Dozens of diplomats filed into the Liberator Simon Bolivar Room at the Organization of the American States on Jan. 24 to intensify a political earthquake that could upend Latin American politics and, perhaps, the conventional wisdom about President Trump and his administration.
The location was appropriate. That morning’s assembly, in a space named for the man who secured Venezuelan independence from the Spanish Empire, would seek the liberation of the Venezuelan people once again. A day after Trump recognized a young lawmaker as the legitimate interim president of the oil-rich country, the United States, with 15 other countries, signed a statement denouncing the regime of Nicolas Maduro, Hugo Chavez’s disciple and successor. In another detail rich with symbolism, the message was delivered not by an American but rather the ambassador from Argentina.
Visible deference to a Latin American leader might seem out of character for Trump, but it actually typifies his approach to the crisis. American diplomats, senior OAS officials say, sought to avoid reviving “all the historical demons” of U.S. intervention in Latin America.
They did so in an effort to help exorcise one of the region’s homegrown demons. Trump’s decisive support for the move contradicts his reputation as an isolationist or an instinctive enemy of multilateralism, easily manipulated by China and Russia. Most of all, allies and even staunch critics of the president agree, America’s role has been handled with nuance and care. And it is not just in subtlety and tone that the Trump administration’s intervention in Venezuela is profoundly significant; it is also so in substance, for it demonstrates a new intention to advance U.S. interests in Latin America to a far greater extent than has been the case for many years. Strategic thinkers within the administration are recognizing the vital importance of a long-neglected region and are determined that it be neglected no longer.
To find an American intervention in the region of comparable significance you’d have to go back to the Reagan administration. In 1983, amid spiraling Marxist violence and unrest, President Ronald Reagan ordered troops to Grenada to protect the thousand or so Americans in harm’s way. Operation Urgent Fury was successful in quelling the violence and in preparing the way for a pro-American government there.
Yet unlike Urgent Fury, what the Trump administration has undertaken in Venezuela has yet to involve a military component. Clearheaded diplomacy, especially from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton, has reinforced alliances and made the dictatorial regime in Caracas the regional pariah, exploding the myth of the “isolated” United States. And if their Caracas partners bring the rule of law to Venezuela, Maduro’s allies in Cuba will lose access to the foreign treasury that finances their regime’s malign activities throughout the region. This unequivocal reversal of President Barack Obama’s outreach to Fidel Castro sends China and Russia a clear message that the United States will not permit them to have a Syrian-style satrapy in America’s backyard.
“The U.S. has taken a second- or third-row seat,” one OAS official told the Washington Examiner. “I think they’ve hit the sweet spot there on the role of the U.S. They’ve been strong enough to help keep things going and moving, but then, at the same time, not being overpowering.”
This has allowed the most dramatic act of Latin American consensus “probably since the Cuban missile crisis,” Francisco Santos, Colombian ambassador to the United States, told the Washington Examiner.
“That’s a huge change in foreign policy, and I think it’s a great success,” Santos explained. “It’s a great success of U.S. foreign policy, on the one hand — of saying, ‘You know, we’re going to take a different approach’ — and of the Latin American nations who have decided to take a more active approach.”
Those in the administration say it’s not an inversion but the realization of the president’s approach to foreign affairs. “I actually think this is very consistent with President Trump’s theory of foreign policy and how it is America ought to operate in the world,” Pompeo told the Washington Examiner in an exclusive interview. “We want to keep the American people safe. That means there has to be an important international component to that.”
They must maintain those partnerships in the days to come. Maduro’s regime remains armed and dangerous. Then, hidden beneath the Chavista regalia, Venezuela teems with agents of Cartel de los Soles, Cartel of the Suns — drug traffickers who parade in the uniforms of generals in the National Guard, with political partners throughout the government.
The momentous attempt to transfer power from socialist dictator Maduro to the elected president of the National Assembly, Juan Guaido, happened because the Venezuelan people and their supporters in the region had finally had enough — and because Uncle Sam decided to put his foot down.
