The Man Behind the Dictator
The capture of Venezuelan narco dictator Nicolás Maduro in a pre-dawn special forces raid on his fortified compound in the heart of Caracas was an intricately planned and calculated gamble. It succeeded in its principal objective of taking Maduro alive, but the Trump administration may still lose its bet if it fails to dismantle the vast network that remains active in Venezuela and Cuba still controls.
U.S. Army Delta Force eliminated 32 Cuban military and intelligence officers posted at Maduro’s fortified residence who controlled Venezuela’s presidency and Maduro’s life. Two were Colonels, a very senior rank in Cuba’s armed forces. Four were lieutenant colonels. Others were majors, captains, lieutenants, and staff sergeants of the elite special unit Avispas Negras attached to the Interior Ministry’s General Directorate of Intelligence (DGI). (RELATED: Echoes of Cuba in Caracas)
One officer was a cryptographer whose job was deciphering direct messages and orders received hourly from Havana containing as yet undisclosed secret directives that could have even contained coded instructions to kill Maduro before allowing him to give himself up or be captured. Radios, computers, telephones, and other communications equipment operated by the Cubans were taken by Delta for analysis.
Maduro was hardly the Godfather. He was always a creature of the DGI, which recruited him when he was a young bus driver and union activist during violent riots that shook Venezuela in the early 1990s. They brought him to Cuba for indoctrination and political training, maneuvering him into key positions under President Hugo Chávez, who appointed him foreign minister and then vice president.
When Chávez was undergoing cancer treatment in Cuba, where he died surrounded by Babalaos or witch doctors of the Afro-Cuban Santeria cult, of whose healing powers Fidel Castro had convinced him, DGI chief general Ramiro Valdés set up offices at Venezuela’s presidential palace of Miraflores to manage the succession.
The Cubans saw in Maduro’s dour charisma, limited intelligence, and compliantly corrupt character the ideal puppet they could manipulate to further their plans of taking over Venezuela.
The Cubans saw in Maduro’s dour charisma, limited intelligence, and compliantly corrupt character the ideal puppet they could manipulate to further their plans of taking over Venezuela. Free oil, a portion of which they sold on the spot market, gold, and countless other financial benefits flowed to the Castro regime from Latin America’s richest country.
Thousands of Cuban operatives were sent to manage and police the communist system being installed. The high-level military officials found around Maduro were the tip of the iceberg. DGI operatives are embedded throughout Venezuela, ranging from IT specialists in the national oil company (PDVSA) to “doctors” rationing aspirin in the poor barrios while organizing armed “Colectivos” who have taken the streets of Caracas to hunt for US “collaborators,” following Delta’s operation in a style typical of Cuba’s repressive system.
The thug squads recruited from prison gangs like Tren de Aragua are driving around checking people’s cell phones to detect any content indicating support for Maduro’s capture. They can haul anyone off into secret detention and torture centers. The U.S. State Department issued an urgent travel warning over the weekend advising all Americans to leave Venezuela immediately.
Cuba was deeply involved in narcotrafficking with Colombia’s FARC and ELN guerrillas, decades before the groups funneled millions of dollars into the 1998 presidential campaign of Hugo Chávez, who allowed them to set up bases in Venezuela and turn it into the main export route for their cocaine. The Cubans tended bridges to Iran, Russia, and China, which armed and financed Venezuela’s regime to gain control of the country’s vast oil and mineral wealth, and slices of the drug trade.
A Chinese PLA company laid the undersea fiberoptic cables through which coded messages flowed daily to the cryptologist who was riddled with short bursts from Delta’s HK416 compact assault rifles alongside his DGI superior, Col. Alfonso Roca Sánchez, before orders might be executed to kill Maduro and further sink Venezuela into chaos.
Cuba’s regime has long relied on martyrs to further its bankrupt “Revolution” and creates them to cover failed ventures. Che Guevara proved a lot more useful as a dead icon than as Industry Minister for Castro, who had sent him on the doomed guerrilla expedition to the Bolivian Andes, where he met his death before being emblazoned on college T-shirts.
