On November 18, a conference entitled “Cuba’s Shadow is Long: The role of the Cuban dictatorship in Russia and Venezuela,” was held in the Spanish senate, organized by Rosa María Payá’s Cuba Decide and the Popular Party. Payá’s main objective has been asking Europe to stop subsidizing the Cuban regime with millions of euros under the Political Dialogue and Cooperation Agreement.
In the conference it was argued that the liberation of Cuba and Venezuela was not only a necessity for the people suffering the consequences of human rights violations and humanitarian crises, but also an imperative for the security of the Western Hemisphere, because these dictatorships threaten the peace and stability of the region.
In the panel on Venezuela, in which the director of El Nacional, Miguel Henrique Otero, and I participated, three aspects of the Venezuelan regime were denounced. First, that Venezuela is currently the world’s leading exporter of cocaine, supplying 20% of the market. In this regard, it was recommended to read two reports: “The Cocaine Revolution in Venezuela,” by InSight Crime; and “NarcoFiles: The New Criminal Order,” prepared by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project in conjunction with a team of journalists from several countries.
According to these reports, in 2022, Venezuela was exporting around 300 tons of cocaine a year, with a street value of around $7.5 billion. The figures have since increased. The main destinations are the United States and Europe, via routes through the Caribbean, Central America and Mexico, and Africa.
This is possible because the Venezuelan authorities at the highest levels, both civilian and military, manage this business through the Cartel of the Suns. We are talking, without any doubt, about a narco-state, because the institutions are at the service of drug trafficking. Therefore, the liberation of Venezuela would mean a severe blow to drug trafficking.
The second aspect of the Venezuelan regime is its relationship with Islamic terrorism. In this regard, it was recommended to read the Atlantic Council report entitled “The Maduro-Hezbollah nexus: How Iranian-backed networks prop up the Venezuelan regime,” by Joseph Humire.
Humire’s report argues that Hezbollah has helped to turn Venezuela into a hub for transnational organized crime and international terrorism, and it reiterates that the Maduro regime provides Venezuelan identity to Islamic terrorists so that they can travel freely to Europe and the United States.
The third aspect of the regime, and one of the lesser known, is that Venezuela introduced a new form of coup d’état based on electoral fraud and perpetrated with state-of-the-art technology. In this regard, I wrote a book entitled The Electoral Frauds of the Sao Paulo Forum.
At Cuba’s behest, Hugo Chavez developed a fraud scheme based on electronic voting machines and computerized totalization systems, which assisted him—according to electoral technicians and statistical experts—in stealing two million votes in the 2004 recall referendum.
This election involved a newly created company called Smartmatic, which according to Stolen Election Facts is closely linked to the Venezuelan regime, although that company publicly broke with the Maduro government in 2017.
Last August, a lawsuit was filed against the president of Smartmatic, Roger Piñate, for having bribed the electoral authorities of the Philippines. Yet this did not prevent the company from being hired to manage the next electoral process in Honduras.
Drug trafficking, Islamic terrorism, and electoral fraud are just some of the export products of the Venezuelan regime. This explains why the Colombian guerrillas FARC and ELN operate freely in Venezuelan territory; and it explains why so many crimes against humanity are committed: persecution, disappearances, torture, detention of children, imprisonment of thousands of innocent people, and political assassinations in broad daylight.
All attempts to negotiate with Maduro’s spokesmen have failed—and will continue to fail—because they are treated as government members, when in reality they represent a criminal organization directed from Havana. Cuba directs the Venezuelan Armed Forces, manages its foreign policy, oversees state security, and Maduro’s protection, and has control of the identification service, registries, and notary offices.
In short, Maduro is doing the dirty work of the Cuban dictatorship, which pretends to have nothing to do with drug trafficking, Islamic terrorism, or the electoral fraud that takes place around the world; but this is only a facade to deceive the international community and particularly the European governments. Maduro is a puppet of Havana, and it will not be possible to achieve the liberation of Venezuela until the Cuban occupation army leaves the country.
