, a reform of the existing Anti-Blockade Law and very similar to Cuba’s Law of Investments — both having the same aim: to attract direct foreign investment to their blockaded and sanctioned economies given their inability to generate sufficient resources domestically.

Venezuela Approves Pro-Business Oil Reform as Trump Issues New Sanctions Waiver