A new report detailed that Delcy Rodriguez, interim leader of Venezuela, is now working in coordination with the United States on operations to recover oil.
Specifically, a New York Times report said that Rodríguez enlisted U.S. military support to return an oil tanker that had left Venezuela without permission and belonged to one of Rodríguez's political adversaries.
According to people close to the Venezuelan government who spoke to the outlet, a joint operation involving the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy boarded the tanker on Jan. 9 and forced it to return to port, marking the first example of military cooperation between the U.S. and Venezuela since Maduro's capture.
According to the report, the tanker left a port in eastern Venezuela shortly after the Jan. 3 military operation in Caracas without authorization from port authorities or Petróleos de Venezuela, the state oil company, which said it was never paid for the half a million barrels of crude it was transporting.
PDVSA said in a statement on Jan. 9 that the tanker had left the country without payment and added that the U.S. government aided its return, a claim echoed by President Donald Trump, who said the operation was coordinated at Rodríguez's request.
As the interim leader seeks support and approval from the Trump administration, the operation appears to have been politically motivated. The tanker allegedly belonged to a company controlled by Alex Saab, a Colombian businessman based in Caracas with a long history of laundering money for Maduro's regime.
Saab was a major player in Venezuela's oil trade for years. He was indicted by the United States in connection with a scheme involving bribes to exploit Venezuela's government-controlled exchange rate and was captured and later extradited to the U.S. in 2020.
According to the indictment, between 2011 and at least 2015, Saab conspired with other individuals to launder proceeds from bank accounts in Venezuela to and through bank accounts in the United States. Prosecutors said in 2021 that Saab and his co-conspirators exploited the exchange rate by submitting false and fraudulent import documents for goods that were never imported into Venezuela and by bribing government officials to approve those documents.
As a result of the scheme, prosecutors say Saab and his co-conspirators transferred approximately $350 million out of Venezuela, through the United States, to overseas accounts they owned or controlled.
He spent two years in a U.S. prison before being released in a prisoner swap.
According to people with direct knowledge of Venezuela's leadership dynamics cited by The New York Times, Rodríguez and Saab sit on opposite sides of the country's deeply divided ruling coalition and are known to have a strained relationship.
Rodríguez and her brother, Jorge Rodríguez, oversee Venezuela's economic policy and control the legislature, while Saab built his wealth and influence through his close ties to Maduro, his wife and her relatives, the people said. Maduro's wife, Cilia Flores, was also captured by U.S. special forces on Jan. 3 and was taken to New York to face trial alongside her husband, while much of her immediate family remains under U.S. sanctions.
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