The government of Venezuela’s interim leader, Delcy Rodríguez, enlisted U.S. military support to return an oil tanker that left the country without permission, according to people close to the Venezuelan government who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
That unlikely pact, the first publicly known instance of military cooperation between the countries since the capture of President Nicolás Maduro, comes as Ms. Rodríguez seeks to assert her will on the oil-rich nation amid a redistribution of wealth and power that has followed the sudden change in leadership.
The tanker, called alternatively Olina or Minerva M, left a port in eastern Venezuela late last weekend without the authorization of port authorities or the state oil company in the chaotic hours that followed Mr. Maduro’s downfall, according to satellite imagery and the people close to the government.
The state oil company, known as PDVSA, said it was never paid for its crude.
The tanker “launched without payment, nor the authorization of Venezuelan authorities,” PDVSA said in a statement on Friday, adding that the U.S. government aided its return. Mr. Trump echoed the claim the same day, saying that the tanker “departed Venezuela without our approval” and was returning to Venezuela “in coordination” with Ms. Rodríguez.
Mr. Trump said in a recent interview with The New York Times that Ms. Rodríguez spoke “all the time” with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a claim confirmed by people close to the Venezuelan leader.
The tanker was carrying half a million barrels of oil belonging to a company controlled by a businessman called Alex Saab, according to internal PDVSA data and the people close to the industry.
Through a representative, Mr. Saab denied this, calling the allegations “false, deliberately deceptive and not journalism.”
Mr. Saab, a billionaire Colombian businessman based in Caracas, the capital of Venezuela, was indicted by the United States on charges of laundering money for Mr. Maduro’s government in 2019. He spent two years in a U.S. prison before being released in a prisoner swap.
Multiple people close to the Venezuelan government have said that Ms. Rodríguez and Mr. Saab belong to different factions of the country’s fractious ruling coalition and that they have a tense personal relationship.
Ms. Rodríguez and her brother Jorge Rodríguez together control the country’s economic policy and legislature. Mr. Saab owed his lucrative business contracts to his closeness to Mr. Maduro, his wife and her relatives, said the people. Mr. Maduro’s wife, Cilia Flores, was captured by the U.S. Special Forces and brought to stand trial in New York along with him. Much of her immediate family is under U.S. sanctions.
Mr. Saab dominated Venezuela’s oil trade until he was captured on the orders of U.S. agents in Africa in 2020 and extradited to the United States. Though less prominent since he returned to Venezuela, he has continued to obtain contracts to export oil to China. This put him on a collision course with Ms. Rodríguez, who has been trying to impose her will on Venezuela’s main source of export revenue since becoming the oil minister in 2024, the people said.
A joint U.S. Coast Guard and Navy team boarded the Olina outside Venezuelan territorial waters in the Caribbean Sea on Friday and forced the ship to return to port, according to the Pentagon. It is unclear when U.S. servicemen left the ship.
The close cooperation between Ms. Rodríguez and the Pentagon is particularly striking because just a week ago the U.S. military attacked Caracas, killing at least 100 civilians, soldiers and security officers, according to Venezuelan officials. In an interview with The Times in September, Ms. Rodríguez denounced the Pentagon in particular for trying to gain control of Venezuelan oil reserves.
But now, U.S. soldiers are in effect helping Ms. Rodríguez assert control of Venezuela and its wealth.
Tensions between Venezuela’s different power factions also appeared to erupt in another setting a day before the Olina was returned. Barry J. Pollock, a lawyer who represented Mr. Maduro at his Manhattan arraignment, filed papers with the court on Thursday, claiming that another lawyer was “purporting to appear” on behalf of the detained Venezuelan leader.
That other lawyer, Bruce Fein, claims to have the backing of at least some members of Ms. Flores’s family.
“I was informed that Maduro’s insiders — including brother-in-law — suspected betrayal and trusted no one in Maduro’s hastily arranged initial representation,” Mr. Fein wrote in an email to The Times on Friday.
Reporting was contributed by Eric Schmitt and Nicholas Nehamas from Washington; Mariana Martínez from Caracas; and Benjamin Weiser and Jonah E. Bromwich from New York.
Note: The International Maritime Organization issues an IMO number, a permanent identification number, that remains associated with a vessel throughout its lifetime unlike a ship’s name, which can change frequently. The ship in this article is Olina, also known as Minerva M (9282479).
Anatoly Kurmanaev covers Venezuela and its interim government.
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