Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro is losing allies as a political crisis in the country remains in a “stalemate,” according to a key Republican lawmaker.
“I don’t want to call them the rats, but the rats are abandoning the ship,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart told the Washington Examiner.
The Florida Republican was referring to reports that a state-run Russian defense company is withdrawing contractors who have been deployed to Venezuela in recent months. The Russian government and the company have denied the reports, but Diaz-Balart maintained that the evidence is in that Maduro doesn’t have the money or political support to govern the country.
“The Russians are backing out because they’re not getting paid,” he said. “That Russian withdrawal is because they don’t see Maduro as viable. They don’t see the regime as viable.”
He offered that assessment days after a report that Rostec has only “a few dozen” defense advisers in Venezuela at this point. President Trump later tweeted that “Russia has informed us that they have removed most of their people from Venezuela,” which drew a derisive response from Moscow.
“I can’t even imagine from where this information has surfaced that we allegedly ‘informed’ Americans that we were pulling out our specialists from there,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Tuesday. “But this raises questions for me about the quality of those advisers who put reports on the table of the U.S. president.”
A preliminary series of talks to end the crisis were scrapped after Juan Guaidó, the top opposition lawmaker whom Trump and other Western democracies have recognized as interim president, refused to negotiate with Maduro. That’s an improvement on past negotiations that saw the regime sow divisions within the opposition, according to Diaz-Balart.
“So I am basically very optimistic,” he said. “Are there things that we can do additionally? I think there are, I think there need to be. I don’t want to get into the details [but] the Maduro regime is not consolidating, they’re not in control. It’s just kind of there, holed up.”
