WASHINGTON (AP) — When President Donald Trump announced the audacious capture of Nicolás Maduro to face drug-trafficking charges in the U.S., he cast the vice president and longtime adviser to the strongman as America’s preferred partner in stabilizing Venezuela amid a scourge of drugs, corruption and economic chaos.
Unsaid is the cloud of suspicion that long surrounded Delcy Rodríguez before she became acting president of the beleaguered nation earlier this month.
In fact, Rodríguez has been on the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s radar for years and was even labeled a “priority target” in 2022, a designation the DEA reserves for suspects believed to have a “significant impact” on the drug trade, according to records obtained by The Associated Press and more than half a dozen current and former U.S. law enforcement officials.
The DEA has amassed a detailed dossier of information on Rodríguez dating back to at least 2018, records show, cataloging her known associates and charges ranging from drug trafficking to gold smuggling. A confidential informant told the DEA in early 2021 that Rodríguez was using hotels in the Caribbean resort of Isla Margarita “as a front for money laundering,” records show. As recently as last year, she was linked to Maduro’s alleged henchman Alex Saab, whom US authorities arrested in 2020 on money laundering charges.
The US government has never publicly charged Rodríguez with any criminal wrongdoing. Notably for Maduro’s inner circle, she is not among the more than a dozen current Venezuelan officials accused of drug trafficking alongside the ousted president.
Rodríguez’s name has come up in nearly a dozen DEA investigations, many of which remain ongoing, involving agents from offices from Paraguay and Ecuador to Phoenix and New York, the AP has learned. The PA was unable to determine the specific focus of each investigation.
Three current and former DEA agents who reviewed the records at the AP’s request said they indicated intense interest in Rodríguez throughout her tenure as vice president, which began in 2018. They were not authorized to discuss DEA investigations and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Records reviewed by the AP do not make clear why Rodríguez was elevated to a “priority target,” a designation that requires extensive documentation to justify additional investigative resources. The agency has hundreds of high-priority targets at any given time, and having the tag does not necessarily lead to criminal charges.
“She was on the rise, so it’s not surprising that she could become a high-priority target with her role,” said Kurt Lunkenheimer, a former federal prosecutor in Miami who handled several cases related to Venezuela. “The problem is, when people talk about you and you become a high-priority target, there’s a difference between that and evidence supporting an indictment.”
Venezuela’s Communications Ministry did not respond to emails seeking comment.
The DEA and the US Department of Justice also did not respond to requests for comment. Asked whether the president trusted Rodríguez, the White House referred the AP to Trump’s earlier remarks about “a very good discussion” he had with the acting president on Wednesday, a day before she met in Caracas with CIA Director John Ratcliffe.
Almost immediately after Maduro’s capture, Trump began praising Rodríguez — last week referring to her as an “extraordinary person — in close contact with officials in Washington, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
The DEA’s interest in Rodríguez comes even as Trump has tried to install her as a steward of American interests to navigate a volatile post-Maduro Venezuela, said Steve Dudley, co-director of InSight Crime, a think tank focused on organized crime in the Americas.
“The current government of Venezuela is a criminal-hybrid regime. The only way you can get into a position of power in the regime is, at the very least, by encouraging criminal activity,” said Dudley, who has investigated Venezuela for years. “This is not a bug in the system. This is the system.”
Those sentiments were echoed by opposition leader María Corina Machado, who met with Trump at the White House on Thursday in an attempt to drum up more US support for Venezuelan democracy.
“The American justice system has enough information about her,” Machado said, referring to Rodríguez. “Her profile is pretty clear.”
Rodríguez, 56, rose to the top of power in Venezuela as a loyal adviser to Maduro, with whom she shares a deep leftist bent stemming from the death of her socialist father in police custody when she was just 7 years old. Despite blaming the US for her father’s death, she worked steadily as secretary of state and later vice president to judge US investment during the first Trump administration, hiring lobbyists close to Trump and even ordering the state oil company to make a $500,000 donation to his inaugural committee.
The charm offensive failed when Trump, urged by Rubio, pressed Maduro to hold free and fair elections. In September 2018,The White House has sanctioned Rodríguez, describing her as key to Maduro’s grip on power and the ability to “consolidate his authoritarian rule.” Also, she was previously sanctioned by the European Union.
But those charges focused on her threat to Venezuela’s democracy, not any alleged involvement in corruption.
“Venezuela is a failed state that supports terrorism, corruption, human rights abuses and drug trafficking at the highest levels. There is nothing political about this analysis,” said Rob Zachariasiewicz, a longtime former DEA agent who led investigations into Venezuelan officials and is now managing partner at Elicius Intelligence, a specialized investigative firm. “Delcy Rodríguez was part of this criminal enterprise.”
DEA records seen by the AP provide an unprecedented look at the agency’s interest in Rodríguez. Much of it was conducted by the agency’s elite Special Operations Division, the same unit in Virginia that worked with Manhattan prosecutors to indict Maduro.
One of the records cites an unnamed confidential informant linking Rodríguez to Margarita Island hotels allegedly used as fronts for money laundering. The AP could not independently confirm the information.
The US has long considered the island resort, northeast of mainland Venezuela, a strategic hub for drug trafficking routes to the Caribbean and Europe. Numerous traffickers have been arrested or taken refuge there over the years, including representatives of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s Sinaloa cartel.
The records also indicate that the feds were looking into Rodríguez’s involvement in government contracts awarded to Maduro ally Saab — investigations that remain ongoing even after President Joe Biden pardoned him in 2023 as part of a prisoner exchange for Americans imprisoned in Venezuela.
The Colombian businessman has become one of Venezuela’s leading fixers as US sanctions cut off his access to hard currency and Western banks. He was arrested in 2020 on federal money laundering charges while traveling from Venezuela to Iran to negotiate oil deals to help both countries evade sanctions.
In an unrelated matter, DEA records also indicate agents’ interest in Rodríguez’s possible involvement in alleged corrupt dealings between the government and Omar Nassif-Sruji, a relative of a longtime romantic partner of Rodríguez’s, Yussef Nassif.
Nassif-Sruji did not respond to emails and text messages seeking comment, and a lawyer for Nassif denied that his client was involved in any nefarious activity, stressing that he has not been charged with any crime.
“He has the utmost respect and confidence in the interim president’s vision for Venezuela and believes she is a true patriot who has dedicated her entire life to the betterment of the Venezuelan people,” the lawyer, Jihad M. Smaili, said in a statement. “Insinuations that Mr. Nassif is currently involved in any untoward relationship with the acting president are false.”
Taken together, the DEA investigations underscore how power has long been wielded in Venezuela, which is ranked the third most corrupt country in the world by Transparency International. For Rodríguez, they also represent a sharp sword over her head, bringing to life Trump’s threat, shortly after Maduro’s ouster, that she would “pay a very high price, probably higher than Maduro” if she did not fall in line. The president added that he wants her to give the US “full access” to the country’s vast reserves of oil and other natural resources.
“Just being the leader of a highly corrupt regime for over a decade makes sense that she’s a prime target for investigation,” said David Smilde, a professor at Tulane University who has studied Venezuela for three decades. “She certainly knows this and is giving the US government leverage over her. She may fear that if she doesn’t do as the Trump administration demands, she could end up with an indictment like Maduro.”
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Mustian reported from New York.
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Contact AP’s global investigative team at investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/.
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This story is part of an ongoing collaboration between The Associated Press and FRONTLINE (PBS), which includes an upcoming documentary.