The United States lifted sanctions against Venezuelan interim President Delcy Rodriguez on Wednesday, removing her name from its list of specially designated nationals in the clearest signal yet that Washington is treating her government as a legitimate partner following the military operation that removed Nicolás Maduro from power in January.

The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control published the deletion without announcement, a bureaucratic act that carries significant practical weight — Rodriguez can now conduct international financial transactions, engage with American companies, and operate within the global banking system in ways that were legally blocked while she remained on the list.

Rodriguez had been sanctioned as a key figure in Maduro’s government, where she served as his deputy. Her removal from the sanctions list reflects a relationship that has moved with unusual speed since Maduro’s ouster.

Washington’s conditions for normalisation were explicit: open Venezuela’s energy sector to American companies. Rodriguez has been complying. The reward is arriving in stages — the sanctions removal follows Monday’s reopening of the US Embassy in Caracas after a seven-year closure, another concrete marker of the bilateral thaw.

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The architecture of what Rodriguez is managing is delicate. She took power in the immediate aftermath of a military operation that killed approximately 100 people in Venezuela, according to Venezuelan authorities, and removed a leader whose government many of her current backers had served and supported. She is now implementing the economic opening that Washington demanded while holding together a coalition that includes figures who spent years inside the system she is now being asked to transform.

The balance is visible in the personnel decisions she has made. In mid-March she fired former Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez, who had been sanctioned alongside her. Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello — also previously sanctioned and regarded as one of her most important political backers — remains in office. Cabello’s continued presence reflects the limits of how far Rodriguez can move against the old guard without losing the support she needs to govern. Washington, for its part, appears willing to tolerate that pace, prioritising the energy opening over a comprehensive housecleaning of Maduro-era officials.

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Maduro himself is in New York facing federal drug trafficking charges that he and his wife Cilia Flores, who was taken alongside him in the January 3 operation, have denied. The case against him rests on narcoterrorism and cocaine conspiracy charges that the Justice Department has been building for years. His removal from Caracas was the opening condition for everything that has followed — the embassy reopening, the sanctions relief, the energy negotiations — though the legal proceedings against him are entirely separate from the bilateral normalisation track and are expected to continue regardless of how far Washington-Caracas relations warm.

The sanctions that remain on other Venezuelan officials, including some still serving in Rodriguez’s government, give Washington continued leverage over the pace and direction of economic reform without requiring it to make all-or-nothing demands. Rodriguez’s removal from the list is an incentive delivered, a signal that compliance produces results — and an implicit message to others in Caracas about what continued cooperation could yield.