No OFAC, No Problem: With Jorge Rodríguez Delisted, Washington Cements Venezuela Gamble

Washington lifted its last major individual sanction against Venezuela's Chavista leadership on Wednesday, removing Jorge Rodríguez — president of the National Assembly and brother of acting President Delcy Rodríguez — from the U.S. Treasury's blacklist of designated nationals. The move completed a paired diplomatic rehabilitation begun six months earlier when Delcy was cleared, formally recognizing the siblings who now hold Venezuela's executive and legislative reins as Washington's counterparts in an ongoing political transition. Nine months after Nicolás Maduro was seized by U.S. forces in a nighttime military operation, the architecture of America's post-Maduro Venezuela strategy is taking unmistakable shape — and the Rodríguez family is at its center.

A Designation That Survived Eight Years — Until Now

OFAC's Wednesday notice formally removed Jorge Jesús Rodríguez Gómez, born November 9, 1965, from the Venezuela-related Specially Designated Nationals list, where his name had appeared since September 2018. That year, the Treasury Department targeted four senior officials in a single sweep: his sister Delcy Rodríguez, then Maduro's executive vice president; Maduro's wife, Cilia Flores; and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López. The Treasury offered no public explanation for the latest removal. Al Jazeera reported that a source familiar with the decision linked it to Washington's broader diplomatic recognition of the interim Venezuelan government and Trump's three-phase plan for the country's political transition.

The "Rodrigato": How Two Siblings Came to Run Venezuela

When U.S. special operations forces captured Nicolás Maduro on January 3, 2026, the executive power he had concentrated for 13 years passed to Delcy Rodríguez, his executive vice president, who became acting president. Her brother Jorge, Assembly president since 2021, moved into the role of chief government negotiator in the Washington-backed dialogue process — a political arrangement some analysts have taken to calling the "Rodrigato," given that both branches of the state now answer to the same family. With Delcy's OFAC removal on April 1 and Jorge's on October 14, each sibling shed U.S. sanctions designations that had blocked them from engaging freely with American financial institutions. Washington now holds sanction-free interlocutors in both chambers of Venezuelan power.

A Transactional Relationship Built on Oil and Reform

The Rodríguez rehabilitation did not happen through goodwill alone. Since Delcy assumed the interim presidency, the government has moved to fulfill Washington's central demand: opening Venezuela's energy sector to American companies. In January 2026, Trump announced that Venezuela would deliver between 30 and 50 million barrels of crude oil to be refined and sold by the United States — a transfer that has since been underway. The White House has described the arrangement as a cornerstone of Phase 2: economic recovery paired with national reconciliation. Jorge Rodríguez, for his part, has steered investment-liberalization measures through the National Assembly, including provisions easing foreign entry into the oil and mining sectors and legislation allowing private capital into the country's battered power grid.

A Three-Phase Roadmap With One Unresolved Chapter

Secretary of State Marco Rubio laid out the Trump administration's Venezuela framework in January 2026: three sequential phases of stabilization, economic recovery, and political transition. By April, Rubio confirmed Venezuela had advanced to Phase 2. When Jorge Rodríguez's name was removed from the SDN list on October 14 — the same day a third round of government-opposition talks opened in Caracas — a Congressional Research Service analysis had already told Congress that elections remain a future condition, not a scheduled event. Rubio's own benchmark — "multi-party, free and fair elections" — marks the threshold of Phase 3, and no public timeline exists for reaching it. Democratic lawmakers have charged the administration with subordinating political goals to oil access; some Republicans have warned that the economic emphasis risks hollowing out the transition's democratic credibility.

Machado at the Margins of Her Own Country's Future

The figure most conspicuously absent from this process is María Corina Machado, Venezuela's 2025 Nobel Peace laureate and its most recognizable democratic symbol. Barred from the 2024 presidential race, Machado backed opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, whose independent vote tallies showed a decisive margin over Maduro — a result the Maduro government refused to honor. Today, with Maduro gone, Machado remains outside the U.S.-backed negotiating structure. NPR reported that the transition talks involve government delegates and a sector of formal opposition legislators — not Machado's movement — a design that has deepened frustration among Venezuelans who regard her as the clearest embodiment of the 2024 democratic mandate. Venezuelan authorities have also blocked her return to the country, reportedly closing airspace to prevent her re-entry.

What the Diaspora Watches From a Distance

For the nearly 8 million Venezuelans living outside their country — substantial communities spread across the United States, Colombia, and Peru — the paired delisting of both Rodríguez siblings sends an unmistakable signal: Washington now treats the surviving Chavista leadership as legitimate transition partners rather than targets of economic pressure. The path to elections, which diaspora communities have long cited as the essential democratic measure, carries no public timeline. Trump has pledged to secure the release of all remaining political prisoners in Venezuela while simultaneously expressing confidence in Delcy Rodríguez's stewardship of the interim government — a rhetorical posture that satisfies neither democratic advocates nor Chavismo hardliners. Jorge Rodríguez's exit from OFAC's list is not the end of a sanctions story. It is the clearest signal yet that the Trump administration intends to write Venezuela's next chapter with Chavismo's pen — whether the opposition, the nearly 8 million Venezuelans scattered across the globe, and the Nobel Committee's chosen laureate give their approval or not.

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