“No one has faith in Delcy, it’s a question of incentives”

“These are decisive hours and days for the future of Venezuela, we are very close to achieving what we have longed for,” Machado said at the end of his meeting with Rubio. “No one has faith in Delcy [Rodríguez]it is a question of incentives, and that is what has been discussed today. “There is no naivety, everyone knows who is in power today in Venezuela.”

The truth is that the White House still has not set a timetable to force Chavismo out of power. She is the vice president of Nicolas Maduro who retains the baton by offering concessions to the Trump Administration and keeping the regime cohesive.

This Wednesday, before his former colleagues in the Senate, Rubio confirmed that the decision to keep Delcy in the Miraflores Palace is pure pragmatism, and largely responds to the White House’s fears of causing a power vacuum that could lead to skirmishes, looting or massive displacement of refugees.

Trump’s national security advisor acknowledged, at the same time, that Delcy and the Chavismo leadership “deserve some recognition” for having managed to approve “a new hydrocarbons law that basically eradicates many of the Chávez-era restrictions on private investment in the oil industry.”

Machado decided to cling, instead, to another of the answers that Trump’s Secretary of State had offered during the questioning in the Senate. “In the long term, our policy is not at all to leave something so corrupt standing,” Rubio stressed.

In line with these words, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, who gave the award to Trump during her visit to the White House in mid-January, guaranteed Venezuelans that “the transition to democracy will take place because we have the support of the most important democracies in the world, most especially, the Government of President Trump.”

To deepen the gap that divides the interim president and the US Administration, Machado wanted to remember the hug that Delcy gave to the ambassadors of China, Russia and Iran who attended her investiture ceremony.

The opposition leader also reiterated her intention to return to Caracas, a city that she managed to leave at the beginning of December to attend the Nobel ceremony in Oslo. “I told the Secretary of State that I want to return to my country as soon as possible,” he declared.

The Secretary of State had assured during his speech that the operation in Venezuela was necessary because the situation the country was going through was “unsustainable” and posed an “enormous strategic risk” for the United States and the region.

Rubio argued that the capture of Maduro along with his wife, Cilia Florescould not be considered “an act of war”, and that the Chavista leader “is not a guy with whom you can reach an agreement… What he wanted was to buy us time and gain three years until he could negotiate with a new Administration that he considered more favorable.”

Regarding the removal of Maduro and the bombings in Caracas, which caused the death of a hundred people, according to the regime’s count, Machado pointed out that “the Government of Donald Trump is the only Government that has risked the lives of its own citizens for the future of Venezuela.”