The crisis
To some degree, Trump and Latin American leaders had cooperation thrust upon them by a humanitarian crisis. More than three million Venezuelans have left the country, a senior United Nations official told the Security Council on Jan. 26, and infant mortality has doubled. The U.N. children’s agency sees “clear signs that the crisis is limiting children’s access to quality health services, medicines, and food,” a UNICEF spokesman said one day earlier.
About a million Venezuelans have fled to Colombia, where diplomats estimate that as many as 4 million could arrive by 2021. Santos compares it to the Syrian refugee crisis that rocked Europe and the Middle East.
“This is a humanitarian crisis bigger than Syria,” one ambassador told the Washington Examiner, but “it’s not being caused by a war.”
When the Chavistas came to power in 2002, they gained control of the wealthiest oil country in the region. They funded Fidel Castro’s tyranny in Cuba, which had struggled since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Cuba, which Obama identified in 2016 as one of the four most dangerous espionage threats to America, spent that money partly to support anti-American moves in Venezuela and around the region.
“They share their intelligence with all of the enemies of the United States,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., said of Cuba. “The brain is Havana. The money has come from narco-trafficking and Venezuelan oil money. So it is a cancer right next to the United States, and a cancer that spends a lot of time and a lot of effort trying to specifically hurt U.S. national security interests.”
The loss of Venezuela as a financier and client state could deliver the greatest blow to Cuba since the Cold War. “Bad news for Cuba, for sure,” said one South American diplomat. “Maybe they will be left out in the rain once again. Will China step in to do more than what they’re doing in recent years?”
Maduro has help from China and Russia. A Russian Boeing 777 landed mysteriously in Caracas on Jan. 29, sparking speculation that Russian President Vladimir Putin was sending mercenaries to buttress a fellow dictator. Both countries like to kick Washington in the shins when they get a chance. Beijing has poured billions of dollars into Venezuela over the last decade, but “denominated its loans to Venezuela in barrels of oil,” says David Malpass, under secretary for international affairs at Treasury.
“Venezuela is an important client state for Russia and China, especially for their military sales,” University of Texas professor Will Inboden, the National Security Council’s senior director of strategic planning from 2005 to 2007, told the Washington Examiner. “I certainly don’t think that Putin sees Venezuela as being as important to him as states in his near-abroad like Ukraine or the Baltics or others. Or Syria for that matter. But I do think he sees it as an opportunity to open another front in his mischief against the U.S. and our interests, too.”
More recently, Putin has speculated in Venezuela at a crisis-driven discount. In 2017, he loaned Maduro $1.5 billion and secured 49 percent of the state oil company, Citgo, as collateral. Maduro flew to Moscow last month to sign oil and gold deals that would secure another cash infusion. Days later, Russia sent a pair of strategic nuclear bombers to a Venezuelan island in the Caribbean; military officials mused about establishing a permanent airbase there, evoking memories of the Cuban missile crisis.
“This isn’t about a great power struggle for us,” Pompeo maintained. “Rather this is about pushing back against those countries that have interfered and brought so much destruction on the Venezuelan people.”
The refugee flood became a common problem for the United States and three key South American nations once friendly with Chavez and Maduro. Argentine President Mauricio Macri took office in December 2015, eager to build a relationship with the U.S. after defeating the successor to the anti-American President Cristina Kirchner. In August 2018, Colombian President Ivan Duque took office as “the most pro-American head of state in Latin America,” a U.S. official said at the time. Then Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro raced to victory over a leftist rival while running on an emphatically pro-American, anti-Communist platform buoyed by frustration over the Venezuelan refugee crisis.
This gave an opening to a former Uruguayan minister who’d been waiting patiently for it.
Enter Almagro
Luis Almagro was elected secretary general of the Organization of American States in March 2015. The OAS is comprised of the 35 independent nations of the Western Hemisphere, giving Almagro’s team a panoramic view of the Venezuela crisis.
“The thing that matters the most is the Venezuelan people and the administration,” Diaz-Balart told the Washington Examiner. “Having said that, it helps that you have a leader in the OAS, in the secretary general, who has been so vocal on explaining the situation and not obfuscating what’s going on there.”
