It seems like an impossible mission: Trump entrusted Chavismo to “unchavize” Venezuela. An essentially anti-American regime must become Washington’s puppet. Like Marshal Petain, who from hero of the battles of Verdun and the Somme went on to preside over the Vichy regime, managed from Berlin.
A handful of actors who have been at the center of the scene for decades, acting for a local and foreign congregation clinging to the ideological beliefs they profess, now must act for two audiences that expect radically opposite impersonations from them.
The big man whom Hugo Chávez anointed as the protagonist of the script he left as an epitaph is no longer on the stage where he roared anti-imperialist speeches, spoke to little birds, sang joropos llaneros, cursed dissidents, danced and made Maradona dance, acted as a superhero called “super mustache” and ended up babbling four-word English (“peace yes, war no”), repeated to the point of ridiculousness.
The stellar place occupied by that gigantic man with few lights is now occupied by a small woman, with excessive glasses and a slight Chilindrina air, who unlike Maduro has shown signs of being very lucid.
With the action perpetrated in Caracas, Donald Trump joined the long list of presidents who put into practice the doctrine that James Monroe proposed in the first half of the 19th century, warning England, Spain, Portugal, Holland and France that they should abandon their colonies in the Americas, because both are “for the Americans.” That doctrine first became practice with the 25th president, William McKinley, when he launched the war that took Cuba and Puerto Rico, as well as the Philippines and Guam, from Spain, as well as annexing Hawaii and pushing for control over the Panama Canal.
The fact is that the happiness that millions of Venezuelans experienced in the Caribbean country and in the diaspora on Saturday when they woke up with the news of Maduro’s fall, transformed into confusion hours later, when Trump appeared and talked about oil, said that he will lead Venezuela and announced that Delcy Rodríguez will preside over the regime from the ground doing what she is told to do from the White House.
Perplexity turned into stupefaction when he referred to María Corina Machado, devaluing her and turning her into the second most humiliated person these days, behind the fallen dictator.
Before the sun rose in Venezuela, the CIA and Delta commandos gave a dazzling display of the levels of excellence achieved in infiltration and surgical operations.
The largest North American intelligence agency, which had been operating inside Venezuela since August, had managed to disconnect the defensive structure, while the elite commandos that have their headquarters in North Carolina, dealt them the greatest and most humiliating blow that the Chavista military apparatus and also the Cuban regime have received.
Without a single casualty in the CIA and the Delta Force, they paralyzed the local anti-aircraft defenses, destroyed entire tank divisions in Fuerte Tiuna and dozens of Sukhoy fighter planes in the La Carlota air base, killed in combat the 32 Cuban agents who made up the last circle of Maduro’s security and took the head of the regime by the ear.
That morning, Cuba lost the undefeated record it boasted with justified reasons. The intelligence and security apparatuses that in more than half a century frustrated hundreds of conspiracies hatched by the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro and also neutralized hundreds of intrigues and plots to produce fissures in the Castro regime, were humiliated by the devastating North American military operation.
When the sun illuminated the Caribbean, the regimes of Cuba and Venezuela sported a gnawing eye and a sense of vulnerability. The image of dozens of Chinook helicopters flying over Caracas at low altitude, while the F-18s bombed nerve centers of Chavista military power without any response, showed a regime in the open. The panorama of the day after was dantesque and warned the Venezuelan and Cuban nomenclatures that they will no longer be able to sleep peacefully.
The Delta Force had debuted in 1980 with a disastrous mission: Operation Eagle Claw, which had to rescue the hostages that Ayatollah Khomeini’s regime was holding captive in the North American embassy in Tehran.
It was not the only failure of that body of covert operations. The battle of Mogadishu in 1993 was a devastating setback and marked the American withdrawal from Somalia. But it vindicated itself with successful operations, such as the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003 and the elimination of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi seven years ago.
The CIA also boasts successful attacks, such as the one that disintegrated Al Qaeda leader Aymán al-Zawahiri with Hellfire missiles in the center of Kabul. And the Navy Seal commandos will always show off the operation in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad where they shot down Osama Bin Laden. Well, with the devastating Operation Absolute Resolve, the Delta commandos no longer have anything to envy of the Navy Seals.
