The View From Above
The Rodríguez regime is increasingly cementing a specific trend: the disappointment of those who anticipated a democratic transition. This expectation rested not on the will of Delcy and Jorge, but on the belief that the Trump administration would exert enough pressure to force their hand. The transition currently underway is less about democratization and more about a strategic purge. The siblings are replacing the old Maduro elite with figures they deem more loyal and better equipped to steer an economic overhaul that is inextricably linked to their political survival.
The interim president’s announcements this week killed the hopes of those expecting major news, such as the call for presidential elections expected by groups right and left—a move that would require admitting, once and for all, that Maduro will never return to Miraflores. But the Rodriguez regime has not yet reached that point. Instead, they are buying time to improve their electoral prospects for whenever real elections take place, whether this December or early next year. For the moment, they are focusing on turning the American presence from a threat to an advantage, facilitating foreign investment to produce an economic miracle they could claim as their own.
The announcements seem to scrap more of the core pillars of the Chavez and Maduro political economy, where the private sector was treated as the enemy. Delcy appears to be preparing the ground for privatizations, changes in the populist laws that protect tenants and workers, and the enactment of a tax reform. An overhaul of the labor and tax regimes is something that has been requested by international investors. They are challenging hardcore chavistas, banking on American protection and on the fact that most chavistas—especially those with political and financial interests to protect—will swallow any ideological U-turn if that means remaining in power. Simultaneously, they defied civil society and opposition parties by refusing to appoint as Attorney General and Ombudsman the prestigious candidates proposed by academia. Instead, the National Assembly finally appointed Larry Devoe and Eglée González Lobato, both of whom are close to the Rodriguezes and hostile to the opposition represented by Maria Corina Machado.
The government still has some teeth to show. The population could see how a demonstration led by public employees demanding better salaries was repressed in Caracas and is also aware of rumors of a violent crackdown against political prisoners in El Rodeo jail. Machado’s return is still on hold, while Diosdado Cabello is reminding everyone—Delcy included—that he’s still there, willing to use prison torture and street violence. This is bad press for Delcy, as well as for Trump and Marco Rubio; global media is more sensitive to fresh images of repression in Caracas than to the news of American Airlines scheduling direct flights from Miami again.
Those symptoms of increasing state violence point at the constraints that the Rodriguezes face at home, as well as the time they took in the National Assembly to approve the reform of the mining law that the US had demanded. It was finally approved this week. The reform is in sync with the one already done with the hydrocarbons law: it dismantles the legal regime promoted by Chavez’s nationalist economics. Now, private investors could apply for exploitation agreements that can last until 50 years, regarding gold and strategic minerals. We must assume that the law reform was delayed by lawmakers who fight back on behalf of chavistas with interest in the mining system that Chavez and Maduro built, and that more resistance will come if Delcy Rodriguez and foreign companies aspire to displace the corrupt officials and criminal warlords who control many of the mines in Southern Venezuela.
Cabello’s range of action