Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, has offered to work with the US, dialing down the confrontational tone she initially adopted after the capture of the dictator Nicolás Maduro.
In a statement late on Sunday, Rodríguez said she had “invited the US government to work together on an agenda of cooperation”.
Her comments came hours after Donald Trump threatened that Maduro’s former vice-president could “pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro” if she did not bend to his wishes.
Rodríguez has effectively been running Venezuela since Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were seized by the US military on Saturday. The couple were taken to New York and pleaded not guilty to drugs and weapons charges at a federal court in Manhattan on Monday.
Rodríguez was sworn in as president by the Venezuelan supreme court on Saturday, and on the following day the heads of the country’s armed forces agreed to recognise her authority, while still demanding the immediate release of Maduro and his wife.
After the shocking capture and rendition of Maduro on Saturday, Trump said the US would now “run” Venezuela, and that Rodríguez would remain in power only so long as she “does what we want”.
On Sunday, the US president warned that the US might launch a second strike if remaining members of the administration do not cooperate with his efforts to get the country “fixed”.
Trump’s conditional endorsement of Rodríguez has entirely sidelined the country’s democratic opposition led by Nobel peace prize winner María Corina Machado, and on Monday, opposition supporters who had spent years yearning for Maduro’s removal voiced a mix of contentment and concern as the reality sank in that while the Venezuelan dictator was finally gone, his regime was still in power.
“I don’t think anything has changed,” said Ricardo Hausmann, a former Venezuelan minister and opposition supporter. Hausmann describe the US operation to seize Maduro as “super positive” but said that Trump’s subsequent moves were perplexing.
In her first public appearance after Maduro’s capture on Saturday, Rodríguez initially struck a defiant tone, declaring that Venezuela would “never again be anyone’s colony”.
On Sunday night, however, she struck a markedly more conciliatory tone after chairing her first cabinet meeting. Rodríguez released a message saying she considered an “balanced and respectful” relationship with the US to be a priority.
“We extend an invitation to the government of the US to work jointly on an agenda of cooperation, aimed at shared development, within the framework of international law, and that strengthens lasting peaceful coexistence,” she added.
Addressing the US president directly, she wrote: “President Donald Trump: our peoples and our region deserve peace and dialogue, not war. That has always been President Nicolás Maduro’s conviction and it is that of all Venezuela at this moment.
“This is the Venezuela I believe in and to which I have dedicated my life. My dream is for Venezuela to become a great power where all decent Venezuelans can come together. Venezuela has the right to peace, development, sovereignty and a future,” she added.
Reuters reported on Monday that the state of emergency imposed by the Venezuelan government after the US attack orders police to “immediately begin the national search and capture of everyone involved in the promotion or support of the armed attack by the US”.
In Venezuela, any celebrations were cautious and private, amid fears that any public display could draw the regime’s repressive attention.
“People might be celebrating overseas but not here, we are repressed,” said Juan Carlos, an administrative manager at an internet company in Caracas. “If you go out to celebrate, they’ll arrest you. Before I came out today I deleted all the chats on my [WhatsApp] groups, because you never know if they might stop you at a roadblock.”
Though fearful, he said he was overjoyed by Maduro’s downfall.
“We’ve been enduring this for 25 years [since the Chavistas came to power in 1999], asking ourselves: when, when, when will this be over? … Justice may be slow, but eventually it arrives,” he said, as he queued outside a grocery store hoping to stock up on basic supplies in case there was more turbulence.
But the 42-year-old saw little reason for celebration given that Maduro’s regime effectively remained in place – only now with the apparent support of Washington. “They’ve got rid of some of them, but the rest of them remain,” he said.
His partner, a 34-year-old graphic designer who asked only to be named as Andreína, said she had no idea what the coming days had in store. “There is no information … We have no way of knowing what the government here, or the one overseas [the US], are planning,” she said.