Almagro dubbed Maduro a “petty dictator” early in 2016, making him the first diplomat to condemn the tyrant in terms that so many world leaders did last month. U.S. officials identify Almagro as a key figure in rallying Latin American nations, first around the opposition-controlled National Assembly and then around Guaido himself.
“When an organization of which Venezuela is a part calls out one of their constituent members in this way, it’s very important,” Pompeo told the Washington Examiner. “Luis Almagro stepped forward and, frankly, just stated a plain fact.”
It was a dramatic shift from previous OAS leadership, which seemed comfortable with the Maduro regime.
“There was a bit of an unspoken hands-off policy,” another senior OAS official told the Washington Examiner. “No one wanted to call Venezuela what they seemed to understand it was … certainly, [Almagro’s predecessor] avoided doing so.”
Almagro’s distaste for Maduro dated from his tenure as Uruguayan foreign minister. It intensified with Maduro’s crackdown on Leopoldo Lopez, an opposition leader. Lopez had been arrested in 2014 and convicted on charges of inciting violence through “subliminal” messages during anti-government protests. In September 2015, Lopez was sentenced to 14 years in prison. Weeks later, prosecutors in the case described the trial as a “farce” predicated on “false evidence.” And the vacuous court documents justifying the decision confirmed that impression for Almagro, a lawyer by training.
“When he read that, he said, ‘OK, that’s it,’ this is a guy who is the leader of the opposition and being arrested just because he is the leader of the opposition and he represents a threat, a political threat, to Maduro,” the first senior OAS official told the Washington Examiner. “That was, I think, the turning point for him.”
The arrest of Lopez set off successive events in 2015 that weakened Maduro. Months before his sentencing, Lopez went on a hunger strike that helped pressure the regime into scheduling legislative elections for that December. “For Chavismo, maintaining a majority in the National Assembly is absolutely vital,” warned Venezuela Analysis, an outlet founded with regime financing. “For the opposition, a majority win is a critical opening to launch an onslaught against the Bolivarian process.”
Almagro and Maduro traded barbs weeks before the elections. The secretary general wrote a 19-page letter to the Venezuelan elections chief protesting an array of repressive measures. He noted the disqualification of several candidates, the Lopez sentencing, and the deaths of 43 anti-government protesters the previous year. “To call Almagro a piece of garbage is an insult to garbage itself,” Maduro replied.
“It does not make one ‘garbage,’ Mister President Nicolas Maduro, to condemn the killing of a politician,” Almagro responded.
Maduro’s regime lost control of the National Assembly. Juan Guaido won a seat for the first time, to the pleasure of his mentor, Leopoldo Lopez. The imprisoned opposition star was moved to house arrest in 2017, making it easier to coordinate with his younger compatriot.
The legislature campaigned to schedule a presidential recall election, in 2016, as Maduro’s allies expected. The elections board, which Maduro controlled, suspended the second round of the petition drive after court judgments of voter fraud in the first round. The following spring, the Supreme Court sparked mass protests by suspending the National Assembly and claiming the legislative powers for itself. The judiciary reversed itself within days, but Maduro’s course was clear, as he scheduled elections for July 30 to form a National Constituent Assembly to draft a new constitution.
Almagro’s team spent these years remonstrating with Maduro and collecting 800 pages of evidence for the International Criminal Court to investigate whether the Maduro regime committed crimes against humanity. Five Latin American countries, joined by Canada, referred the case to the ICC in September 2018, at the U.N. General Assembly. It was the first time even one country had made such a referral. “[Countries] don’t do that, in case they are referred to those courts in the future,” one of the senior OAS officials said. “So the fact that actually six — not one — six countries went and took that step, led by the secretary general, was unheard of.”
Such progress was a long time coming. In the early days, Almagro’s entrepreneurial behavior angered foreign ministers throughout Latin America. They wanted Almagro to approach his job like a professional sports commissioner, whose actions are driven by members. It wasn’t until 2017 that a major bloc of Western Hemisphere countries, notably not including the United States, formed the Lima Group.
