The Trump administration is using a secret indictment to assert leverage over Venezuela’s Acting President Delcy Rodríguez, according to the editor-in-chief of the US government-funded outlet, Armando.info.
“One of the information we manage is that the US is holding an indictment against [Rodriguez] to make it public, just in case she derails,” Valentina Lares Martiz revealed during a February 6, 2026webinarhosted by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an outlet also sponsored by the US government.
“Just to hold it over her head?” asked OCCRP deputy editor Julia Wallace.
“Yeah, so, I think she, she and her brother [Jorge Rodríguez], they are in this survival mode, and they will have the capacity to move the pieces, as long as the US backs her up,” Armando.info’s Lares Martiz affirmed.
A January 17, 2026reportby the Associated Press revealed that the Drug Enforcement Administration classified Acting president Rodríguez as a “priority target” almost as soon as she was appointed as Vice President in 2018.
David Smilde, an academic who crusades for regime change in Venezuela at theUS government and ExxonMobil-fundedAtlantic Council, described the DEA investigation of Rodríguez as “logical.” Smilde explained to the AP thatthe investigation “gives the U.S. government leverage over her. She may fear that if she does not do as the Trump administration demands, she could end up with an indictment like Maduro.”
During the OCCRP webinar, Steven Dudley of the State Department-funded Insight Crime outlet remarked that “this isn’t without precedent, in terms of [the US government] hanging an indictment over somebody to cajole them into doing their bidding.”
Dudley added, “They don’t need an indictment to cajole people. They have a giant military, and they’ve shown that they’re willing to use that military. That is the biggest stick.”
Source: The Grayzone