The assault on the fortress where the Cuban agents were the last ring of security was an overwhelming success. But in political terms, it had nothing of “absolute resolution”.
Trump had already shown that drug trafficking is just an excuse, by pardoning former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández for collaborating with the campaign of Nasry Asfura, the New York tycoon’s ultra-conservative file in Honduras. And he corroborated it with an operation that was limited to the capture of Maduro, leaving alive and in office the most despicable leaders of what Trump considers a drug mafia: Diosdado Cabello, General Vladimir Padrino López and Attorney General Tarek William Saab.
If the operation was truly aimed at decapitating drug trafficking, what it achieved is insignificant. And the first public appearances after the spectacular operation made it clear that neither the end of drug trafficking nor the democratization of Venezuela are Trump’s priorities.
He did not talk about releasing political prisoners or ending censorship. The word that was repeated in Trump’s tirades was “oil.” And from Maduro’s first post-fall reference to María Corina Machado, it was clear that he despises her and does not want her to come to power.
The disconcerting thing is not that he chose Delcy Rodríguez instead of her. Strangely enough, it makes sense to leave a Chavista leader who has been at the top of the regime for years, instead of the anti-Chavista leader. The incredible thing is that he disqualified her in a humiliating way and resorting to a crude fallacy. Saying that Machado does not have the respect or support of Venezuelans collides with obvious reality. In the first years of her political life, she was a young woman with courage who said to Hugo Chávez himself what other opposition leaders did not even dare to whisper. But she was a recalcitrant rightist who prevented the unity of the opposition political arc, because her conservatism rejected the center-left.
His actions were negligent and negative. But it is indisputable that in the last five years he achieved what Henrique Capriles, Manuel Rosales, Antonio Ledesma, Leopoldo López, Juan Guaidó and others had not achieved. It is clear that his intelligence and courage ended up undressing the Chavista king before the eyes of Venezuelans and the world. It began by organizing internal opposition elections that, still illegal and obstructed by the regime, allowed it to show more than two million votes.
When the regime banned her when it was clear that Maduro would be defeated if he faced her in the election scheduled for 2024, María Corina pulled an unexpected card out of her sleeve: she placed on that single ballot where all the candidates were men and false opponents, an unknown person, but with two attributes that would make her visible as the one anointed by her: she is a woman and her name is Corina.
When the regime realized the cunning of the move and banned Corina Yoris, Machado pulled another card from his sleeve: a retired diplomat, with a harmless face and kind appearance. Since Edmundo González Urrutia was as unknown as the previous candidate, but he is not a woman nor is his name Corina, therefore he would be invisible on the ballot, so Machado put on his uniform consisting of tight jeans and a white T-shirt, put his candidate on a truck and traveled with him all over Venezuela so that every last Venezuelan would engrave the face of María Corina’s candidate in their memory.
It was already too late to outlaw it and the result of the presidential election was such an overwhelming defeat for Maduro that it made it impossible to implement a minimally credible fraud and the regime resigned itself to proclaiming a result that it could never prove by showing the results of the vote.
Maduro stole the election, but he had to do it openly. María Corina Machado caused that stain on the image of a regime that at that point was already suffering immense discredit. The opposition leader whom the world saw throughout 2024 sailing oceans of people who hailed her in every corner of Venezuela. Saying that she does not have “respect or support” to be in the transition is an open lie, that is, it exhibits Trump’s viscous resentment towards the person who was left with the Nobel Peace Prize that he so publicly revealed he had obtained.
There are logical reasons to sideline the leader of Vente Venezuela at this stage, but they are not what Trump said. Tasking the Chavista regime with undoing the country could be a brilliant move if the experiment passes all the litmus tests it will have to go through. In this nomenclature of obtuse thugs, Delcy Rodríguez is the only one who was able to exhibit results, such as putting an end to years of hyperinflation and achieving economic stability, in addition to establishing dialogues with businessmen that generated investments in the private sector.
The complete note, in this edition of NEWS.
