AP obtains documents showing Venezuelan leader Delcy Rodrguez has been on DEA's radar for years
Source: Associated Press
When President Donald Trump announced the audacious capture of Nicolás Maduro to face drug trafficking charges in the U.S., he portrayed the strongman’s vice president and longtime aide as America’s preferred partner to stabilize Venezuela amid a scourge of drugs, corruption and economic mayhem. Left unspoken was the cloud of suspicion that long surrounded Delcy Rodríguez before she became acting president of the beleaguered nation earlier this month.
In fact, Rodríguez has been on the radar of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration for years and in 2022 was even labeled a “priority target,” a designation DEA reserves for suspects believed to have a “significant impact” on the drug trade, according to records obtained by The Associated Press and more than a half dozen current and former U.S. law enforcement officials.
Rodríguez’s name has surfaced in nearly a dozen DEA investigations, several of which remain ongoing, involving agents in field offices from Paraguay and Ecuador to Phoenix and New York, the AP learned. The AP could not determine the specific focus of each investigation.
Rodríguez, 56, worked her way to the apex of power in Venezuela as a loyal aide to Maduro, with whom she shares a deep-seated leftist bent stemming from her socialist father’s death in police custody when she was only 7 years old. Despite blaming the U.S. for her father’s death, she steadily worked while foreign minister and later vice president to court American investment during the first Trump administration, hiring lobbyists close to Trump and even ordering the state oil company to make a $500,000 donation to his inaugural committee.
Read more: https://apnews.com/article/delcy-rodriguez-donald-trump-venezuela-drugs-maduro-70ffbe17378fe0fa9b7f12a40e07b2f3
Who knew you could stave off drug trafficking investigations AND an almost certain overthrow/arrest/imprisonment by giving $500K to Trump's inauguration committee?
OK, pretty much everyone.
You kinda gotta wonder what María Corina Machado thinks about this, in the aftermath of her giving up her. Nobel medal to Orange Jesus. If only she'd brought crypto instead.
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After more than 150 years of training (at least since Haymarket, probably before), US politicians know that all they have to do is say "leftist," "socialist," or "communist," Like Pavlov's dog, most Americans will salivate and agree that "those people" must be destroyed, giving license to pro-capitalist authoritarian wannabes like Hoover, Nixon, Reagan, and Trump. Promising to save people from "enemies" is a tried and true pathway to power. I'm not even going to mention popular perception of "anarchists," who are actually non-authoritarian.
This predicament of association hasn't been helped by left movements that might start with good intentions but fall under the spell of leaders with authoritarian tendencies. Beginning with Lenin's proclamation of the "vanguard party," perhaps foreshadowed by Daniel DeLeon's iron rule of the Socialist Labor Party in the USA, politically savvy authoritarian types have used the advancement of the proletariat to justify their seizure of power. Remember, Felix Dzerzhinsky was there from before the founding of the USSR. While Kronstadt should have demonstrated what the Bolsheviks were about, it either wasn't enough or too late, depending on one's perspective.
Of course the right pretty much always favors a "strong leader" unapologetically. "How can we possible exist without leaders?," they ask. People "need" someone higher in rank to tell them what to do, apparently.
It's hard to break the hierarchy that is civilization. One might speculate that we have to be de-civilized to do so, though it's ever so hard to imagine what that might look like. After 6000 or so years of civilization's "world system," we seem to have been taught there's nothing else. I suspect that until we do, however, we're stuck in the endless repetition of the Townsend Law ("meet the new boss, same as the old boss"
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Spoiler alert: I don't think a reversion to hunting & gathering or swidden horticulture is likely to work.