The Lima Group received positive signals from the Trump administration, though it was sometimes messy. In February 2017, the Treasury Department blacklisted Venezuelan Vice President Tareck El Aissami, who had been appointed to the position overseeing the country’s spy agency just weeks earlier, for drug trafficking. Pompeo, then the CIA director, credited Trump with deep interest in the Venezuela crisis leading up to the sanctions decision.
Those sanctions briefings marked the beginning of a process that would see the president regularly raise the Venezuela issue with Latin American leaders throughout the region.
“I understand that these guys do a lot of papering over problems, if you will,” a former senior diplomat said of Pompeo’s comments. “This was authentic.“
The Pompeo-Bolton coherence
Still, Venezuela policymaking was often a casualty of Trump’s personal inexperience and alienation from most Republican foreign policy hands who would typically populate the vast national security bureaucracy. The early months of the administration were consumed by controversies over Russian interference in the 2016 presidential elections and back-biting among senior aides. Army Gen. H.R. McMaster ran the National Security Council like “a defense think tank,” said one veteran of former Republican administrations. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson devoted his attention to reorganizing the bureaucracy rather than installing a full team of diplomats who could set a new agenda.
“Until John Bolton and Mike Pompeo came in, there really was no coherent foreign policy,” another veteran of past administrations told the Washington Examiner.
But Pompeo worked at Langley for the first year of the Trump administration. No lower-level political appointees took office in the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs until 2018. That left Venezuela policy in the hands of Ambassador Tom Shannon, the third-highest ranking official in Foggy Bottom, who had spent much of his career focused on the Western Hemisphere, including a deployment to Venezuela.
Shannon had led a U.S. delegation to Caracas in 2016, at the request of then-Secretary of State John Kerry, “to explore the Venezuelan government’s willingness to work with us on issues of common interest” in concert with the Vatican and former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. The talks failed.
Shannon’s influence perhaps explains why U.S. officials downplayed the sanctioning of the Venezuelan vice president in February 2017. “The message in this designation is not a political one,” one senior administration official told reporters at the time. “This is about going after international narcotics trafficking.”
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., one of the leading advocates of a confrontational policy with Venezuela, saw greater potential significance in the punishment.
“I’m hopeful this is only the beginning of making sure the Maduro regime feels pressure to cease its illicit activities, free all political prisoners, tolerate dissent, and respect the will of the Venezuelan people, who voted to abandon the disastrous path of Chavez and Maduro,” the Florida Republican, a prominent member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said that day.
Shannon’s policies hampered Almagro throughout 2017, according to two veterans of previous administrations. “Tom Shannon prevented Almagro from getting anywhere,” a senior U.S. diplomat said.
Trump planned a meeting with Latin American leaders at the 2017 U.N. General Assembly, held annually in September, in large part to discuss the Venezuela crisis. “The Latin Americans got the idea that it was a U.S. priority, but the U.S. wasn’t calling a play,” a former ambassador familiar with their reactions told the Washington Examiner.
Diplomatic coordination improved in 2018, with several developments. Shannon announced his retirement in February. This drew bipartisan dismay because the State Department was riddled with vacancies. But, even at the time, this news foreshadowed a more confrontational approach toward Latin American dictatorships. Trump nominated Pompeo to replace Tillerson in March. He tapped Bolton as national security adviser in early April, beginning just weeks before Pompeo’s installment as the nation’s top diplomat.
Those high-level moves coincided with the Senate’s confirmation of Ambassador Carlos Trujillo to represent the United States at the OAS. Trujillo, a newcomer to international diplomacy, nevertheless had cachet as a representative of the president.
He was a rarity in Florida politics, an elected Miami Cuban-American who endorsed Donald Trump for president after bruising primary campaigns against local rivals Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio that left bitter feelings in the state. He risked losing his swing-district seat by backing a candidate known for incendiary comments about illegal immigrants, but the willingness to serve as a prominent Latino surrogate for Trump paid off.
