Delcy Rodríguez, presidenta encargada de Venezuela, afirmó este jueves que “la agresión invasora” llevada a cabo por Estados Unidos contra el país el pasado 3 de enero constituye “una mancha en la relación entre ambas naciones”, y agregó que, en el contexto político actual, su gobierno “ha decidido escoger la vía diplomática” para dirimir el conflicto. “Tenemos derecho a tener relaciones diplomáticas con China, con Rusia, con Irán, con Cuba, con todos los pueblos del mundo. También con los Estados Unidos. Somos una nación soberana”, añadió.

Rodríguez hizo estas afirmaciones durante la presentación anual de la gestión del Ejecutivo ante el Parlamento, un ritual constitucional que se celebra a comienzos de cada año en el Palacio Federal Legislativo. A la sesión han acudido varios embajadores extranjeros, gobernadores y autoridades del chavismo.

La presidenta encargada, que en sus últimas declaraciones ha señalado que el país se abre a un “nuevo momento político”, dedicó buena parte de su intervención a honrar a Nicolás Maduro y Cilia Flores, capturados durante la operación estadounidense del 3 de enero, y a elevar la moral de la militancia revolucionaria tras el ataque. Rodríguez se comprometió nuevamente con la lealtad a los principios fundamentales del chavismo. “Este trabajo es del presidente Maduro, afirmó al presentar el documento.

Rodríguez prometió trabajar por la liberación de Maduro y Flores y pidió “un minuto de aplausos” para los soldados venezolanos y cubanos que murieron en los enfrentamientos con tropas estadounidenses. “No le tengamos miedo a la contradicción planteada. Vamos a enfrentarla”, dijo en referencia a los acuerdos petroleros con Estados Unidos anunciados por el propio Donald Trump tras la detención de la pareja presidencial.

Tanto Delcy Rodríguez como su hermano Jorge Rodríguez, presidente del Parlamento, emplearon un tono conciliador hacia la oposición. Ambos invocaron la importancia de fomentar la convivencia política y asumieron, al menos de forma parcial, la responsabilidad de trabajar para consolidar un mejor clima en el país.

Rodríguez advirtió a la oposición: “No confundan las medidas sustitutivas tomadas con algunas personas judicializadas y nuestro interés en bajarle la presión al clima político con debilidad. No se equivoquen con esto. Es hora de desterrar el extremismo fascista. Vamos a rectificar todos”. Rodríguez agregó además: “No es que la presidenta encargada tenga miedo porque esté amenazada. No. Venezuela entera está amenazada y, con la soberanía por delante, daremos la batalla diplomática”.

La presidenta encargada criticó los fundamentos históricos de la diplomacia estadounidense y comentó que, históricamente, la nación norteamericana ha maniobrado e intrigado abiertamente para ampliar su radio de influencia en América Latina, socavar su independencia y traficar con sus recursos naturales. “La doctrina Monroe y el bolivarianismo que nosotros postulamos y defendemos son proyectos completamente opuestos, son antítesis”, afirmó.

En una alusión directa a las recientes conversaciones entre Donald Trump y la líder de la oposición venezolana, María Corina Machado, Rodríguez comentó: “Si algún día me tocara ir como presidenta encargada a Washington, lo haré con dignidad, de pie, caminando con la frente en alto y con la bandera tricolor. Será de pie, nunca será arrastrándome”.

Some buildings are born with a systemic vocation. They aspire to be more than just containers for human activity and behave like three-dimensional diagrams of the world, ideological machines disguised as concrete. El Helicoide was born with precisely that ambition, perhaps too much so.

Venezuela in the 1950s. With dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez at the helm, the country was overflowing with gasoline, dollars, and a very specific kind of civic silence that could be mistaken for political stability. Oil permeated everything. There was money, there was speed, and with both, an almost sweaty faith in the idea that the future was guaranteed and that any attempt at objection would be drowned out by pressing the gas pedal. Literally.

This economic, political — and moral — ecosystem was condensed into a project as simple in its gesture as it was excessive in its consequences. A shopping mall that could only be traversed by car, without getting out of the vehicle and without walking. Without abandoning the steering wheel, lest progress escape through the back door. Thus, El Helicoide was conceived as a single, continuous movement. A ramp. A spiral path that encircled the Tarpeian Rock and rose above Caracas, transforming consumption into a journey and the incline into a substitute for urban strolling.

Designed by Jorge Romero Gutiérrez, Pedro Neuberger, and Dirk Bornhorst, the project included hundreds of shops, eight cinemas, a five-star hotel, a private club, a performance hall, and even a helipad, in case the oil boom reached such a point that customers arrived directly from the skies. Crowning it all was a geodesic dome designed to reflect the tropical light and return it to the city, transformed into an abstract symbol. Four kilometers (2.5 miles) of asphalt spiraled around the hillside, where cars would stop in front of every shop window, every cinema, every restaurant, transforming the act of shopping into a perfectly calibrated mechanical choreography. El Helicoide was more than just a building. It was a compact symbol in which form was the message, because the spiral was not just a path, it was a gesture that promised perpetual ascent, frictionless circulation toward continuous progress that, at that time, seemed to have no expiration date. So much so that its design circled the globe even before the building was fully constructed. It was exhibited at MoMA, Pablo Neruda called it a “concrete rose,” and Salvador Dalí offered to decorate its interiors. Everything fit the narrative.

In that state of architectural celebration, construction began in 1956, observed with proud awe by the white elites who had envisioned it and with a mixture of intimacy and infinite distance by the Black children of the nearby neighborhoods, who would probably never be able to travel through it. Because to inhabit El Helicoide required gasoline and a robust faith in the eternity of the regime. But eternity endured less than the oil.

In 1958, the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship fell, and the building was caught in the ebb and flow of change. Funds froze. Lawsuits piled up. The company went bankrupt. The imported elevators disappeared. The interior was left exposed to rain, looting, and slow deterioration. An attempt was made to resume construction. Some sections were completed, including the dome, but El Helicoide never became what it was intended to be. For years it remained unfinished, too grand to ignore and too laden with symbolism to complete without discomfort.

In the late 1970s, thousands of homeless people occupied the structure. The ramps designed for cars were filled with mattresses, makeshift stoves set up halfway up the slope, and clothes hanging where once there had only been structural calculations. El Helicoide became an informal city embedded in a futuristic engineering work, a layering of times and uses that ended in evictions and returned the building to a new state of expectant emptiness.

But another transformation was yet to come. In an unintentional and sinister homage to the hill’s name — the Tarpeian Rock in Rome was the place from which traitors and thieves were thrown to their deaths — the building’s function changed once again. Starting in 1982, the state began to gradually establish itself within its walls. First, administrative offices. Then, security agencies. In 1984, the DISIP (General Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services) used it as its headquarters and as a detention center. In 1992, during Hugo Chávez’s second coup attempt, an OV-10 Bronco from the rebel Air Force bombed the building, and the resulting anti-aircraft fire destroyed part of the facilities. But El Helicoide was already too important to abandon again, so it was rebuilt and, as of 2010, under the Chavista regime, it became a detention center for SEBIN, the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service. And SEBIN transformed a circulation device into an internal control mechanism. Offices were converted into cells, bathrooms sealed off for confinement, and curved corridors integrated into a monitored circuit that erased any stable spatial reference. The prisoners gave names to these former stores. Little Hell. The Guarimbero. Guantánamo. The Little Tiger. The Cockroach. The Fishbowl. A tropical bestiary, surreal and terrifying all at once. Because these names, however close they may be to verbal folklore, designate places where organizations like Human Rights Watch have denounced torture, extreme overcrowding, electrocutions, immersion in feces, and sexual abuse.

To this day, El Helicoide still stands, towering over Caracas. The White House has stated that Delcy Rodríguez plans to dismantle the detention center, but for now, the building’s future remains uncertain, true to form.

Seen in photographs, with its impeccably designed ramp and its still-gleaming dome, El Helicoide, for me — someone who has always believed in the capacity of built spaces to improve life — leads to a chilling reflection: that architecture — or rather, the humans who use it — has the capacity to adapt to anything. To anything. That a project conceived under a dictatorship as a delirious promise of the future can end up, with hardly any modifications, as a political prison under another dictatorship. And that all of this — the oil, the cars, the ramp, the asphalt, the luxury for a few and the poverty for many, the looting, the arrests, the bombings, the cells, and the torture — functions, whether we like it or not, as a strange and brutal summary of the last 70 years of Venezuelan history.

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Just a few weeks ago, the scene would have been unthinkable. The German ambassador, Völker Pellet, shook hands with Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello at the Miraflores presidential palace. A month earlier, Cabello, one of Chavismo’s strongmen, had dedicated part of his television program, where he usually ridicules and threatens those he considers adversaries, to the German diplomat. He said he had seen him “taking it easy” in Caracas and showed photos from his social media accounts of him walking around Waraira Repano, the Ávila mountain that dominates the city, to mock Berlin’s warning about the risks of traveling to Venezuela in the midst of escalating tensions with Washington. Today, that same ambassador is being officially received in the heart of Chavista power.

Just a year ago, Venezuela was expelling diplomats. Today, it welcomes them into the presidential palace. Something has shifted since the attack on January 3 and the capture of Nicolás Maduro. After years of broken relations, accusations of interference, and clashes with much of the world, Chavismo is looking outward. “Venezuela is opening itself to a new political moment, one that allows for understanding despite political and ideological differences,” said the country’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez.

The speed has been surprising. In just a few days, Rodríguez activated an agenda that no one expected so soon: calls to international leaders, promises of official trips, meetings with ambassadors, and messages of reopening. “There is a lot of hope that this new stage will change the paradigm and [Venezuela will] open up to the world,” says a high-ranking European diplomatic source. “That is why, despite everything, we continue talking.”

