The midnight arrest of Venezuelan Socialist dictator and drug kingpin Nicolás Maduro by U.S. Special Forces last Jan. 3 was supposed to open the way for a transition to political and economic normality in Venezuela. His vice-president, Delcy Rodriguez, would work closely with the Trump administration towards holding new elections, restoring legal guarantees, and disconnecting the regime from drug cartels, Cuba, China, Russia, and Iran.
But a double 7.5 earthquake that flattened much of the strategic port city of La Guaira has nakedly exposed the dysfunction, brutality, and corruption still permeating Venezuela’s ruling circles, in full depth. All facets of Venezuela’s extinction-level experiment with radical socialism have played into the disaster that has cost the lives of more than 3,000 people and left thousands more injured and homeless.
Entire public housing estates, which had been the Maduro regime’s most heralded signature projects, pancaked onto the ground. Warnings from engineers that the buildings were being erected on a tectonic fault line had been totally ignored by corrupt officials, who compounded their criminal negligence by filling the construction’s supporting steel beams with styrofoam to cut costs and fill their pockets. (RELATED: The Ruins of Chavismo As Seen in Venezuela’s Earthquakes)
The tragic aftermath provides further shocking insights into the depravity of thugs still running Venezuela who sent secret police and paramilitary goon squads to rummage through the ruins for millions of dollars in cash and cocaine stashed in over 100 safehouses they kept there, while police and Colectivo militias blocked access to international relief teams seeking to recover thousands of residents buried in the rubble.
Panic-stricken Security, Peace, and Justice minister Diosdado Cabello was filmed trying to cordon off the ruins of a collapsed apartment block. In a viral video, Cabello, who is an alleged “tier one” member of Venezuela’s Cartel de los Soles, is seen pushing away a team of American relief workers trying to access struggling survivors in the wreckage.
Phone video clips also show uniformed police agents carrying away bags stacked with $100 notes, as enraged destitute residents scream and insult them. One woman tore up notes scattered in the rubble while yelling, “You are garbage” at the police.
Enraged neighbors publicly denounced authorities for being more concerned about securing their “cartel money” than helping relatives and neighbors buried in the ruins.
Enraged neighbors publicly denounced authorities for being more concerned about securing their “cartel money” than helping relatives and neighbors buried in the ruins. “They don’t give us a single shovel to dig them out while they search for their filthy bags,” exclaimed one on camera.
Convoys of regime henchmen raced to La Guaira in unmarked vehicles with sirens blaring hours after the earthquakes struck, according to eyewitnesses. But it took two days for the government to mobilize a single excavator to clear the wreckage.
“The regime doesn’t want anybody stumbling upon their operation in La Guaira which is the main logistical center for drug smuggling, as well as storing and distributing cash received from cocaine sales in the US,” ex-Special Forces colonel and former U.S. military attaché to Venezuela, Ron MacMannon, told the British newspaper The Sun.
La Guaira is Venezuela’s main commercial seaport from where most Caribbean drug shipments intercepted by the U.S. Navy originate. It also contains Venezuela’s main airport, from where drug proceeds are flown to laundering points around the world.
Regime officials are believed to keep $500 billion at secret bank accounts in Switzerland and Qatar, a former senior U.S. State Department official involved in law enforcement investigations, speaking to The American Spectator on condition of anonymity.
Some of the drug money also stays in Venezuela to pay special police teams and armed militias under Cabello’s control, according to Venezuelan investigative journalist Carlos Salazar, citing sources inside the government.
A Sky News TV crew reported being continually tailed and harassed by a group identified as agents of the General Directorate of Military Counter-Intelligence, a unit personally controlled by Cabello, who remains in his post despite a $25 million U.S. government bounty on his head.
The DGCIM has conducted extraofficial detentions estimated to be in the thousands, keeping “disappeared” victims jailed in secret prisons that could have operated inside La Guaira’s housing estates.
Despite last January’s elaborate operation to extract Maduro, in which Delta Force had to fight its way through his Cuban security team to fly him for trial in the U.S., over 300 officials accused of drug running, money laundering, terrorism, and human rights abuses remain in Venezuela. Many of them still hold key positions in the government and military.
The Trump administration has been very tolerant of the painfully slow progress of the democratic transition that Delcy Rodriguez is supposed to administer. Six months into her “transitional administration,” there is still no date for elections, and over 400 political prisoners remain in jail. (RELATED: Slow Walking in Venezuela)
Sources connected with U.S. intelligence agencies have told The American Spectator that a group of oil brokers with close ties to the White House is making a lot of money from deals negotiated with Rodriguez. They are influencing a policy focused on maintaining “stability” of a government about as stable as its housing projects.
The extent to which U.S.-Venezuelan policy has been twisted is further illustrated by another embarrassing episode following the earthquake, when the return of exiled opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, the true winner of the 2024 elections stolen by Maduro, was suddenly aborted.
Machado had boarded a private jet in Virginia to fly to the island of Curaçao, where she would catch a boat to La Guaira and rally her supporters to aid earthquake victims.
The plane was turned around in mid-flight, on orders originating from the State Department, presumably out of concern for her safety.
When she proceeded to Panama to get on a commercial flight to Venezuela, COPA Airlines wouldn’t let her board for fear of “repercussions” from the regime.
Terrorism still rules Venezuela. Bending over backwards to accommodate what amounts to a virtual continuity of the Maduro regime is a “strategic mistake” by Trump, a former U.S. ambassador says.
The president may be too focused on Iran, Ukraine, and other global flashpoints to devote much attention to Venezuela right now. But “something could explode there very soon,” sources tell The American Spectator, “… and we could be caught holding a tar baby.”
READ MORE from Martin Arostegui:
Walloping Each Other Harder and Harder
