By Dustin Volz, Vera Bergengruen and Kejal Vyas

WASHINGTON -- Central Intelligence Agency Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Caracas on Thursday to meet with acting President Delcy Rodríguez, in the first known visit by a senior U.S. official to Venezuela since U.S. Special Forces captured strongman Nicolás Maduro last month.

In the two-hour-long meeting, Ratcliffe told Rodríguez that the Trump administration wants to strengthen its working relationship with the governmen t and discussed potential opportunities for economic collaboration, a U.S. official said.

He also conveyed that Venezuela couldn't serve as a haven for drug gangs, the official said. Ratcliffe singled out Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that the U.S. has designated a foreign terrorist organization.

Venezuela's Information Ministry didn't immediately respond to calls and emails seeking comment on the CIA visit. Representatives of Rodríguez's government were also in Washington this week to meet with U.S. officials, including at the State Department, to work on reopening the Venezuelan embassy, a person familiar with the talks said. The New York Times earlier reported on Ratcliffe's visit to Caracas.

Ratcliffe visited Caracas on the same day that Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado -- whose ally Edmundo González is widely acknowledged to have won the 2024 election against Maduro -- was in Washington to meet with President Trump. In that meeting, she presented him with the Nobel Peace Prize she was awarded for her pro-democracy work in Venezuela.

Trump has made it clear he intends to continue working with Rodríguez, Maduro's former vice president and a regime loyalist, and hasn't spoken about a timetable for a democratic transition in the country. Instead, he has focused largely on economic arrangements, demanding that the country partner exclusively with the U.S. on oil production and sales. Trump officials have also said they want Venezuela to push out Chinese and Russian influence and reorient Venezuela's oil trade away from China.

Even as she has cooperated with the Trump administration's demands, Rodríguez has kept up the nationalist rhetoric at home. In a speech on Thursday, she stated that her country would continue to do business with U.S. adversaries.

"May the constrictions that seek to dominate our foreign policy dissipate definitively," Rodríguez said to applause from ruling socialist party loyalists. "Venezuela has the right to relations with China, with Russia, with Cuba, with Iran."

Venezuelan officials have repeatedly dismissed allegations that the Tren de Aragua gang has penetrated the government. They say the criminal group, which was formed in a prison, has already been dismantled by Venezuelan security forces. Its influence, they say, is being exaggerated to justify U.S. intervention in the country. Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello last year called the gang "fake news" and referred to it as "an urban legend."

In the weeks leading up to the Jan. three operation that deposed Maduro, a classified CIA assessment concluded that top members of Maduro's regime, including Rodríguez, would be best positioned to lead a temporary government in Caracas to maintain stability, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

Ratcliffe, a former Republican congressman from Texas who also served as the director of national intelligence during Trump's first term, was among a handful of senior Trump administration officials who met regularly for months to discuss planning for the Maduro operation.

Write to Dustin Volz at dustin.volz@wsj.com, Vera Bergengruen at vera.bergengruen@wsj.com and Kejal Vyas at kejal.vyas@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

U.S. Special Forces captured Nicolás Maduro on Jan. 3. "CIA Director Traveled to Caracas to Meet Venezuela's Delcy Rodríguez," at 11:31 a.m., incorrectly said he was captured last month.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

January 16, 2026 13:16 ET (18:16 GMT)

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