“He challenged a lot of this conventional wisdom in the Western Hemisphere bureau,” the veteran of past administrations, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the inner workings of the department, told the Washington Examiner. “He didn’t quite fit in, but he was high enough that they paid attention to him. They had to pay attention to him.”
One of Trujillo’s first official acts was a trip to the Summit of the Americas in Peru. It was a sign of the changing times in Latin America that Maduro was not invited, as the Peruvian foreign minister made quite public, but Guaido did attend. Trujillo, who played a role in the administration’s vetting of the opposition, said he met Guaido for the first time at the summit.
“Our No. 1 commitment when I meet with Juan or any of the opposition leaders is … ‘You will not embarrass us with any integrity issues, so if you have any integrity issues you need to come clean and we’ll determine whether we’ll continue to have a relationship,’” Trujillo told the Washington Examiner. “And No. 2, our commitment is not with an individual, our commitment is with democracy and human rights. So as long as we agree to those two basic corner-stones, we’ll have a great relationship. And so far they have and they’ve honored their commitment.”
Trujillo’s arrival meant Almagro, officially, had an ally from the most powerful member of the OAS in the room. The democratic partners took turns ripping the Maduro regime up one way and down the other.
In early May, Trujillo replied in the affirmative when asked if the Trump administration thinks “regime change” — brought about by economic and diplomatic pressure, not military force — is necessary to rehabilitate Venezuela. He echoed Almagro’s condemnation of the impending May 2018 presidential elections, along with European and Latin American leaders. Maduro declared victory, but the OAS passed a resolution weeks later condemning the results and replied that “an unconstitutional alteration of the constitutional order” of Venezuela had taken place.
“That was the first major win from a multilateral perspective on Maduro,” Trujillo told the Washington Examiner.
The resolution received 19 votes, just one more than it needed to pass. Only four states voted in favor of Maduro, and 11 abstained.
That resolution passed a week before President Trump’s summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. Pompeo had been point man on North Korea for months, while also navigating the U.S. exit from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal in May. With the top diplomat focused on two hot-button arms control issues, Bolton identified Venezuela as an important priority for the administration.
“Bolton did, frankly, what the national security adviser should do,” the veteran of previous administrations said.
In August, he tapped Mauricio Claver-Carone as his senior director for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the National Security Council. Claver-Carone had worked at the Treasury Department on sanctioning Venezuelan officials. That same month, the Treasury Department unveiled “America Creces,” a framework for energy cooperation throughout the region that could “fill the void” left by Venezuela’s economic collapse and help counter Chinese incursions into the hemisphere. “We worked really hard to turn the page of that narrative in the region that the Chinese are coming,” a senior administration official told the Washington Examiner. “I think we made a lot of progress on that front.”
Everyone focused on the Venezuela crisis, around the region, knew the calendar. Maduro’s Jan. 10 inauguration would require a response from opposition leaders and regional players who had judged his election illegitimate. But the details of the next rebuke remained unknown.
“To be very sincere, nobody thought this was going to happen three months ago,” Santos, the Colombian ambassador, said in an interview.
Almagro persistently called for recognizing the president of the National Assembly as the interim president, as allowed under the Chavista constitution. A consensus formed gradually. “It’s like most things diplomatic. It is quiet, it is continuous, it requires — you might call them tedious, but determined conversations about what’s right, what’s achievable,” Pompeo told the Washington Examiner. “It’s the stuff of real old-school diplomacy.”
Diplomatic moves were boosted in October when the Senate confirmed Assistant Secretary of State Kimberly Breier to lead the Western Hemisphere Affairs Bureau. Breier and Claver-Carone would work closely with Trujillo, as Bolton moved toward a stentorian denunciation of Communist powers in Latin America.
“The Troika of Tyranny in this Hemisphere, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, has finally met its match,” he said at the Freedom Tower in Miami on Nov. 1. “Under President Trump, the United States is taking direct action against all three regimes to defend the rule of law, liberty, and basic human decency in our region.”
