ISTANBUL — The woman now running Venezuela stepped off her plane in Istanbul on Monday to a minister’s welcome, and within hours Recep Tayyip Erdogan met her with the kind of public embrace Washington had hoped she would no longer be able to find. Five months after US commandos seized Nicolas Maduro from Caracas, Delcy Rodriguez is touring the capitals that did not look away.
The visit, unannounced until she had landed, carried a message pitched less at Ankara than at Washington. Removing a president, it said, did not remove the country, and Venezuela intends to keep doing business with anyone willing to. Erdogan gave Caracas the answer it came for, telling Rodriguez that Turkey would continue to stand by the Venezuelan people.
The two governments said they want to lift bilateral trade to $3 billion, and the talks settled on the sectors where their interests actually overlap: energy, mining and gold. Rodriguez was received at the airport by Turkey’s energy minister, which is its own statement about what the trip was for. Daily Sabah reported that the leaders held both one-on-one and delegation talks on deepening cooperation.
The trip cannot be read apart from January, when a US Delta Force raid seized Maduro in a strike on Caracas that much of the world called an act of war. Washington framed the removal as the end of a dictatorship. For Venezuela’s government, and for a long list of capitals across the Global South, it looked like something older: a great power deciding who may run a smaller one.
Istanbul was not the first stop. Days earlier Rodriguez was in New Delhi, courting India on oil and investment, and before that she hosted Colombia’s president in Caracas. The itinerary sketches the world Venezuela is betting on, one where barrels and bullion set the terms and the United States is one customer among several rather than the gatekeeper.
For Erdogan the calculation is concrete. Turkey holds interests in Venezuelan gold and energy and a foothold in Latin America it has no wish to surrender to a US-installed alternative. Standing by Caracas costs Ankara little and signals a great deal, both to Washington and to a Global South that watches closely how Turkey behaves when a partner is cornered. Arab News noted the visit was a surprise even by the standards of Rodriguez’s fast-moving tour.
The numbers deserve a caveat. A $3 billion trade target is an aspiration, not an achievement, and Venezuela has announced ambitious figures with many partners before that did not survive contact with sanctions, shipping and banking. Whether this tour yields signed contracts or only warm communiques is the question the photographs cannot answer.
What neither government addressed in public is the thing hanging over all of it. Maduro, the elected president, is in US custody and has now made his first appearance in an American court. Rodriguez is governing as acting president of a country whose head of state is a prisoner abroad, and no amount of trade diplomacy dissolves that fact. It only routes around it.
For now the image is the message. A Venezuelan leader the United States tried to sideline stood beside the president of a NATO member who called her country a friend. Whether the handshake becomes barrels, gold and dollars, or stays a handshake in Istanbul, will be settled later. Monday’s point was simply that it happened at all.
