For Delcy Rodríguez, September 2026 was the month she pulled Venezuela out of years of international isolation. At the UN General Assembly in New York, she met the UN Secretary-General and the leaders of Chile and the Netherlands, shook hands with Spain’s prime minister and, most significantly, held a closed-door meeting with President Trump.
Slowly, she could begin to imagine dropping the “interim” label from the presidency she inherited in January, after U.S. special forces raided Caracas and captured Nicolás Maduro. Yet while Rodríguez and her close circle of confidants celebrated their diplomatic gains abroad, frustration was growing at home.
The photo with Trump, both of them grinning with thumbs and fingers raised, caused particular resentment among the government’s traditional and more militant supporters, who had not forgotten that it was Trump who attacked their capital and seized their president.
Nor did it help that Rodríguez left New York without visiting Maduro, who is held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, only a few miles from the UN. She appears to have given little thought to how her cheerful photos with Trump would play at home, a blind spot that now risks leaving her administration as a government without a constituency.
The making of Chavismo
Chávez had renamed his country the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and cast his project as a Bolivarian Revolution for the whole region. Yet the movement came to bear his name, with Chavismo marked by socialist symbolism, fierce anti-Americanism, a personality cult around its leader and a dense network of grassroots organisations.
Riding the oil boom of the 2000s, Chávez poured petroleum revenues into social programmes and subsidies, building a loyal base among the military, the poor, left-wing activists and marginalised communities. Chavismo’s harder edge took shape in armed groups, with the colectivos drawing radical leftists and criminal gangs into paramilitary enforcement in the cities, while campesino groups extended the movement’s reach into the countryside.
Nicolás Maduro, who succeeded Chávez after his death in 2013, carried the movement forward with far less success, and his years in power lurched from one crisis to the next.
The economy collapsed into hyperinflation, democratic institutions such as the opposition-controlled National Assembly were stripped of their powers, mass protests were violently crushed and more than 7 million Venezuelans, roughly a fifth of the population, fled the country, sparking a migration crisis across Latin America. Polls consistently showed that a large majority of Venezuelans opposed Maduro and wanted to see him gone sooner rather than later.
