Please Follow us on Gab, Minds, Telegram, Rumble, Truth Social, GETTR, X, Youtube, Instagram
President Donald Trump held his first meeting with Venezuela acting President Delcy Rodriguez Tuesday evening at the United Nations General Assembly in New York — their first encounter since American forces captured then-President Nicolas Maduro in a January raid that upended Venezuelan politics.
A photo of the meeting between US President Trump and Venezuela acting President Delcy Rodriguez was published by news outlets including the Epoch Times and i24News during UNGA week. Rodriguez has been serving as Venezuela's interim president after Maduro was removed from office by a US military raid in January. The country has been struggling to recover from two decades of socialist rule and is currently facing severe economic crisis.
No details of the conversation have been released. The meeting is historic in and of itself — the first time the head of the US government has sat down with a Venezuelan government figure since Maduro's ouster. The Trump administration has called for free democratic elections and for accountability for those who carried out human rights abuses under Maduro's rule.
Trump had removed the dictator Maduro from power in one of the most daring foreign policy moves of recent decades. Maduro had ruined the oil-rich country's oil industry, pushed millions of citizens into poverty, and prompted a mass exodus of the population. At the same time, Venezuela had become a key transit point for huge amounts of drugs being smuggled into the United States. SOUTHCOM's Operation Southern Spear is still working to dismantle the cartels exploiting the vacuum left by Maduro.
Whether this begins a true democratic transition or is merely another round of political posturing by the same Bolivarian bureaucrats is not yet clear.
For Miami's Venezuelan community — one of the largest Venezuelan diaspora communities in the U.S. — having Rodriguez seated at a table with Washington carries enormous weight. For many years they have been waiting for Venezuela to transition to a democratic, accountable government, watching while socialist leadership systematically dismantled the country's economy and destroyed its oil industry.
That moment has not yet arrived. But Trump has initiated the first conversation with the leaders of Venezuela's post-Maduro era.
