Venezuela of the Castros scrutinized: Maduro charged with narco-terrorism, drug trafficking & other criminal charges

Where do you think he got the idea to do that from?

The United States Department of Justice announced today that Nicolás Maduro Moros and 14 current and former Venezuelan Officials were charged with narco-terrorism, corruption, drug trafficking and other criminal charges. Maduro and other high ranking Venezuelan officials partnered with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) to use cocaine as a weapon to “flood” the United States. The State Department is offering up to a 15 million dollar reward for  Nicolás Maduro's arrest and conviction, and up to $10 million for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of  Diosdado Cabello Rondón,  Hugo Armando Carvajal Barrios, and  Clíver Antonio Alcalá Cordones, and up to $5 million for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of Luciano Marín Arango.

Venezuelan human rights defender and attorney Tamara Suju on March 19, 2020 in her article in El Nacional, "The Venezuela of the Castros and Díaz-Canel" put into historical context Venezuela's criminal regime.

"The criminal structure of Chavismo-Madurismo, and those members of the national armed forces that allowed it, will pass into history as the greatest shame and betrayal our country has seen in all its modern history. They not only denied two generations of Venezuelans the opportunity to improve their lives and live in peace, but they handed over the homeland to the oldest dictatorship in the continent in exchange for help remaining in power by controlling its people, persecuting, spying, repressing, torturing and humiliating its adversaries and sparking the current biblical exodus out of Venezuela."

Jackson Diehl  in The Washington Post  reported on May 24, 2015 in his article "A drug cartel’s power in Venezuela" that "Cuba’s communist regime and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah have been cut in on the trafficking [by the Venezuelans]."

Indicted co-conspirator Diosdado Cabello with Raul Castro and Bruno Rodriguez

 It is important to revisit communist Cuba's history of involvement in drug trafficking.

The Cuban dictatorship was placed on the list of state terror sponsors on March 1, 1982, after the U.S. State Department confirmed that the Cuban government was using a narcotics ring to funnel both arms and cash to the Colombian M19 terrorist group then battling to overthrow Colombia’s democratic government.

In the 1991 Frontline documentary, "Cuba and Cocaine", U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Commander Jeff Karonis, stated, "We would observe in the middle of the day an air drop going on inside Cuban waters. The scenario would be for a small twin-engine airplane with maybe 1,000 to 2,000 pounds of cocaine to fly over Cuba, drop the drugs to a predesignated rendezvous point to several boats.  Then it would exit back down off Cuba, and many times a Cuban military vessel would be in the immediate vicinity, right on scene with them.''

Nicolás Maduro Moros and 14 Current and Former Venezuelan Officials Charged with Narco-Terrorism, Corruption, Drug Trafficking and Other Criminal Charges. Learn more: https://t.co/3PM0rePFZI pic.twitter.com/C5LVQNljPT

— Justice Department (@TheJusticeDept) March 26, 2020

During General Manuel Noriega's 1992 trial information emerged implicating the Castro regime in drug trafficking that was reported in the Sun Sentinel: "Federal prosecutors say Noriega traveled to Havana to ask [Fidel] Castro to mediate a potentially deadly dispute with top members of Colombia's Medellin cocaine cartel. They say the cartel chiefs were upset because a major drug lab had been seized in Panama despite payment of millions of dollars in protection money to Noriega. According to the Noriega indictment, Castro negotiated a peace accord between the cartel and Noriega at the 1984 meeting. The allegation forms a cornerstone of the racketeering and drug trafficking charges against Noriega." At the same time convicted cartel leader Carlos Lehder directly implicated Raul Castro and U.S. fugitive Robert Vesco "to route cocaine flights through Cuba."

Manuel Noriega and Fidel Castro

Christopher Dickey  World News Editor at The Daily Beast on June 4, 2018 wrote a well researched and documented article "How Cuba Helped Make Venezuela a Mafia State" that outlines the Castro regime's involvement in linking up Venezuelan officials with drug traffickers and guerilla groups, but begins with the 1989 Ochoa Trial, an effort by the Cuban autocrats to whitewash their drug trafficking image by executing the high ranking Cuban general Arnaldo Ochoa in a political show trial. This ended one chapter of large scale drug trafficking for the Castros, but a new chapter began with the Chavez regime in Venezuela according to Dickey.

"In the years that followed the Ochoa trial, Cuba offered to cooperate with the United States fighting against drug traffickers. The Clinton administration shelved proposed indictments of the regime, and as relations gradually warmed, the U.S. would begin to liaise with Cuban authorities in the war on drugs. But at the same time the Cuban intelligence services were reaching out in other directions, to networks that would become the world’s biggest suppliers of cocaine: the narco-guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and  Venezuela’s security forces. 

Cuban counterintelligence is said to have tutored the Venezuelan spies, domestic and foreign, and helped to organize them to root out opposition to the regime of Hugo Chávez. Indeed, the Cubans taught them to do whatever might be necessary to survive.Over time, many of Chavez’s officers would become known as the Cartel de los Soles, the Cartel of the Suns: “cartel” because of their involvement with the drug trade on a scale that nobody in 1989 could have imagined; “the suns” for the insignias on the epaulets of Venezuela’s generals."

This arrangement has flooded drugs into the United States, and claimed many lives. Today's indictments of high ranking Venezuelan officials is a good start in cleaning up the scourge of drug trafficking in the Americas.

Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro