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One by one, they are singing, the men who used to do dirty deeds for the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro. Nobody knows what’s going to happen, whether the United States will attack, and whether Maduro will fall. But these Venezuelans sniff change in the air. As more countries exit Venezuela’s orbit, more allegations are likely to emerge.
Two of the men are in prison here in the U.S.: Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal, the former spy mastermind, and Cliver Alcala Cordones, a former general, both of whom have written letters to President Donald Trump airing bales of dirty laundry regarding narco-trafficking to the U.S. A third is a top official who has defected and is cooperating with the U.S. government, to whom I spoke a couple of months ago.
Over in Bolivia, where change has already begun, information regarding that government’s involvement with narco-terrorism may soon see the light of day as well. The new president, Rodrigo Paz Pereira, elected earlier this year and sworn into office last month, had his predecessor, Luis Arce, arrested on Wednesday. Many members of Arce’s government may follow him into the clink, and they may soon start “cooperating” by airing dirty laundry as well.
Arce’s Movement for Socialism party is every bit as socialist, as steeped in drug trafficking, and as Cuban-influenced as Chavez’s and Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela. They fed off each other back in the heyday of Marxism in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Even Spain, currently run by the Left, may soon start producing information. Last week, the Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit searched the offices of an airline run by people with close ties to Venezuela and Cuba, Plus Ultra. The firm is also close to former Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, an anti-American socialist who advocates on behalf of Venezuela and China in Madrid.
The Venezuelan regime itself forms the Cartel de los Soles, a narco-trafficking, terrorist group that helped flood our streets with drugs. Maduro and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, in fact, lead it, something we already knew, but which Carbajal confirmed in his letter to Trump.
But the Venezuelan government, using revenues not just from narcotics but also from the world’s largest oil reserves, which Venezuela owns, led not just domestic bad actors against the U.S., but the region’s communist states. The ideology and deep hatred of the U.S., and the planning on how to operationalize this animus, have come from Havana, but the resources come from Caracas.
Grouped in a regional Marxist bloc called the Foro de Sao Paulo, founded by Cuba’s dead dictator Fidel Castro and Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, these Marxist parties swept to power in a second wave — the first was in the early 2000s — four or five years ago in Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Brazil, etc.
Voters in Ibero-America are now bringing this era to a screeching halt, which means that many more narco-terrorist secrets will surely come out. In Chile on Sunday, Jose Antonio Kast romped to victory, defeating the communist candidate Jeannette Jara by 20 points.
Honduras, too, held elections recently, and the candidate supported by the outgoing Marxist President Xiomara Castro, Rixi Moncada, got less than 20% of the vote in elections held Nov. 30. With 99% of the vote counted in that Central American nation, the Trump-backed candidate, Nasry Asfura, has a commanding lead. Castro and her Marxist husband, Manuel Zelaya, will try everything not to hand power to a Trumpian, but they will only be inviting trouble if they do.
All these Marxist presidents who were unable to help their chosen candidates get elected, or may be about to meet the same fate, as Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, is certain to face in elections in May, came to office in our hemisphere under unusual circumstances.
This new pink tidal wave was unleashed by the seismic force of Venezuelan-organized riots in Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and other South American countries between 2019 and 2022. Marxist revolutionaries emerged victorious in elections in all the countries following the riots. Most of these new governments then aided Venezuela’s narco-terrorist activity.
America, too, was rocked in 2020 by nationwide riots organized by Black Lives Matter, whose leaders were close to Chavez and Maduro. According to the defector who spoke with me, at least one of them received financial assistance from Chavez.
If you pull the information together, a picture emerges of a Cuban-led plan to create disarray inside the U.S., both by flooding U.S. streets with drugs that would undermine the fiber of this country or with street mayhem. Venezuelan gangs and Colombian guerrillas carried out the plan.
