Who are the sinister Rodríguez brothers who are in power behind Nicolás Maduro’s throne in Venezuela?

Those who say that nothing has changed in Venezuela since the July 28 elections, which were clearly won by the opposition and stolen by the Chavista regime, are right, but only in part.

It is true that Nicolás Maduro is still in power and he is not going to leave for nowBut it is also true that, in the eyes of the vast majority of his people and of the international community, which almost universally refuses to recognise him as the winner, he is today much more illegitimate than before the vote.

And one more thing: as a result of his need to defend himself, Maduro has been forced to move his cabinet to include figures with whom he has not had the best relations in recent years, such as the new Minister of the Interior and Justice, Diosdado Cabello, and the previously confirmed Minister of Defense, General Vladimir Padrino.

“To balance the weight of those two figures he does not trust, he added power to his vice president, Delcy Rodriguezby appointing her Minister of Petroleum, the position that many Chavistas are salivating over,” a South American diplomatic source who is closely following the Venezuelan crisis explained to EL TIEMPO.

Maduro has been forced to move his cabinet to include figures with whom he has not had the best relations in recent years.

She and her inseparable brother Jorge Rodriguez -much less close to Maduro-, They have survived the internal purges of Chavismo for years, And now they look better positioned than ever: she as vice president and at the head of the oil business, and he as president of the National Assembly.

As explained by journalist Emilia Landaluce in a detailed report this Sunday in The World from Madrid, Delcy and Jorge Rodríguez were behind the investigation against the once powerful oil minister, Tareck El Aissami, who was arrested in February for corruption.

According to Venezuelan journalist Ibéyise Pacheco, the Rodríguez operation would have had the help of Cabello who, although not very close to them, also wanted to get El Aissami out of the way.

When then-President Hugo Chavez fell seriously ill with cancer in 2011, the Rodriguez brothers had lost ground with the leader of the Bolivarian revolution. Meanwhile,
Cabello was Maduro’s competitor for the succession, and that had not only cooled but strained relations between the two.

After Chávez died in 2013 and was replaced by Maduro, Cabello remained at the head of the United Socialist Party (PSUV) and became president of the National Assembly, always removed from the executive branch and, consequently, from big business – including oil – at a time when crude oil exports had not declined and the oil checkbook continued to go a long way.

Crude oil production reached 3.4 million barrels per day during Chavez’s time. Today, it barely reaches 750,000.

How do Diosdado Cabello and Vladimir Padrino Lopez fare?

According to experts on the Maduro era, While the Rodríguez brothers were ascending, Diosdado Cabello was not doing so well.

Cornered by Maduro’s government, he became a great ally of the Cartel de los Soles, the club of drug lords of high-ranking military officers, associated for years with Colombian guerrillas and criminal gangs.

This is the direction of a criminal investigation by the United States justice system dating back to 2015, which in 2020 became a formal criminal accusation by the Prosecutor’s Office for “conspiracy to commit narcoterrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine, and arms trafficking.”

This cabinet is a sign that the most important and visible elites are united in a line to publicly prevent the idea that there is fragmentation between mini power blocks.

As revealed by a BBC report last week, since 2018 “Cabello is subject to personal sanctions” by the European Union, Switzerland, Panama and the United States Treasury Department.

In a document shared by these governments, Cabello is considered “high risk in terms of money laundering, financing of terrorism and illicit arms dealings…”

For his part, the general Vladimir Padrino López, who burned his adversaries one by one in the military leadership, has established himself as the undisputed leader of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces, but his rRelations with Maduro have had many ups and downs.

Padrino has complained privately about how poorly the president and his team of collaborators manage the country, and has given as an example the deterioration in the quality of public services, including electricity.

It is clear that, Frightened by the huge victory of the opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia and the charismatic María Corina Machado, the Chavista leaders have put aside their differences to make common cause and defend themselves.

Cabello concentrates in his powerful ministry the entire repressive apparatus of the State: National Police, National Guard, Scientific, Penal and Criminal Investigations Corps, and Sebin, the feared intelligence service.

As for Padrino, after the massive blackout last Friday, which affected more than 70 percent of the country, he put his criticism aside and this time accused “the extreme right and fascism” of being behind an alleged sabotage in the development of “a coup d’état that had been planned before the elections.”