Opposition leaders worried that Trump might cut a deal with Maduro and abandon them, so they reached out to former government officials for reassurances, two veterans of past administrations told the Washington Examiner. Conversations continued through the partial federal government shutdown. The parties reached agreement on declaring Maduro illegitimate, even if he had thrown an inauguration party. There was a debate about taking an additional step of declaring the National Assembly president as the interim president of the country, according to a former senior U.S. diplomat and another veteran of past administrations.
An ally of opposition lawmaker Henrique Capriles, a presidential aspirant who rivals Guaido’s mentor, the imprisoned Leopoldo Lopez, in popularity, traveled to Washington to discourage the administration from backing an interim president. Even Lopez hesitated to endorse the move, sources said, perhaps worrying about Guaido’s ambitions. “I think there’s a bit of a natural rivalry,” the former senior U.S. diplomat told the Washington Examiner.
Almagro made a crucial closing argument that, once they said Maduro is not president, they must back an interim president to maintain their position as the duly elected opposition according to the constitution.
“Almagro pushed very hard, saying, ‘If we’re going to do this, it’s got to be by the book,’” the former diplomat said. And so, on Jan. 23, the administration recognized Guaido.
The Trump administration credits Almagro with laying that groundwork over the previous years of debate. “Luis Almagro was out there, very early on, saying that they are the legitimate democratic institution and [Guaido] was the legitimate leader of that institution, before a lot of people went there,” Trujillo told the Washington Examiner. “So I think a lot of credit goes to Almagro, and I think our ability to work through a multilateral perspective on building consensus in the region adds to this idea.”
“If I told you a month ago that the Latin American countries would sanction another Latin American country,” Santos told the Washington Examiner, “you would have told me I was crazy.”
There is skepticism within U.S. and Latin American circles that Maduro will fall. He controls the military and enjoys support of expert Cuban security services, plus he has money siphoned away from the country over two decades.
“The Cubans are the best example of these guys managing to stay on,” observed the South American diplomat. “I’ve seen this before. I remember when everybody said that Assad in Syria was finished, absolutely finished.”
“There has never been a regime more prepared to muscle through the collapse of a country than this one,” a former U.S. ambassador concurred. “If they don’t make stupid mistakes, Maduro could last another year.”
Pompeo hopes intensifying economic pressure — the administration sanctioned Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, which Americans know through its subsidiary Citgo, on Jan. 28, capping an eventful week — and careful cooperation with Guaido will prevent that from happening.
“We hope we can redirect the money of the Venezuelan people to the National Assembly and to President Guaido,” Pompeo told the Washington Examiner, reiterating that Maduro has “corruptly stolen” his wealth. “And so there will be a full-on effort by, not only the United States, but other countries to achieve that, so we deny him the resources that he has used to oppress his people for oh-so-many years.”
Maduro’s regime is a marriage of military dictatorship and transnational drug cartels, guided by the Cuban spy services. They might buy friends, but they don’t take prisoners.
“Who is going to be able to offer more money for Venezuela?” a former diplomat asked. “The United States government? Or fucking narcos, who have boundless sums of money, and, by the way, ‘You can take our money or we can chop you up into little pieces and we’ll kill your family, too.’ I wouldn’t want to be in a bidding war with narco traffickers for Venezuela.”
Guaido will need a lot of help to establish a sovereign government, not just control of the military, but legitimate and functioning court systems. The diplomatic work falls to former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, once barred from the administration for criticism of Trump, but now Pompeo’s special envoy for Venezuela.
“Elliott knows the region, has expertise and experience with the interagency, is close to Pompeo and Bolton, and is a savvy operator and strategist,” Inboden told the Washington Examiner. “We still don’t know what will play out in Venezuela, but we know U.S. policy is in capable hands.”
Pompeo acknowledges the scale of the problem of rehabilitating Venezuelan society.
“So the mission set is to stand up these institutions, stand up these capabilities, and help the Venezuelan people build out appropriate security forces for themselves, whether that’s local police or national-level security. We want them to have that, but we want it to be Venezuelan, led by Venezuelans,” Pompeo told the Washington Examiner. “Not at the direction of a Cuban dictator or a Russian president.”
