The Truth About Venezuela

So, the Maduro regime is what's called a cartel, the cartel of the sons. These all began, I mean, these investigations have been ongoing for over 10 years independently at the Department of Justice. And one of the things Chavez did in the early 2000s is that most countries have cooperation agreements with the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration, to stop drug trafficking. South America is a big source of drug trafficking.

Why? Because it's mostly produced in Colombia. That's where the US Open Military Base is there, and really fought it hard under the Uribe presidency. And then now under Petro, obviously, it's all gone overboard. But Chavez stopped the cooperation with the US government, and that was purposeful. That's because they thought that that was actually their best revenue source.

They destroyed the oil industry, so they ran out of oil to steal. What they didn't destroy, because it's not government-owned, is the drug trafficking industry. And so the generals of the Venezuelan military, this is part of how they remain in power,

the military is the cartel. And the military knows that if Venezuela were to become a democratic country, obviously generals cannot be drug kingpins, no matter who comes to power in an election. And that's why they will never give him power peacefully.

That's another discussion that we can talk about. But the point is, they became a cartel. They don't mainly produce the drugs there. It's mostly from Colombia, from FARC, ELN, these other military groups. They bring it through Venezuela. And because Venezuela is a narco state, the government itself endorses this. They use government

planes to transport drugs. They use all the state infrastructure to do it. Nicolás Maduro's nephews were captured by the DEA in Haiti with kilos of cocaine. They were brought here, they went to trial, they were declared guilty, and then Biden pardoned them and sent them back.

What?

Oh yeah, this happened a few years ago under Biden, because it was all part of an exchange for American prisoners. And here are the nephews of the dictator. I mean, this is how high up it is. I mean, how close do you want to get? It's his own family. So that is why they do it, because it's a big source of revenue. It's a way to create a clientele of people in power that have the weapons to remain in

power. And how much cocaine, do we know how much cocaine is being trafficked from Venezuela

to the United States?

So my understanding is that it's about 20% of the cocaine that gets to the United States comes from Venezuela. It's not a majority, but it's a huge portion. And, but I mean, I don't know how credible it is, the amount. But it really comes from Colombia. That's where it's produced,

and then Venezuela helps with the transportation. Part of it also goes to Europe. It's not all to the United States, goes through the islands of the Caribbean, sometimes on flights, sometimes on boats, like the boats we've seen,

they've stricken in the Caribbean, and then ultimately also through Mexico, right?

Well, these boats that have been destroyed by US strikes, are they narco boats? What do we know about them?

I am certain that they are. I have no... So, one of the things is, right now there's a very lively discussion in the United States over whether this is legal, whether this is good, whether these people need to be brought to trial. Look, I can tell you, at least me personally as a Venezuelan, I fully support the Trump

administration's strikes on drug boats in the Caribbean. And the overwhelming majority of Venezuelans, even post on their personal social media, jokes about it, they love it. They're like, another one bites the dust. Because this is part of what keeps the regime in power. Now, are the strikes going to overthrow Maduro by themselves,

striking boats? No. More would need to be done. But is it a good thing? Because these people are evil and have destroyed our country? Yes.

Well, there's something strange I found because, look, this episode might go out a fair while after the events that we're discussing and by this point it might all be legal or illegal or, you know, whatever. But I just thought it was quite weird the way the media covered it

because they were like, well, one of the people who was hit was a fisherman, and you're going, well, drug cartels will use fishermen to drive boats.

No, no, wait, that person, who was, by the way, Colombian, that fisherman was a convicted armed trafficker in Colombia. Are you telling me that he reformed himself, went to a drug trafficking route to fish. Right. And that sounds fishy.

That sounds fishy. But even if that isn't the case, I mean, just because there was one fisherman on a boat doesn't mean it's not a narco boat. I mean, drug cartels probably don't have boat training camps. They just get a guy who has a boat or who knows how to.

Do you know what I mean?

It's kind of silly. Now, you might say, well, Daniel, but is death really the solution, right? I'm going to tell you why this is the appropriate strategy. It is the appropriate strategy because the drug trafficking in Latin America, and especially in Venezuela and Colombia, it is tied to terrorism. How do you think FARC and ELN, the terrorist designated groups by the United States, not even talking about the Cartel of the Suns yet?

Sorry, Daniel, there's a lot of people who won't know what FARC is and won't know what ELN is. So let's just give us a bit of background and then come back to the point.

Yeah, the FARC and ELN are Colombian militias that occupy large portions of Colombia, do bomb attacks, kidnap people. They have kidnapped even presidential candidates in Colombia and they extort businesses in the region. And they're funded through drug trafficking. How do you think Hezbollah even gets funding too? Hezbollah also receives money from drug trafficking.