Maryhen Jimenez, an academic at Oxford University and an expert on political opposition and authoritarianism, explained it to the BBC: “This cabinet is a sign that the most important and visible elites are united in a line to publicly prevent the idea that there is fragmentation between mini power blocks.” She concluded: “They want to communicate cohesion at the highest level.” Defending the regime is defending themselves.

The Rodríguez family, the path they have taken within Chavismo

Ibéyise Pacheco, the Venezuelan journalist who has specialized in Delcy and Jorge Rodríguez, published in 2020 a coded novel entitled ‘The Sinister Brothers’ in which they bear the names of Betty and Jaime Ramírez.

She says that Betty (Delcy) and Jaime (Jorge) came to Chávez in the early years of the Bolivarian revolution through their mentor, the then vice president José Vicente Rangel.

The Rodríguez brothers’ capacity for betrayal worries Cabello and General Padrino, but also Maduro

An elderly intellectual of the Venezuelan left who died at the age of 91 in late 2020, Rangel had known the guerrilla Jorge Antonio Rodríguez, the brothers’ father, who was tortured and killed by the police in 1976, when Jorge Jr. was 11 years old and Delcy was 9.

For years, Rangel looked after the two children. Jorge studied psychiatry and Delcy, law, and when they were adults, the then vice president opened the doors of the Chavista bureaucracy for them.

Jorge became president of the National Electoral Council, where he helped Chávez in critical elections. In 2006, Delcy made a great leap forward when she became Minister of the Presidency. But it didn’t last long: Chávez couldn’t stand her tantrums and called her a “spoiled child.”

Unlike her brother Jorge, who knows how to use the tools of psychiatry to seduce and manipulate his interlocutors, “Delcy lacks emotional intelligence,” explains journalist Pacheco.

Despite their differences in style, the brothers always act in a coordinated manner. Together, they plotted a betrayal that made it clear how ungrateful they are. When they saw that Vice President Rangel’s star was beginning to decline, they were quick to let Chavez know that the old leader was speaking ill of him behind his back.

After Chavez’s death, and thanks to the closeness she had achieved with Cilia Flores, Maduro’s wife, Delcy continued to climb positions.

At the end of 2014, she took over as Foreign Minister and, taking advantage of her command of English and French, she developed a very active diplomacy and built a network of allies ranging from Russian leaders to American billionaires. Her close friendship with the former head of the Spanish government, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, is well known.

Luxury purchases, among the questionable expenses of Jorge and Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela

Delcy is also famous for her luxury shopping in designer stores, both in Paris and London. Where does the money come from to spend tens of thousands of dollars on handbags or shoes? Since his time in the Ministry of the Presidency, there has been a rumour that a quarter of a million dollars in cash, which was in his custody, has disappeared.

“Her long hand with secret expenses, both at that time and as foreign minister, is proverbial,” an opposition source told EL TIEMPO. “Now, as oil minister, she will be like the mouse that is put in charge of guarding the cheese,” the source added.

His brother Jorge also spends thousands of dollars on designer clothes and on gifts for his female conquests.

Cultured, avid reader and fun conversationalist, he has also been involved in cash entanglements: promoted to vice president of the country at the beginning of 2007, months later He was involved in the discovery of a briefcase containing $800,000 at Jorge Newbery Airport in Buenos Aires, which Chavez had asked him to send to Cristina Kirchner to finance her campaign.

Both Delcy and her brother Jorge like designer clothes, traveling and a life of luxury.

The fact that the briefcase fell and a scandal broke out cost him points with Chavez. As for Maduro, known for his lack of culture, he has never liked Jorge’s intellectual whims, nor his obsession with quoting authors and talking about poetry. “But Delcy protects him and that is why he has survived,” adds the same source.

With so many years of accumulated quarrels, and beyond the way in which the electoral beating that the opposition gave
them on July 28 has forced them to unite, the truth is that from the heights of Chavista power, these protagonists look at each other askance.

The Rodríguez brothers’ capacity for betrayal worries Cabello and General Padrino, but also Maduro.

It remains to be seen how they all behave now that Washington is once again tightening sanctions, both against the regime and against some of its leaders personally. But as long as they are united, a negotiated solution to the serious Venezuelan crisis does not seem possible. If that changes, nothing is out of the question.

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