Records obtained by the Associated Press reveal that Delcy Rodríguez was listed as a “priority target” in 2022, although the US has never formally accused her of crimes. The information adds pressure to the delicate support that Washington gives him after the capture of Nicolás Maduro
Internal documents from the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) show that Delcy Rodríguez has been on that agency’s radar for years and that in 2022 she was classified as a “priority target”, a category reserved for people considered to have a “significant impact” on drug trafficking.
The information was obtained by the Associated Press (AP)which had access to DEA records and consulted more than half a dozen current and former US security officials. According to these documents, the anti-drug agency has prepared an intelligence file on Rodríguez since at least 2018, which records alleged links to drug trafficking, gold smuggling and money laundering.
One of the reports cited by AP includes the testimony of a confidential informant who claimed in 2021 that Rodríguez used hotels on Margarita Island “as a front to launder money.”
The agency notes that it has not been able to independently confirm that claim. The records also link Rodríguez to Alex Saab, a businessman close to Nicolás Maduro, arrested in 2020 on money laundering charges and later pardoned in 2023 in a prisoner exchange.
Despite the DEA’s sustained interest, the US government has never publicly accused Rodríguez of any crime. Nor is he among the more than a dozen senior Venezuelan officials formally charged with drug trafficking alongside Maduro, captured in early January to face charges in the United States.
According to AP, Rodríguez’s name appears in almost a dozen DEA investigations, some still open, with the participation of offices in Paraguay, Ecuador and several cities in the United States, including Phoenix and New York. Three current and retired agents who reviewed the documents indicated that they reflect intense monitoring, although they stressed that the designation as a “priority target” does not necessarily imply that there is sufficient evidence for a criminal accusation.
“That someone is a priority target is not the same as having evidence to support a formal accusation,” Kurt Lunkenheimer, a former federal prosecutor in Miami with experience in cases linked to Venezuela, told AP.
The revelation comes at a politically sensitive time. After the capture of Maduro, US President Donald Trump has presented Rodríguez, now interim president, as a key interlocutor to stabilize Venezuela. This week, Trump said he had a “very good conversation” with her before she met in Caracas with CIA Director John Ratcliffe.
Analysts cited by AP warn that this support entails risks. Steve Dudley, co-director of InSight Crime, stated that power in Venezuela operates within a “hybrid criminal regime.” Along the same lines, opposition leader María Corina Machado assured that “the American justice system has sufficient information” about Rodríguez and that his “profile is quite clear.”
Rodríguez was sanctioned by the United States in 2018 and also by the European Union, although those measures focused on her political role and her responsibility in the weakening of Venezuelan democracy, not on criminal accusations for corruption or drug trafficking.
For experts consulted by AP, the DEA’s history of investigations has become an element of additional pressure on Rodríguez, in a context in which the Trump administration seeks political, economic and security guarantees in post-Maduro Venezuela.
*Read also: Pedro Benítez: “Without democratic legitimacy there will be no stability in Venezuela”
*Journalism in Venezuela is carried out in a hostile environment for the press with dozens of legal instruments in place to punish the word, especially the laws “against hate”, “against fascism” and “against the blockade.” This content was written taking into consideration the threats and limits that, consequently, have been imposed on the dissemination of information from within the country.
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