Venezuela’s streets were on fire as protests raged over misrule.

Paramilitary cells and security forces were killing protesters by the dozens. Delcy Rodríguez, the foreign minister at the time, in 2014, convened ambassadors from around the world in a bid to flip the narrative and fend off sanctions over rights abuses.

In the closed-door meeting, Rodríguez berated envoys from the US and the European Union. Pointing her finger at them, she said those killed were terrorists, not protesters.

“She was yelling at them, using very aggressive language,” said Imdat Oner, a former diplomat at Turkey’s embassy in Caracas who witnessed the scene. “This is not the way a foreign minister acts. I found it shocking because it was out of line with diplomatic practices.”

Rodríguez lost that battle when President Barack Obama ended up imposing sanctions. But her combative tactics served her well as she climbed through the ranks of a government dominated by men who were military figures or fire-breathing ideologues.

Now, with President Trump’s assent, Rodríguez is Venezuela’s interim leader after US forces captured and forcibly extracted her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, to stand trial in New York.

Rodríguez, 56, faces an immense challenge. She must placate an American President who says the US will run Venezuela for years to come, while trying to stabilise a cratering economy and consolidate control over governing institutions and power brokers in her inner circle, imbued with hatred of US meddling.

But those who know her say her capacity for hurling insults at the West, virtually a job requirement in Venezuela’s government until Maduro’s capture, is complemented by a pragmatic streak, making her a survivor of both internal purges and geopolitical shifts.

Her transformation from Maduro’s ideological provocateur into a straight-talking technocrat seemingly capable of working with Trump unspooled as she amassed power in recent years by leading an effort to pull Venezuela out of an economic crash marked by children dying of hunger.

Trained abroad in France and Britain, she holds rarefied status for some at home as the daughter of a Marxist guerrilla who kidnapped an American business executive and became a revolutionary martyr.

New York Times News Service