The American president, Donald Trump, and the president in charge of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, held a “historic” closed-door meeting on Tuesday on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly held in New York, which constitutes the first face to face between both leaders since Rodríguez’s arrival in Miraflores.
Rodríguez explained on his social networks that “we held a historic meeting with the president of the United States, Donald Trump, with whom we talked about strengthening the bilateral relationship between our countries and advancing a cooperation agenda in strategic areas such as energy, mining, security.”
The Venezuelan leader thanked Trump for his “support for the process of reintegration” of Venezuela into the “multilateral spaces”, exemplified by the president’s presence at this great international meeting, in which no Venezuelan president has participated since 2018.
An achievement for Venezuelan diplomacy
“Yesterday the devil was here, in this place, it still smells of sulfur,” declared Hugo Chávez in 2006 at the UN. A few words that are far from those that the Venezuelan president wrote just a few hours ago on her social networks: “We talked about strengthening the bilateral relationship,” said Delcy Rodríguez.
In fact, the president is scheduled to give her speech this Thursday before the plenary session of the international organization, where she will continue praising Trump’s management.
In addition to both leaders, the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, participated; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
The meeting was held behind closed doors and without press access, unlike other meetings held by Trump in New York, such as the one he held with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
Nicolás Maduro, a few kilometers from Trump and Delcy
The meeting took place shortly after the controversial agreement by which Venezuela gave part of its oil reserves to the United States and a few kilometers from the New York prison where Nicolás Maduro remains imprisoned, accused of drug trafficking.
This is the first meeting between a US president and a Venezuelan leader in more than eleven years, since the brief meeting between Barack Obama and Nicolás Maduro during the 2015 Summit of the Americas, held in Panama.
The main example of the rapprochement between Washington and Caracas occurred recently with the announcement of an oil agreement that would allow the United States to control a fifth of Venezuelan crude oil reserves.
