Trump and Delcy Rodríguez seal thaw with meeting in New York

It was the most anticipated meeting of the day. The embrace between the leaders of two countries considered bitter enemies for nearly three decades. Donald Trump and Delcy Rodríguez, leaders of the United States and Venezuela, met late on Tuesday, the White House confirmed, on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. The encounter thus seals a thaw between their countries. But it was not born of equality; rather it reflected Caracas’s absolute subordination to Washington. It was the first meeting between a U.S. president and a Chavista leader since Bill Clinton met then president-elect Hugo Chávez in 1999, apart from a brief exchange at a summit between Barack Obama and Nicolás Maduro in 2015 in Panama City.

The meeting took place at the Lotte New York Palace Hotel as part of a reception offered by Trump to foreign leaders. There were also high-ranking Cabinet members present, including State Secretary Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.

Rodríguez arrived at the UN on Tuesday saying she was coming to the United States “with her head held high.” Shortly afterward she watched, unmoved, as Trump boasted of the “massive military operation” that detained “a criminal, a dictator: Nicolás Maduro.” The former Venezuelan president was physically very close to the spot where he was being discussed—about a 20-minute drive away, in the Brooklyn jail where he has slept since his forced removal from power on January 3.

But what the Republican president seemed most proud of was the deal announced in September that would grant privileged access to more than 20% of the South American country’s oil reserves. “When you add the United States and Venezuela together, we have more than 60 percent of the oil in the world. So it’s, perhaps, the biggest deal. It was a war, but it is, maybe, the greatest deal ever made. To the victor belong the spoils,” he said.

The setting could not have been more symbolic. It was at UN headquarters that Chávez, the leader of the Bolivarian revolution who came to power in 1998, famously declared, “There’s a smell of sulfur here.” He said it at the 2006 General Assembly after President George W. Bush spoke. “Yesterday the devil was here, in this very place; there is still a smell of sulfur at this roster where I have had to speak,” Chávez said—words repeated and caricatured countless times.

Maduro, Chávez’s successor after his death in 2013, returned to a bellicose rhetoric. The last time was in 2018, during Trump’s first term. Even Rodríguez herself, who now insists on the need to build bridges with the American leader, launched harsh attacks on the United States and on Trump from the UN podium.

In 2019 she called U.S. sanctions a form of “state terrorism” that no longer uses bombs but banks and insurers; she accused the Republican leader of having “extended his imperial claws” against Cuba; she said peoples like Venezuela’s lacked access to a media machine serving the global “hegemon” and its satellites; and she urged Washington to show less arrogance and more tolerance toward free nations. Today, those words seem distant.

Upon landing in New York last Sunday, the Chavista leader expressed her willingness not to cause any trouble. “We arrived in New York with the firmness and hope of a people who believe in encounter and unity among nations,” the former vice president and now acting president wrote. “At the 81st United Nations General Assembly, Venezuela will be present to carry its voice and defend its principles, with a work agenda based on respect, cooperation and understanding. [...] We are a country committed to peace, dialogue and building common paths,” she added. Those words are far removed from those she and her former bosses, Maduro and Chávez, once uttered.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition