Trump administration says Havana is the reason Maduro is still in power.
By Karen DeYoung and Karen DeYoung Associate editor and senior national security correspondent Email Bio Follow Anthony Faiola Anthony Faiola Correspondent covering Latin America, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, human rights, poverty, globalization and economics Email Bio Follow March 26 at 10:40 AM Before he fled Venezuela last year, Lt. Col. Carlos Jose Montiel Lopez sometimes felt like he was serving in another country’s army.
“No nation has done more to sustain the death and daily misery of ordinary Venezuelans, including Venezuela’s military and their families, than the communists in Havana,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said earlier this month. Trump and his national security adviser, John Bolton, were cheered when they denounced Maduro and his Cuban backers in speeches delivered in Miami in recent months. Bolton and Cuban American Sen. Marco Rubio , both longtime advocates of ridding Cuba of its communist government, have found a new avenue via Venezuela.
But most of the administration’s attention has been focused on Cuba, which it charges has 20,000-25,000 military and intelligence personnel embedded in the Venezuelan military and intelligence services, as well as Maduro’s personal guard. “We think there will come a point at which the whole society will show its rejection of this regime even more strongly, that is, larger demonstrations, more people in the army saying this can’t continue,” Abrams said in an interview.
But there is also fear of capture and reprisals, Abrams said, and “the Cubans are the enforcers” inside Venezuela’s security and intelligence services. Gen. Antonio Rivero, a senior member of the Venezuelan military who turned against Maduro and fled the country in 2014, said in an interview that Venezuela’s military strategy had been transformed by Cuban advisers into that of a “prolonged asymmetrical war” against a new enemy: imperialism.
Some Latin American governments have come to share the administration’s contention that Havana is calling the shots in Caracas — particularly as several large countries such as Colombia and Brazil have swung to the right in recent elections. Previous governments in those places, and in the United States, ignored the growing crisis in Venezuela, one senior Latin American official charged.
His Miami speech coincided with the administration’s decision to appoint a special envoy, a job initially envisioned as coordinating policy toward all three members of the “troika.” That plan was dropped by the time of Abrams’s January appointment, but the insistence that Venezuelan-style, Cuban-spread “socialism” is a Democratic goal for the United States has already become a prominent Trump campaign trope.
A staunch Cold War ally of the United States, Venezuela quickly shifted when Chavez, a career military officer who was jailed for a coup attempt and later pardoned, won the 1999 presidential election on a platform of social reforms for the poor.
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