Venezuela's acting president Delcy Rodríguez will travel to Washington in the coming days, a senior US official told multiple news agencies, cementing her status as President Donald Trump's preferred partner for governing post-Maduro Venezuela despite her two decades defending authoritarian rule.

The planned visit would mark the highest-level engagement between the two governments since Nicolas Maduro and his wife were captured and transferred to New York to face narcoterrorism charges after the January 3 operation. It would also make Rodríguez the first Venezuelan president to travel to the United States for bilateral talks in more than a quarter century – aside from protocol appearances at United Nations meetings in New York.

The dramatic US military raid that extracted Maduro from a heavily guarded compound in Caracas has fundamentally reshaped Venezuela's political landscape. Rodríguez, who served as Maduro's vice president and oil minister, assumed interim leadership as part of what Secretary of State Marco Rubio has outlined as a three-phase American strategy beginning with "stabilisation" through economic leverage, followed by "recovery" ensuring US companies gain oil sector access, and concluding with political "transition."

Washington has seized multiple Venezuelan oil tankers and recently completed its first sale of confiscated petroleum worth approximately $500mn whilst controlling revenues that would otherwise flow to Caracas. The Trump administration maintains explicit threats of further military intervention if the interim government fails to cooperate, a leverage that has so far produced tangible results including the release of over 400 political prisoners, though opposition groups report lower figures.

The announcement comes just a week after President Donald Trump met Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado. Despite praising Machado personally, Trump has so far sidelined her from the country's transition process, arguing she lacks sufficient political backing.

After Machado presented him with the Nobel Prize, Trump seemed to partially backtrack on January 20, saying, "We're talking to her and maybe we can get her involved some way. I'd love to be able to do that; Maria, maybe we can do that.”

Still, he has firmly endorsed Rodríguez's post-Chavista administration, saying it is operating under his government's tutelage and meeting US demands, including granting access to Venezuela's oil sector and shipping millions of barrels of crude to the US for sale.

In a veiled swipe at Machado, which some also saw as an ironic reference to Maduro, Rodriguez told the National Assembly last week “If one day, as acting president, I have to go to Washington, I will do so standing up, walking, not being dragged." “I’ll go standing tall ... never crawling.”

During his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 21, Trump heaped praise on Rodriguez stating, "Her leadership is good and smart. We are working together to ensure that both countries prosper in this new era of trade."

Yet the arrangement remains precarious. Rodríguez, a pragmatic technocrat, governs alongside Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, the brutal enforcer who commands intelligence services accused by the United Nations of crimes against humanity, and Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino López, who controls the armed forces. Armed pro-regime motorcycle gangs known as colectivos have established roadblocks in Caracas, prompting the State Department to issue urgent warnings ordering US citizens to flee immediately. The violence suggests that removing Maduro did not eliminate the coercive apparatus sustaining authoritarian control.

On the same day as Trump's meeting with Machado, Rodríguez held talks in Caracas with CIA Director John Ratcliffe on security matters and potential economic cooperation. Ratcliffe became the most senior US official, and the first cabinet member under Trump, to visit Venezuela since the military operation that ousted Maduro.