OPINION:
Nicolas Maduro was led to believe that Russian air defense systems would keep American helicopters from landing near his fortified compound in Caracas. He was misinformed.
The Venezuelan dictator also thought that any hostiles who managed to enter his residence would be taken down by his Cuban bodyguards. However, Caribbean muscle proved no match for Delta Force special operators, who relied on actionable intelligence provided by a clandestine CIA team. More than 30 Cubans were reportedly killed in action.
President Trump deserves enormous credit for authorizing this intervention, fully aware of the risks entailed but also anticipating significant rewards for the U.S., Venezuela and Latin America.
Mr. Maduro is now in a federal jail cell in Brooklyn, New York. Do you think being incarcerated in a city that has a socialist mayor is any consolation for him? Is he feeling the collectivist warmth?
But I digress.
The extraction of Mr. Maduro — indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2020 on charges of “narco-terrorism” and other crimes — should not be confused with “regime change.” For now, at least, Mr. Maduro’s henchmen, the pillars of his regime, remain in power. Let me acquaint you with three of them.
Delcy Rodriguez, formerly Mr. Maduro’s vice president and minister of finance and petroleum, is now the interim president. Her father, Jorge Antonio Rodriguez, was a Venezuelan Marxist guerrilla and political leader who died in 1976 after being arrested in connection with the kidnapping of an American businessman in Caracas.
Ms. Rodriguez studied labor law at the Sorbonne in Paris and was later assigned to a diplomatic post in London. She also has been — and perhaps still is; I’ve read conflicting reports — the head of SEBIN, Venezuela’s secret police, infamous for torturing dissidents and journalists.
Behind her — I use the term advisedly — is Diosdado Cabello, whose formal title is minister of the popular power for interior, justice and peace. A socialist ideologue, he is under indictment in the United States on charges related to international drug trafficking and narco-terrorism.
Mr. Cabello controls the national police, the national intelligence services and the “colectivos,” who are paramilitary armed thugs akin to Nazi Brownshirts.
He also is believed to closely cooperate with Tren de Aragua, a transnational gang involved in violent crimes, drug and human trafficking, extortion and racketeering. More than 1,000 Tren de Aragua members are estimated to have illegally entered the U.S. under the Biden administration’s open borders policy. They now operate in at least 19 states.
Then there is Vladimir Padrino Lopez, Venezuela’s longtime defense minister and a stalwart Maduro loyalist. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and Transparency International detail a web of family-linked companies and U.S. real estate worth millions of dollars.
I presume that any one of them would be thrilled to slit Mr. Trump’s throat with a butter knife. At this moment, however, they appear to view appeasement as the better part of valor. They are “giving us everything that we feel is necessary,” Mr. Trump said last week.
Mr. Trump’s necessities include ending the flow of drugs from Venezuela and beginning the flow of crude oil to refineries on the American Gulf Coast. The commander in chief has vowed that no more subsidized Venezuelan oil will go to Cuba. If the Castroite communist regime, its economy already enfeebled, collapses as a consequence, wouldn’t that be one for the history books?
Most geostrategically significant is that Venezuela stop serving as an operating base in the Western Hemisphere for Moscow, Beijing and Tehran — three members of an implacably anti-American axis of aggressors whose imperialism is precisely what the Monroe Doctrine and the Trump Corollary prohibit.
(Related: President Trump should not tolerate the Venezuelan government continuing to issue passports to members of Hezbollah, Tehran’s terrorist vassal.)
Venezuela’s Penitentiary Services Ministry reports that 116 of roughly 800 political prisoners have been released. Foro Penal, an independent human rights monitoring group, has verified fewer than half that number. Mr. Trump should insist that all the anti-socialists be freed immediately and that those who celebrate their liberation may do so without fear.
Eventually, Venezuela will need a new government that respects the basic rights of Venezuelans, including the more than 8 million, roughly a quarter of the population, who have fled socialist oppression and poverty. Many have the brains and skills necessary to reinvigorate the dilapidated economy.
Venezuela possesses the world’s largest crude oil reserves, but its energy infrastructure is derelict. To bring production from where it is now, 870,000 barrels a day, to where it was in the late 1990s before the socialists took over, 3.4 million barrels a day, will cost as much as $100 million. I doubt American oil companies will make that investment until and unless Venezuela is again a rule-of-law nation.
Venezuela is fortunate to have a united opposition led by Maria Corina Machado, the recent Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Edmundo Gonzalez, the overwhelming winner of the 2024 election that Mr. Maduro stole from Venezuelan voters.
That opposition lacks one essential: guns. Mr. Maduro’s remnant regime still has a monopoly on violence, though its eagerness to slaughter dissidents may now be tempered by Mr. Trump’s attention.
I’d like to think that someone in Washington or Northern Virginia is in touch with patriotic Venezuelan military officers willing to take risks to make their country free and prosperous, as it was before the socialist thugs took over.
On these and related matters, in my humble opinion, Mr. Trump could have no better counselor than the one he was smart enough to choose: Marco Rubio. It’s apparent that Mr. Trump’s secretary of state/national security adviser understands that having more allies in the Americas is one of the ways to make America great again.
• Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a columnist for The Washington Times and host of the “Foreign Podicy” podcast.
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