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Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, has offered to work with the US, dialing down the confrontational tone she intially 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 captured on Saturday. The couple were taken to New York and are due to appear at a federal court in Manhattan on Monday.
She was sworn in as president by the supreme court on Saturday and, 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 that the US would now “run” Venezuela, “until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition”. He also said that the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, had been in touch with Rodríguez who he claimed had told him: “We’ll do whatever you need.”
On Sunday, he warned 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 move has entirely sidelined the country’s democratic opposition lead by Nobel prizewinner María Corina Machado. His strategy has been widely criticised by analysts who argue that the regime’s power structure has been left intact – just without Maduro at its head.
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.
Despite the conciliatory tone, the Venezuelan government – and Rodríguez herself, via her Telegram channel – later paid tribute to 32 “Cuban combatants” who were part of Maduro’s personal security and who died “as a consequence of the criminal and infamous attack carried out by the US government”.
Earlier on Sunday, the defence minister, Gen Vladímir Padrino López, had said in a statement that US troops had “cold-bloodedly assassinated much of [Maduro’s] security detail, soldiers and innocent civilians”, without providing names or a death toll – which, according to the New York Times, would be about 80 people.
