President Donald Trump met with the “Acting President” of Venezuela Delcy Rodríguez in New York on Tuesday, marking their first encounter since the arrest of Rodríguez’s former boss, deposed socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro.
“We held a historic meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, with whom we discussed strengthening the bilateral relationship between our countries and advancing a cooperation agenda in strategic areas such as energy, mining, security, and other matters of mutual interest,” Rodríguez wrote on social media.
In a series of follow-up posts, Rodríguez detailed she and her delegation expressed their gratitude to President Trump and his administration for the support provided by the United States in the aftermath of the devastating June 24 doublet earthquake. Additionally, Rodríguez thanked the United States for its “backing of our country’s reintegration into multilateral forums.”
“Venezuela and the United States share a historic relationship that, in this new phase, we are called upon to steer through dialogue,” Rodríguez said. “We will continue to promote diplomacy in the service of the national interest, aimed at achieving concrete results and collective benefits for the Venezuelan people.”
Per the Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional, the encounter took place at the Lotte New York Palace hotel on the sidelines of a reception hosted by President Trump with foreign leaders gathered in New York on the occasion of the ongoing U.N. General Assembly.
El Nacional noted the coming together marks the first formal encounter between an American and a Venezuelan head of state since former President Bill Clinton met with late socialist dictator Hugo Chávez in 1999. Former President Barack Obama briefly met with Nicolás Maduro during the 2015 Summit of the Americas, hosted by Panama.
VTV, the Venezuelan socialist regime’s main propaganda news channel, published additional photos of the encounter on social media.
The Venezuelan “Acting President” arrived in New York earlier this week to participate in the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly. According to the most-recent preliminary schedule published by the U.N. at press time, Rodríguez is expected to deliver her speech before the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday evening.
Delcy Rodríguez has been in charge of the Venezuelan socialist regime since U.S. forces arrested Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores during a January 3 law enforcement operation in Caracas. Prior to Maduro’s arrest, Rodríguez was concurrently serving as the dictator’s Vice President and Oil Minister.
Following Maduro’s arrest, Rodríguez has been actively collaborating with the Trump administration, signing several bilateral agreements over the past months after decades of a hostile anti-U.S. policy maintained by Nicolás Maduro and his predecessor, late dictator Hugo Chávez.
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Rodríguez herself maintained a notoriously anti-U.S. and anti-Trump stance all throughout the Maduro regime — even during her past participation at the U.N. General Assembly in 2019 — prior to the start of her collaboration with the Trump administration earlier this year.
The United States and Venezuela signed a historic oil agreement in August that grants the U.S. control of 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s reserves. President Trump referred to the arrest of Nicolás Maduro and the new oil deal with Venezuela during his Tuesday speech at the United Nations General Assembly — declaring, “To the victor belong the spoils.”
At press time, neither Delcy Rodríguez nor any member of the Venezuelan socialist regime has disclosed if the “Acting President” has any intentions to meet with her former boss Nicolás Maduro during her stay in New York.
The erstwhile dictator and his wife are currently detained several miles away from the U.N. headquarters at the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, awaiting trial on multiple drug trafficking charges.
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