Slow Walking in Venezuela
An FBI team that has been sent into Venezuela to roll up the narco-terrorist organization that took over the country under Nicolás Maduro is trying to operate with the internal security service SEBIN, which was formed by the regime and remains under the control of Maduro stalwarts.
An important arrest took place last week targeting Maduro’s main money launderer, Alex Saab, previously imprisoned and convicted in the U.S. following a DEA international manhunt that nabbed him in the Cape Verde Islands while on his way to Iran. He was subsequently handed back to Maduro by President Joe Biden in one of his string of deals with the now jailed dictator.
Saab was low-hanging fruit, and Venezuelan interim president Delcy Rodriguez sacked him from the cabinet soon after Maduro’s Jan. 3 extraction by Delta Force, in which 32 Cuban military officers were killed. (RELATED: America SOARs at Night)
But working further down the list of 317 government officials, generals, regime-linked businessmen, drug lords, and terrorists who are under U.S. sanctions or indictment in Venezuela will get increasingly complicated unless Rodriguez fires interior minister Diosdado Cabello, who remains head of SEBIN and runs extraofficial Colectivo militias. (RELATED: The Man Behind the Dictator)
A $25M U.S. reward still hangs over Cabello’s head, and although there are persistent rumors that he is next on the FBI list, moving against him carries major risks.
A $25M U.S. reward still hangs over Cabello’s head, and although there are persistent rumors that he is next on the FBI list, moving against him carries major risks. It’s reported that Cabello was targeted by U.S. Special Forces during “Operation Absolute Resolve” but could not be located on the night of the raid. Trump called off the pursuit when Rodriguez vowed to cooperate with the U.S. as she took over the presidency. But she appears to have come under Cabello’s sway instead.
Cabello has blocked the release of political prisoners whose total number is officially estimated at about 2,000. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had to make insistent phone calls to Rodriguez to get her to introduce an amnesty law, which has liberated hundreds in recent days. Cabello could be striking back: suspected Colectivo gunmen kidnapped a close aide to opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, Juan Pablo Guanipa, hours following his prison release on Monday. Reime officials have backed the snatch. Chief State Prosecutor Tarek William Saab said the Guanipa had “violated” the conditions for his release.
While most freed prisoners have been coming out of the notorious Elicoide prison in Caracas, where relatives have been staging daily vigils, large numbers of detainees are held in smaller facilities throughout Venezuela, where a virtual gulag archipelago is operated by SEBIN and the much-feared military counterintelligence group DGCIM. Many are unaccounted for, “disappeared,” or feared dead.
Cabello and the sadistic head of DGCIM, Granko Arteaga, a one-time bodyguard of Maduro, are especially concerned about some 300 military officers being kept in “special” jails. Rodriguez tailored the amnesty law to exclude those arrested between 2018 and 2019, when many of the officers were rounded up in a dragnet of suspected supporters of an attempted coup against Maduro.
Cabello has been keeping a low profile over recent days and is believed to have gone into hiding. “This makes him more dangerous,” says a source in Caracas who asked not to be quoted by name for fear of reprisals. Cabello appeared in combat fatigues flanked by soldiers in a video released over the weekend in which he called for “unity” in support of him.
Exiled Venezuelan brigadier general Marco Ferreira, who formerly held senior positions in the interior ministry, believes that the Maduro’s rump regime is “playing for time.”
“They have a lot of contacts with far left Democrats in the U.S. and are waiting for Trump to lose the midterms in hopes of regaining the upper hand,” he says. While Rodriguez rakes in desperately needed cash from Venezuela’s revived oil industry, sanctions relief, and oil sales negotiated with Trump to pay military salaries and support the bureaucracy, she is slow walking legal and political reforms to rein in rogue police and military units. (RELATED: Venezuelan Oil May Not Come Easy)
It’s hardly a permissive environment for U.S. law enforcement. The FBI informed SEBIN that they were arresting Saab just minutes before raiding his residence out of caution that their Venezuelan counterparts could tip him off, according to sources in Caracas.
Besides army top brass, Tren de Aragua gang leaders, and Colombian guerrilla commanders, the U.S. Treasury Department’s listing of internationally sanctioned Venezuelan “officials” includes Iranians identified as gun runners for the IRGC and Hezbollah terrorists connected with past bomb attacks, including Amer Mohamed Akil Rada, who heads a family-based cell that could be activated if the U.S. strikes Iran.
Some ten thousand members of Hezbollah are believed to have received Venezuelan documentation, and many may have entered the U.S. Venezuela’s involvement with terrorist networks dates back to the early days of its leftist regime.
A former interior minister listed by the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, Ramon Rodriguez Chacin, is suspected of protecting a Palestinian who entered the U.S. on a Venezuelan passport just before the 2001 9/11 attacks, coming into contact with the Al Qaeda cell that crashed a jetliner into the Pentagon, and attending the same flight school in New Jersey. The FBI requested Venezuelan authorities to keep an eye on him when he was deported back to Venezuela, but Chacin covered his tracks, according to General Ferreira, who headed the interior ministry’s immigration department at the time. The interior ministry officially claimed not to have any record of the terrorist suspect, Mohammed Al Diab Fattah, re-entering the country.
CIA director John Ratcliffe reportedly asked Rodriguez, with whom he met in Caracas last week, to shut down the Iranian embassy and reduce Cuban, Russian, and Chinese presence in Venezuela as the U.S. reopens its embassy, whose new chargé d’affairs, Laura Dogu, arrived last week. Cabello may be sleeping at one of the embassies that the U.S. wants closed, according to some reports.
The U.S. needs to strongly reinforce its security presence in Venezuela for any real stabilization or transition to democracy to succeed. According to a recent CNN report, there is a heavy CIA presence among U.S. diplomatic personnel going in. But the State Department might go further by suggesting to Delcy that she bring in the U.S. Army’s 7th Special Group, which has been conducting low-profile advisory and training missions throughout Latin America for decades, to replace the Cuban, Russian, and Iranian military advisors that are supposedly leaving. If the interim president is sincere about wanting to disarm Cabello’s Colectivos, as she claims to have ordered Cabello to do, American Green Berets are there to help. They are already in neighboring Guyana and Colombia. It would be interesting to see what she says.
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