Venezuela is one of the prettiest countries in the Americas. From Islas Margaritas the necklace of islands with uncounted sandy beaches off its Caribbean coast, to Angel Falls, the world’s highest waterfall, nature is vivid and lush, green and blue.
Because my old talk show, dubbed into Spanish, was broadcast for several years on Venivisión, the big TV network here, we spent lots of time in and around Caracas, the capital. In the 1990s, as the wealthiest nation in Latin America, Venezuela had a thriving middle class. It also had wicked, desperately poor hillside shantytowns known as barrios.
Venezuela had its royalty back then, Major League baseball players, broadcast executives and high rollers, most connected to the oil business. But as in Cuba at the end of the 1950s, the party in Venezuela was about to end. A charismatic, anti-American army officer named Hugo Chavez was taking the reins of Venezuelan life.
Chávez became in essence another Fidel Castro, calling for sweeping social changes, nationalization of the oil industry, and property confiscation. He strengthened ties to Russia and China and never missed an opportunity to condemn President George W. Bush and, later, Barack Obama.
The more Chavez took on the United States, the more his fragile economy cracked. Oil executives had their hands full, trying to keep Venezuela pumping. Although it has among the largest oil reserves of any nation on earth, its oil industry is deeply troubled. It is so dysfunctional, it must import gasoline and other refined products.
Importantly, Chavez was a popular, legitimately elected leader, unlike current dictator Nicolás Maduro, who is an alleged gang-banging drug-runner and most wanted fugitive who currently carries a $50 million reward for his arrest and conviction of drug trafficking and other crimes.
By the millennium and especially leading up to Venezuela’s 2002 presidential election, Caracas lost its luster for foreign visitors. Like the country, the capital city was split in half. There were pulsing, competing demonstrations every night by the supporters of socialist Army officer Chavez on the one hand and other rallies representing traditional bourgeois life on the other.
In that country, during Venezuela’s 2002 presidential vote, easily won by Chavez, I ran into former U.S. President Jimmy Carter leaving the Hilton Hotel where election observers from around the world had gathered. The Nobel Laureate assured me that Chavez had won fair and square, which he did again in 2006.
By 2007, Chavez was steering Venezuela squarely in the communist camp, nationalizing the telecom, electricity and banking industries. In 2009, at the Summit of the Americas held in nearby Trinidad, Chavez made clear that he blamed the United States for all the ills suffered by Latin America.
After Chavez was diagnosed with cancer in June 2013, he blamed the United States, claiming we gave him the disease using a secret biological weapon. As he was dying, Chavez anointed Madero as his successor. For a time, Maduro retained Chávez’s popularity. That evaporated as Venezuela fell into disarray.
To prop up his personal fortunes and those of his inner circle, Madero increasingly embraced the drug trade, according to U.S. authorities.
As bad, from the point of view of President Donald Trump, the Venezuelan dictator emptied his prisons and insane asylums during the Biden Administration, sending tens of thousands of Venezuelans illegally into the United States, including many members of the notorious Tren de Aragua prison gang and other narco-terrorists.
Currently, the United States has deployed the largest fleet in Latin American history off the coast of Venezuela, comprising 15,000 sailors. Concurrent with that armada, for the last several months, the United States military has been waging a campaign of destruction, targeting fast drug boats, leaving Venezuela, ultimately bound for ports in the United States.
Over the four months of the operation, at least 30 boats have been destroyed and over 100 crew members killed. Certainly, President Trump wants to dent the drug trade, but the strategic goal of this operation is to rid Venezuela and the world of Nicholas Maduro.
