Delcy Recasts Herself
The Orinoco Tribune is a Pro-Chavista outlet and has a piece on Delcy Rodríguez that is indicative of how she's been operating. She was, of course, central to repression in the country, but is recasting herself as an empathetic technocrat who deserves your vote. She is trying to erase her own history.
She starts out by saying something that seems clearly aimed at demands for elections:
“Venezuela’s political horizon is not measured by a date on the calendar,” she emphasized, “but rather by a sequence of objectives we must reach.”
Analysts suggest that since the return of far-right politician María Corina Machado, the Chavista leadership has entered into a pre-campaign mode aiming at the upcoming tentative elections.
Tentative elections indeed!
She enumerated the deep transformation of the justice system “to rebuild confidence and recover credibility in institutions” without mentioning she was right in the middle of eroding all credibility.
Rodríguez reported that the government continues to restore access to news websites that were subject to administrative measures as a result of the confrontation experienced.
"Administrative measures" included raids and censorship while the rest of the sentence is a passive mess of obfuscation.
The acting head of state reaffirmed that she is familiar with the affairs of the state in depth because of the different positions she has held. “I come from the system we are transforming and changing; I do not hide that; I turn that origin into a strength to drive the changes Venezuela needs.”
I guess the campaign message is that she knows dictatorship really well and so is the best person to transform the dictatorship, though in fact she has precious little experience with democracy. And then:
To young Venezuelans: it is worth believing again. These reforms are here so that, when it is your turn to decide the country’s course, you find institutions and not ruins.
This is perhaps the most noteworthy one because it is actually thanking Donald Trump, without whom Delcy Rodríguez would not be in her position and there wouldn't have been any changes at all.
I doubt any of this will be compelling to the vast majority of Venezuelans, particularly because polls show they don't think anything is getting better. And it won't be compelling to the likely next president, who will set up tribunals that may well try Delcy Rodríguez.