Carvajal’s letter, which confirms most of this, starts as an act of contrition:
“My name is Hugo Carvajal Barrios. For many years, I was a high-ranking member of the Venezuelan regime. … Today, I sit in an American prison because I voluntarily plead guilty to the crimes charged against me: a narco-terrorism conspiracy. I write to atone by telling the full truth so that the United States can protect itself from the dangers I witnessed for so many years.”
Carvajal clearly does not want to spend the rest of his days in an American prison and is seeking a better deal by revealing what he did. “Today, I see the need to address the American people about the reality of what the Venezuelan regime truly is—and why President Trump’s policies are not only correct, but absolutely necessary to the United States’ national security,” he wrote.
Carvajal explained that he “personally witnessed how Hugo Chavez’s government became a criminal organization that is now run by Maduro, Cabello, and other senior regime officials.” The purpose of this criminal organization, “now known as the Cartel of the Suns, is to weaponize drugs against the United States,” he wrote. “The drugs that reached your cities through new routes were not accidents of corruption nor just the work of independent traffickers; they were deliberate policies coordinated by the Venezuelan regime against the United States.”
This plan, he wrote, “was suggested by the Cuban regime to Chávez in the mid-2000s.” It was “successfully executed with help from FARC, ELN, Cuban operatives, and Hezbollah,” he wrote of the Narco-Marxist guerrilla groups in next-door Colombia, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the National Liberation Army. The Venezuelan regime, Carvajal wrote, “has provided weapons, passports, and impunity for these terrorist organizations to operate freely from Venezuela against the United States.”
Then Carvajal let dangle that he could furnish more information: “U.S. diplomats and CIA officers were paid to assist Chávez and Maduro in remaining in power. These Americans acted as spies for Cuba and Venezuela, and some remain active to this day.”
The letter by Alcala Cordones, dated Dec. 8 and revealed by Venezuelan investigative journalist Maibort Petit, confirms most of the information contained in Carvajal’s own missive.
Alcala Cordones is the highest Venezuelan military leader behind bars in the U.S. He is serving a 21-year sentence after admitting to being a member of the Cartel of the Suns and collaborating with the FARC to smuggle weapons, including grenade launchers, and cocaine into the U.S.
He fingers Maduro as the man in charge of international relations, especially with Iran and its Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, and Cabello as the leader who maintains armed protection for the smuggling networks, but he says that the Cartel of the Suns is run by Executive Vice President Delcy Rodriguez and her brother, Jorge Rodriguez. The letter details the evolution of the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua into a transnational organization with operatives in U.S. streets and the role of Cuban intelligence.
The “current supreme core of Venezuelan power,” Maduro, Cabello and the Rodriguezes, according to the letter, has ties with U.S. congressmen who were left unnamed. It closes with this warning: “The regime run by Maduro and Cabello represents a threat to the national security of the United States.”
Whether this emerging picture provides a casus belli for Washington to act against Maduro by hitting targets inside Venezuela is unclear. The U.S. has been bombing boats coming out of Venezuela that it says are carrying drugs headed for the U.S.
But in a way, nothing here is new. In October 2019, Cabello already put the world on notice that Venezuela’s regime would destabilize our hemisphere. “We are headed towards a Bolivarian hurricane,” Cabello warned. “It cannot be stopped by absolutely anyone. What is happening in Peru, what is happening in Chile, what is happening in Argentina, what is happening in Honduras, in Ecuador is just a little breeze. A hurricane is what is to come. It is absolutely impossible that Colombia remains how it is. It is absolutely impossible that Brazil remains how it is. There is no way.”
WHAT WE KNOW SO FAR ABOUT THE BROWN SHOOTING
While all the media attention here has been devoted to whether War Secretary Pete Hegseth gave an order to shoot at one of these boats a second time, the so-called double tap, while some survivors were still swimming in the Caribbean, less attention has been paid to the singing Venezuelans.
That may soon be seen to have been a case of journalistic malpractice.