Just nine days after the U.S. operation that landed Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in a New York jail, representatives from the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland traveled to Caracas for a meeting convened by Rodríguez. Following the meeting, the president wrote on Instagram that Venezuela had “the firm will to advance an agenda of international relations.” Meanwhile, the Venezuelan government began preparations to reopen its embassy in the United States and explore the return of the U.S. mission to Caracas, which has been closed since 2019. Envoys from both countries have been traveling back and forth in recent days, something that would have been scarcely possible until very recently.

For years, every internal political crisis ended up translating into a diplomatic clash. Europe, Latin America, and the United States were all, at different times, the adversary. There were expulsions, withdrawals of ambassadors, and even restrictions on the movements of diplomats. Isolation ceased to be exceptional. “We are coming out of a period of widespread cooling,” explains a diplomatic source from a European country that withdrew its ambassador from Caracas. “The EU did not recognize the last elections or Maduro’s victory, and there was anger over the political repression. And we have always been consistent: we do not sympathize with any dictatorship.”

The archives are full of references to diplomatic crises, some more serious than others. In 2019, when more than 50 countries recognized Juan Guaidó as interim president, several states cooled relations or closed their embassies. The United States shuttered its mission, leaving hundreds of thousands of exiled Venezuelans in limbo without consular representation in the countries to which they had emigrated. Diplomats stopped attending official events. Chavismo stopped attending state receptions. Direct channels of communication were severed. The world became inaccessible to Venezuela.

For many ambassadors, daily dealings with those in power became a barrier. Even mediating the release of detained foreign citizens or providing basic consular assistance became dependent on subtle diplomacy, conducted through unofficial channels. At the same time, several diplomatic missions played a part in the country’s recent history. Since 2017, some diplomatic buildings have served as refuge for opposition leaders. The Chilean ambassador’s residence sheltered as many as six, including Freddy Guevara, who spent three years there before leaving the country after negotiations with the government.

The most delicate episode unfolded at the Spanish embassy. In April 2019, opposition leader Leopoldo López escaped house arrest and sought refuge in the residence of the ambassador, Jesús Silva — who passed away last year — and who, during his mission, attempted to mediate between the Chavista regime and the opposition. López remained there for over a year and became the elephant in the room of bilateral relations. Intelligence services maintained constant surveillance of the residence in the Caracas Country Club. Even so, López managed to flee into exile in Spain with the direct assistance of the ambassador and his family.

Over time, and after several stability crises that tested Chavismo, European diplomacy began to seek ways to navigate Maduro’s entrenched position. The decision by the 27 EU member states to maintain only chargés d’affaires — a way of diminishing political recognition — began to lose its effectiveness around 2022, when the opposition was once again decapitated by repression. By then, Maduro had already expelled the European Union ambassador with a 72-hour ultimatum. Even so, Portugal took the first step and presented its credentials. There was a handshake after years of avoiding them. Then came Spain, France, and Germany. Just this week, Italy announced it would do the same after the release of several of its citizens from prison.

The ostracism came at a high price for dozens of detained foreigners. Without dialogue with the regime, many countries struggled to secure the release of their citizens from Venezuelan prisons. And there were many. Over the past year, the arbitrary detentions of foreign nationals became a tool of diplomatic pressure. The Venezuelan government saw international conspiracies, while human rights organizations denounced a pattern: arrests used as bargaining chips in bilateral negotiations.

Venezuela is now deploying its diplomacy, but the regime remains besieged by sanctions. Its relations with the world continue to be constrained by the web of restrictions the United States maintains on the financial and oil systems, designed to isolate the core of Chavista power and limit its access to foreign currency. The European Union also maintains targeted measures against 69 Chavista leaders, including Delcy Rodríguez herself, in addition to asset freezes, travel bans, and an arms embargo.

Spain has been one of the countries that has most strongly promoted this sanctions regime, although it is now opening the door to reviewing it. Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares argued in an interview with EL PAÍS that if Caracas takes steps toward a democratic solution, “the logical thing” would be for these measures to begin to disappear. Albares even indicated that Rodríguez’s situation warrants “almost automatic reflection,” given that the European Union avoids sanctioning the head of state in order to maintain dialogue. The idea of a new phase is beginning to take shape.

The current developments have attracted attention. “I was surprised to see Delcy Rodríguez meeting with the ambassadors,” says Isabel Santos, a former Portuguese MEP and head of the EU election observation mission in 2021, speaking from Lisbon. “The Chavista Venezuela I knew could be very volatile. Everything depended on which sectors held the most power. When the most radical elements gained ground, everything shut down.”

Others view the scene with more detachment. “I would remain cautious,” warns a former European ambassador who served several years in Caracas. In his opinion, meetings like the ones taking place are not unprecedented. “Delcy wants to send a message. She insists on the idea of normalcy, that there is no power vacuum, that Chavismo has closed ranks, and that she is demonstrating that control. She is telling the world that she wants good relations with everyone, but it remains to be seen what new stage is truly beginning.”

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