Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, has celebrated a “historic” meeting with Donald Trump in New York, posing for a smiley photo with the US president less than nine months after he ordered the abduction of her boss, Nicolás Maduro.
The former foes met at a five-star hotel in Manhattan a few blocks from Trump Tower late on Tuesday, on the sidelines of the United Nations general assembly. The hotel is about 7 miles from the Brooklyn prison where Maduro has been held since he was snatched during a special forces raid on Caracas.
On the eve of Tuesday’s encounter, an American reporter asked Rodríguez if she would be visiting Maduro, under whom she served as vice-president, during her stay in New York. She did not reply.
But Venezuela’s interim leader did find time to meet Trump at the luxury Lotte New York Palace hotel, with the get-together seen as a key part of Rodríguez’s push for international legitimacy after years of diplomatic isolation under Maduro’s dictatorship. On Wednesday she is expected to address the annual UN assembly.
“We held a historic meeting with … 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 common interest,” Rodríguez wrote on Instagram, in a 133-word statement that made no mention of her incarcerated ally.
Oliver Blanco, one of Rodríguez’s top diplomats, claimed the meeting marked “a new stage of dialogue and understanding between both countries” and was “an important step toward new opportunities for our country and our people”. Blanco also posted a cheery photo in which both he and Trump smiled and gave the thumbs up to the camera.
A White House aide said the meeting was also attended by top US officials including the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and the deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.
Hours earlier, Rodríguez had sat in the general assembly hall watching Trump celebrate the “massive military operation” during which Maduro – whom he called an “outlaw dictator” and “a real criminal” – was captured. “It was a war … [and] to the victor belong the spoils,” Trump bragged of the recent oil deal between the US and Venezuela, as she appeared to wince.
Some observers also detected signs of discomfort in the body language captured in the photo of Trump and Rodríguez, who appears to be clenching her left fist as she poses beside the grinning US president.
Some of Rodríguez’s critics in Venezuela called her treatment by Trump an unmitigated humiliation for a socialist party politician who has spent years railing against Yankee imperialism.
After Maduro’s capture, Trump warned that Rodríguez would “pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro” if she did not toe the US line. Since then, Rodríguez has made a series of major concessions, including ceding control of Venezuela’s oil revenues to Washington and agreeing to a controversial 65bn-barrel oil deal that Trump on Tuesday called “the largest oil deal in history”.
One opposition figure denounced the Rodríguez/Trump meeting as an encounter between a “shameless puppet and her unscrupulous puppeteer”.
But Rodríguez has succeeded in consolidating power, with Trump seemingly more focused on gaining access to Venezuela’s natural resources than pushing for a fresh presidential election that would move the South American country back towards democracy.
Trump has repeatedly praised Rodríguez’s “fantastic” and “terrific” leadership while sidelining her main rival, the opposition leader María Corina Machado. Machado, who left Venezuela late last year to receive her Nobel peace prize in Oslo, has been unable to return and is exiled in Panama. She reportedly made three attempts to return to Venezuela this week, but failed.
Before Tuesday’s tête-à-tête, the presidents of the US and Venezuela had last met in 2015, when Barack Obama and Maduro spoke briefly during a regional summit in Panama. In the decade that followed, Maduro became an international pariah as he led his country into economic chaos and increasingly authoritarian rule, and Venezuela was hit by punishing international sanctions.
At the 2015 summit, Obama conceded that the days in which “the US could meddle with impunity” in Latin America were over. But Trump has dramatically different ideas and has been forging ahead with attempts to reassert US dominance in a region it has long considered its back yard.
As well as capturing Venezuela’s government and trying to topple Cuba’s communist government by strangling its economy, Trump’s push for hegemony has also seen the US accused of trying to swing Brazil’s presidential election in favour of the far-right candidate Flávio Bolsonaro through diplomatic and economic pressure.
Addressing the UN assembly on Tuesday, the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, hit back at such efforts, without directly citing the US. “We will not allow the enemies of democracy – internal or external – to attack the will of the people. Brazilian democracy belongs to the Brazilians,” said Lula who is facing a tough battle to win re-election in October’s vote.
“Brazil doesn’t fit into anyone’s back yard,” added Lula, who also called for fresh elections in Venezuela. He did not meet Rodríguez during her visit to New York but said the “people of Venezuela deserve to decide their own future”.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
