To Rodríguez’s left stood Maduro’s only son — known as Nicolasito, a member of the National Assembly — who bore the Venezuelan Constitution on a red velvet cushion. Resting one hand on the book, Delcy rose the other in oath and looked up at her older brother, Jorge Rodríguez, who stood before her as president of the National Assembly. On the podium, Delcy and Jorge were poised to begin a new leadership, presided by Nicolasito as the figurative reembodiment of Maduro.
Delcy made her presidential vow to Jorge in the name of their late father, Jorge Antonio Rodríguez, and for all the little boys and girls of Venezuela. Delcy and Jorge were themselves small children on the day they learned that their father would not be coming home. In July 1976, Rodríguez died while held in detention by Venezuelan intelligence on suspicion of abducting US businessman William Niehous. A postmortem examination identified seven broken ribs and internal bleeding. The cause of death, aged just thirty-four, was cardiac arrest.
Rodríguez’s short adult life had been packed with political action. Barely out of school, he joined the youth branch of an emergent liberal party and then a more radical group of dissidents, taking part in Caracas’s mass student protests in 1968. These were tumultuous times in Venezuela.
The country’s US-allied centrist leadership was urged to stamp out the guerrilla movement that had been ignited by the Cuban Revolution and spread with the splintering of the Left. Feared to be a hotbed for militant organization, Rodríguez’s alma mater, the Central University of Venezuela (UCV), was repeatedly shut down during this period. By the start of the 1970s, Rodríguez had become a prominent advocate of revolutionary armed struggle and pursued this aim in founding a Leninist organization called the Socialist League.
As Rodríguez gained notoriety at home, he found international fame with the Niehous abduction. Niehous was vice president of glass…
Auteur: Rebecca Jarman
