Trump and Delcy Rodríguez meet for the first time in New York

US President Donald Trump and Venezuela's acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, met on Tuesday in New York in an encounter that marks an unprecedented rapprochement between the two governments, according to the outlet El Pitazo. The meeting was held behind closed doors at the Lotte New York Palace hotel, during a reception hosted by Trump for foreign leaders during the High-Level Week of the United Nations (UN).

Key figures of the US administration took part in the meeting, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent; White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles; and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. According to coverage by MercoPress, this is the first time in more than eleven years that a US president has met with a Venezuelan leader, since the brief encounter between Barack Obama and Nicolás Maduro at the Summit of the Americas held in Panama in 2015.

The bilateral rapprochement comes amid deep political and economic changes following the capture of Nicolás Maduro in Caracas last January. Since then, the US administration has backed the new executive and restored diplomatic channels, a process that includes an oil agreement focused on the country's crude reserves. In his address to the UN General Assembly, the US president referred to expectations of foreign investment and to the flow of resources into the national oil industry.

For her part, Rodríguez's New York agenda included meetings with the heads of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), as well as a meeting with UN Secretary-General António Guterres to address economic reforms and the restructuring of external debt. These multilateral dialogue forums are part of Caracas's recent diplomatic moves, which also included the restoration of diplomatic relations with Paraguay in the preceding days.