Venezuela also sponsors terrorism, even more than Cuba

Trump's reincorporation of Cuba to the list of state sponsors of terrorism is great news, but there are other steps that must also be taken in this direction that could have a greater impact.

The Castro regime on the island has been promoting organized crime, drug trafficking and terrorism on the continent for decades. Its legacy is the rise of the Nicaraguan and, above all, Venezuelan tyrannies. There would be no Bolivarian Revolution without Fidel Castro. But today, there is no Cuban Revolution without Nicolás Maduro.

Although the Chavista Revolution is the legacy of the Cuban dictatorship, today the Castro tyranny is nurtured from Caracas. The Venezuelan regime, with its diminished oil industry and cocaine production, is the main financial supporter not only of Cuba, but of all destabilizing movements and forces on the continent.

The United States cannot consider its fight against organized crime on the continent as a priority and include Cuba in the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, but ignore Venezuela. It would be like considering Hezbollah or Hamas as enemies, but ignoring Iran.

Since its beginnings, the Venezuelan regime allied itself with terrorist groups in the continent. Hugo Chávez considered relations with the terrorist groups FARC and ELN, both inspired by Fidel Castro, as essential. Extensive reports, both in the Colombian and international press, have outlined the logistical and armed support that the Venezuelan tyranny lends to these insurgent groups, which even today continue to sow chaos in Colombia.

In addition to the FARC and the ELN, Venezuela has deepened its ties with Islamic terrorism and, in exchange for financial and logistical support, Maduro allowed Iran to enter fully into the country, to use it as a base of operations and coordination of terrorism in Latin America.

Since Obama's term, Nicolás Maduro offered to insert Venezuela into an axis composed of Russia, Iran and Syria. Obama's big mistake was to opt for appeasement and, besides reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran, looked aside and ignored that Hezbollah was exporting cocaine to the United States, "especially from Venezuela," as read in a report by Politico.

"In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez was personally working with then-Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Hezbollah on drug trafficking and other activities aimed at undermining U.S. influence in the region," reads Politico.

"Within a few years, Venezuelan cocaine exports skyrocketed from 50 tons a year to 250, much of it bound for American cities."

And the situation has only gotten worse. In addition, the Venezuelan regime, in alliance with Iran, has issued passports to Hezbollah terrorists, so that they can travel around the continent without raising much suspicion. In addition, Nicolás Maduro recently installed an Iranian drone factory in Venezuela.

With respect to Colombian terrorism, the situation has become particularly tense in recent days, thanks in large part to the fact that Colombia is now ruled by a far-left president linked to drug trafficking groups.

In Catatumbo, a region of Colombia with enough hectares of cocaine to produce billions of dollars a year, the FARC used to rule. But the Venezuelan regime, with its ELN proxies and support from the Colombian government, sought to displace the other guerrilla group. Maduro's control of the region would allow him to produce enough money to replace oil production in the event that the United States reimposes sanctions on PDVSA.

Leaving aside the presence of Russia or China, the other major threat—also operating as a proxy, much like Iran’s Hezbollah—is the Tren de Aragua and organized crime, as highlighted in a well-explained column published by Venezuelan Erick Suarez on February 9 in Visegrad24 —which elaborates on the need to designate Venezuela as a State sponsor of terrorism— and Joseph Humire has documented. The Maduro regime functions, in essence, like a drug trafficking cartel. The Venezuelan state can be considered neither as a normal authoritarian system nor as a simple tyranny. It is much more complex. It would be the equivalent of the Sinaloa Cartel formally ruling Mexico or of Pablo Escobar coming to power in Colombia.

In this sense, the Maduro regime has used organized crime as a proxy and an element to advance geopolitical or criminal causes. The Chilean attorney general's office, after a thorough investigation, charged Diosdado Cabello, the Venezuelan regime's No. 2, of being behind the assassination of exiled opposition lieutenant Ronald Ojeda, using Tren de Aragua members as his executioners.

In the United States, it is clear that Tren de Aragua has been sent to destabilize, provoke chaos and then advance negotiations, such as the ones underway today. Likewise, Maduro's tyranny has weaponized migration in the region, and today this allows him to negotiate convenient migration agreements that he uses as propaganda.

Faced with this reality, Donald Trump's White House could apply two approaches: either try what Biden did, the naïve appeasement based on the belief that making concessions to Maduro will help avoid facing the consequences of his regime, or resuming the policy of maximum pressure from his first administration that, as the president himself said recently from the Oval Office, almost achieved the historic goal of freeing Venezuela and saving the hemisphere from this massive problem.

It would be a mistake with unimaginable consequences if, apart from certain agreements, the Republican administration were to pressure Cuba, but instead apply the inert Democratic policies of concessions and appeasement toward Venezuela.

Nobody understands what is at stake in Venezuela like Trump and his team of courageous and enlightened officials. That is precisely why during his first administration, Trump was the president who did the most damage to Maduro. The stability and prosperity of the region depends on breaking these destabilizing factors. Without funds from blood oil or drug trafficking, Maduro would be left without the ability to blackmail and damage the continent. Therefore, the big imminent step must be to designate Venezuela as a state sponsor of terrorism.