The people of Venezuela who fondly remember their once-great nation when it was free and prosperous have been living through a seemingly never-ending nightmare for more than a decade. Leftist dictator Nicolas Maduro has all but destroyed a country overflowing with oil, as widespread criminal violence, corruption, hyperinflation, and a chronic scarcity of basic goods such as food and medicine have driven Venezuela to a state of economic and political ruin.
A so-called petrostate dangerously reliant on energy to the exclusion of other sectors of its economy, Venezuela began a precipitous decline almost a decade ago, when the price of oil plunged from more than $100 per barrel in 2014 to under $30 per barrel in 2016. In the consequent chaos and upheaval, a staggering total of almost 8 million fled the country.
Maduro’s Stolen Power
Those who prayed for the revival of their homeland were hopeful that the country’s 2024 presidential election would mark a turning point, a return to something approaching normalcy. But despite the fact that every survey of voters concluded that Maduro had been beaten in a landslide, the dictator declared victory and still clings to power in a third term. It was perhaps the most fraudulent election outcome anywhere in the 21st century, to the point that the United States, among many other countries, has refused to recognize the legitimacy of his presidency.
But now that Venezuela has been identified as a safe haven for criminal drug cartels that have poisoned and killed untold thousands of Americans, President Donald Trump is going well beyond just a refusal to legitimize Maduro. After Maduro was indicted in 2020 on federal charges of narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine, Trump offered a $15 million reward for his arrest. Joe Biden later upped the ante to $25 million, and Trump, in early August, then doubled it to $50 million. But it was his decision to send warships to the Caribbean and blow up a boat commanded by narco-terrorists on Sept. 2 that raises the question of just how far the president might be willing to go to protect the world from the Venezuelan strongman, who is in league with terrorist drug smugglers, most notably Tren de Aragua and its enabler partner Hezbollah. Maduro did not help his cause by sending an aircraft to buzz a US vessel, leading to Trump’s declaration that he will shoot down any Venezuelan planes attempting to do so again.
As great as the American military is, Trump has another card to play: crippling sanctions. "President Trump has taken numerous actions to curtail Iran’s terrorist proxies like Hezbollah, such as sanctioning senior officials and financial facilitators,” State Department spokesperson Anna Kelly told Fox News Digital. “The president has proven that he will hold any terrorist group accountable that threatens the national security of our country by smuggling narcotics intended to kill Americans."
Maduro has followed in the footsteps of his predecessor Hugo Chávez, who edged the country steadily toward authoritarianism during his 15 years in power. He ended term limits, effectively took control of the supreme court, harassed the press, and closed independent outlets, while nationalizing hundreds of private businesses and foreign-owned assets, most prominently ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips. Those reforms set the stage for Maduro to establish a full-on dictatorship in the years following Chávez’s death.
Venezuela in Death Spiral
To say the Venezuelan economy has been unstable would be a dramatic understatement. Annual inflation there skyrocketed to an inconceivable 130,000% in 2018 and stood at 190% in 2023, according to the country’s central bank. It makes the roughly 3% inflation in our own country look like nothing. It seems that only the support of oil-trading partner Iran, along with China, Cuba, Russia, and Turkey, has prevented the Maduro regime from a total collapse.
In the end, initiatives to stop the drug trade flowing through Venezuela may well revolve around the theocratic terrorist regime in Iran, whose nuclear program has already been dealt a near-death blow by the American president. "Iran’s partnership with Maduro enables Hezbollah to operate in Venezuela. Iran gets to safely operate, through Hezbollah, in the West without prosecution, and Maduro and his officials get paid well,” Brian Townsend, a retired DEA special agent, told Fox News Digital. And as Danny Citrinowicz, a senior fellow at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, asserted, "[A]s long as Maduro is there, the Iranians will be there. But if Maduro goes, Iran will lose the most important stronghold of its activity in Latin America."
Will Maduro Suffer the Same Fate as Noriega?
In 1989, President George H.W. Bush launched an offensive known as Operation Just Cause to arrest and imprison Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, who was indicted in the United States for money laundering, drug trafficking, and drug smuggling. Liberty Nation News National Security Correspondent Dave Patterson recalled, “Noriega’s regime was well known for facilitating cocaine smuggling and suppressing democracy. President Bush decided to move against the Noriega regime to restore democracy and protect the 35,000 Americans living in Panama and the surrounding region. After a short but intense battle in which as many as 600 Panama Defense Forces were killed, Noriega was captured and brought back to the US.” Might Trump revitalize the Monroe Doctrine – so named two centuries ago, asserting that the Western Hemisphere represents America’s inviolable sphere of influence – and attempt to do the same thing with Maduro? Perhaps, said Patterson: “Many see parallels between Just Cause and President Donald Trump’s opposition to Maduro’s drug smuggling and support for narcoterrorism.”
Does President Trump feel strongly enough about Maduro’s threat to American national security and his ties to Iran, Tren de Aragua, and their drug-drenched allies to set American military forces loose on the Venezuelan dictator? We may soon find out.
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