DEA Has Been Watching Delcy Rodriguez for Years

When President Trump announced the audacious capture of Nicolas Maduro to face drug trafficking charges in the US, he portrayed the strongman's vice president and longtime aide as America's preferred partner to stabilize Venezuela amid a scourge of drugs, corruption, and economic mayhem. Left unspoken was the cloud of suspicion that long surrounded Delcy Rodríguez before she became the nation's acting president this month. In fact, Rodríguez has been on the radar of the US Drug Enforcement Administration for years and in 2022 was even labeled a "priority target," a designation DEA reserves for suspects believed to have a "significant impact" on the drug trade, according to records obtained by the AP and more than a half-dozen current and former US law enforcement officials.

The DEA has amassed a detailed intelligence file on Rodríguez dating to at least 2018, the records show, cataloging her known associates and allegations including drug trafficking and gold smuggling. One confidential informant told the DEA in early 2021 that Rodríguez was using hotels in the Caribbean resort of Isla Margarita "as a front to launder money," the records show. As recently as last year she was linked to Maduro's alleged bagman, Alex Saab, whom US authorities arrested in 2020 on money laundering charges. The US has never publicly accused Rodríguez of any criminal wrongdoing. Notably for Maduro's inner circle, she's not among the more than a dozen current Venezuelan officials charged with drug trafficking alongside the ousted president.

Rodríguez's name has surfaced in nearly a dozen DEA investigations, several of which remain ongoing, involving agents in field offices from Paraguay and Ecuador to Phoenix and New York. Three current and former DEA agents who reviewed the records said they indicate an intense interest in Rodriguez throughout much of her tenure as vice president, which began in 2018. "The current Venezuela government is a criminal-hybrid regime. The only way you reach a position of power in the regime is by, at the very least, abetting criminal activities," said Steve Dudley, co-director of InSight Crime, a think tank focused on organized crime in the Americas. "This isn't a bug in the system. This is the system." The full AP report can be found here.