President Trump on Tuesday night held his first meeting with Acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez, just hours after delivering a speech to the UN General Assembly, where he boasted about taking over Venezuela’s oil industry by force, saying “to the victor belong the spoils.”
In a post on X, Rodriguez shared a photo of her and Trump smiling together, about eight months after the US president ordered a major attack on the Venezuelan capital of Caracas to abduct President Nicolas Maduro, which killed at least 83 people, including Venezuelan military personnel, Cuban presidential guards, and four civilians.
“We held a historic meeting with the President of the United States, Donald Trump, with whom we discussed strengthening the bilateral relationship between our countries and advancing a cooperation agenda in strategic areas such as energy, mining, and security,” Rodriguez said.
The Guardian reported that the meeting took place at the Lotte New York Palace hotel in Manhattan and noted it was just seven miles from the Brooklyn prison where Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, are being held. A reporter asked Rodriguez if she planned to visit Maduro, but she didn’t respond.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Stephen Miller, Trump’s homeland security advisor, also took part in the talks with Rodriguez. “It was a short meeting, but it was an important meeting,” Rubio said.
The meeting came less than a month after the US and Venezuela announced an oil deal that, according to statements from Trump, would see the US take control of 65 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, though years of work and billions in investments would be required to get a significant amount of it out of the ground.
“So, it’s perhaps the biggest deal,” Trump said in his UN address. “It was a war, but it’s perhaps the biggest deal ever made. To the victor belong the spoils. You’ve all heard that.”