Cuba similarly galvanized the international left with the violent death of Chile’s Saville Row-suited Marxist president, Salvador Allende, during the 1973 military coup that toppled his minority government that was driving Chile into the ground. Allende was shot through the mouth with a submachine gun that Castro had given him, which was likely the work of his Cuban-trained bodyguard, recruited from the Chilean terrorist Movement of the Revolutionary Left, who escaped back to Havana while his principal became sanctified as the elegant new symbol of defiant socialism.
The shooting death of yet another “elected” Latin American leftist president in a U.S. attack on his residence would have been spun to generate sympathy for Maduro’s legacy and agitate anti-U.S. sentiment worldwide. It would greatly complicate the Trump administration’s already difficult task of establishing working relations with Maduro’s successor, Delcy Rodríguez, who comes from a militant Marxist background herself and is highly vulnerable to pressures from hardliners still controlling the security services, the streets, and the prisons.
Reports of regime brutality would be swept away by torrential narratives focusing blame on Trump, with Democrats in Congress and governments throughout the world screaming bloody murder to go with the leftist flow. Maduro’s immaculately executed extraterritorial arrest has been denounced by Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, as “an attack on global democracy like never before.”
U.N.-trained international lawyer Christian Barrientos argues that “They ignore that Maduro’s democratic illegitimacy and subsequent non-recognition through treaties against corruption, narcotraffic and organized crime enable extraterritorial jurisdiction.”
Failure was not an option for Delta Force and the 106th Special Operations Air Regiment, which began joint rehearsals to descend some 50 men from a Chinook helicopter onto a mock-up of Maduro’s residence soon after Trump ordered the Navy to the Caribbean and plans started for “Operation Total Resolve” last August.
Delta had to instantly flood Maduro’s residential headquarters to neutralize the Cubans before any of them could get to him while blocking his access to a steel-reinforced safe room. Helicopters unloaded more commandos on the surrounding grounds to similarly smash Avispas Negras posted throughout the military complex and clear the path for Maduro’s exit.
Air strikes, which took out a Russian Buk2 air defense missile battery in Fuerte Tiuna, had to be precisely synchronized with Delta’s landing so as not to alarm the Cubans ahead of time. Even so, intense machinegun fire raked one of the helicopters, seriously wounding the pilot who demonstrated SOAR’s peak training by flying his limping chopper back to the USS Iwo Jima, bleeding from gunshot wounds.
Peak technology was also evident in recently introduced SOAR countermeasures that deflected a shoulder-fired Igla SAM, which the Cubans got off, according to sources in Caracas. Analysts have confirmed to American Spectator that a newly developed laser-activated device disarmed the missile’s heat-seeking system, bouncing it off its trajectory and dropping it to the ground.
There are unconfirmed reports that a member of Maduro’s inner circle was also exfiltrated by Delta in the operation’s “egression phase,” which U.S. military Joint Chiefs Gen. Dan Caine said was the hardest fought. They may have flown out the spy handled by the CIA team in Caracas, who relayed real-time information about Maduro’s movements, inner layouts of his residence, compositions, location, and internal dynamics of his Cuban protective detail.
Maduro could be squeezed for a lot more intelligence as he pleads for a reduced sentence. He has all the key information about Cuba’s direct participation in Cártel de los Soles and the DGI network in Venezuela to facilitate further covert action and special operations to roll it up.
Cuban acolyte Diosdado Cabello, who remains interior minister, is challenging apparent orders from acting President Rodríguez to disarm the Colectivos and release political prisoners. She is receiving a U.S. diplomatic delegation in Caracas this week, even as the State Department warns Americans that they are being targeted by Cabello’s thugs.
Trump may yet have to launch a “second wave” before he can “run” Venezuela. U.S. oil companies clearly can’t go back in under the current conditions, which Cuba will only exacerbate. Applying the “Donroe doctrine” in Latin America may ultimately require going for the command and control centers in Havana. Operation Total Resolve proves it can be done. All that’s needed is more “Resolve.”
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