That terrorist groups have found out that the most profitable way to make money is drug trafficking and other criminal activity. It's like the mob did the alcohol and the prostitution and all these things together. It's the same thing that terrorists do. So when you strike the drug trafficking, you strike the funding source of terrorism.

That's really, really interesting. Another thing I was going to ask you is, one of the things that I think is probably under discussed is the extent to which Venezuela is working with hostile regimes to the United States.

Absolutely. So Chavez became very good friends with Mahmoud al-Maliniyat when he was president of Iran. Iranians are still very good allies of their current regime. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping. I mean, Russia and China gave him billions and billions of loans, and then they forgave. That's all to prop them up. Because for these regimes, having Venezuela there

is both a platform to attack the United States, but also to bother the United States. They know that the drug trafficking kills Americans and harms the West. Why not support them? They know that Maduro and Chavez before him

funded communist parties in other countries, including Petro in Colombia, including Podemos in Spain, by the way, the far left party there, that is in power. So it is a very cost effective way to just fight an asymmetric war against the West. And yeah, so I would say it is a big problem.

I don't know if you remember when they tried to kidnap the Iranian citizen here in New York City, these armed assassins. The objective was kidnapping, but the other option was assassination. The plan was actually to take her to Caracas, not to Iran directly. It was much closer. That's because the Iranian regime cooperates with the Maduro regime.

Their first lady and the president of Iran came recently to Venezuela. It was a really funny video. She came in a full black burka and then when she was coming on the plane, Venezuelans put the Star Wars song as she was coming down.

That's exactly what it is. And that's the tragedy of Venezuela is that it's become completely corrupted, that it's essentially now a vessel for the Iranian regime, but it's also got links to China as well.

Well, absolutely. The Chinese supported Chavez with phones. They're still present. I mean, part of how the oil is extracted today in Venezuela is Iranian, Chinese and Russian companies because the Maduro regime wasn't able to do it themselves, so they're like, hey, let's bring you all of the... So it's really funny when the far leftists in the United States and other countries say that, oh, this is the United States that wants to overthrow Maduro because of the oil.

The oil is being taken by Russia, by China, and by Iran. What are you talking about? What do you think the Venezuelan gasoline comes from? No, it comes from Iran. Take the oil there, bring the gasoline back. The Iranians, I mean, those are the imperialist countries

that intervened in Venezuela. It's Cuba that did. Venezuelans wanted to have peaceful, free relations with the United States, like it used to be. The refineries all along Texas used to be designed to bring Venezuelan heavy oil and refine it there. That's what they're designed to do. And if anything, the Maduro regime

has destroyed oil production. Venezuela used to produce three and a half to four million barrels a day. Now it produces less than a million, about half a million.

And it represents a very real security threat to the United States. Because I was talking to one of my cousins and he was saying that there's Hezbollah training

camps on the island of Margarita. You see now people in broadcast, you see a lot of Islamists in Venezuela. And look, people, you might understand that Muslims are immigrating to rich countries because it's a better place to live. Nobody's immigrating to Venezuela because it's a better place to live.

How did they show up there? Because they all work for Iran. That's really simple. It's because of the Hezbollah training camps. Not only that, but the other terrorist organizations I mentioned earlier, FARC and ELN sought refuge from the US involvement in Colombia

inside Venezuela. Chavez protected them. He even has in one of his State of the Union addresses saying that FARC and ELN are not terrorist groups. They're just misunderstood people.

And not only do they represent a terrorist threat externally to the United States, Venezuela, and I'm ashamed to say this, it actually pains me and it upsets me to say this, we represent a threat to the United States

internally with gangs like El Tren de Aragua. Absolutely. So, Venezuela then, after 2020, became a different, greater threat to America and the world. Because now not only was it the drugs, which also increased, but it's also the migration of hundreds of thousands of people, well, millions all over the world,

of course, and among them, really dangerous gang members that you really didn't need to be a genius to identify them. So one of the examples is this woman who crossed the southern border under Biden. She was not sneaking in. She was let in by border patrol. She was not sneaking in. She was let in by Border Patrol. She was checked.

You just had to see her picture to know that she shouldn't have been allowed, okay? Facial tattoos everywhere. This woman was actually a child sex trafficker. And when she came to America, what she did was traffic girls into prostitution. Her nickname was Barbie. This is all in the New York Post. You can read it, see her photo. All the other cases in New York City of gang members and thief bands, right?

Shoplifting gangs. And that is little, they took over an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado. I mean, they have done so much, and they have even attempted to assassinate Venezuelan dissidents in other countries.

Two Venezuelan dissidents in other countries. Two Venezuelan dissidents were almost killed a couple of weeks ago in Colombia by an assassin group. They survived, thank God. They killed one in Chile. Their goal is to, it's not that most Venezuelans or even a large, you know, or even a small

or significant number are all criminals or whatever coming into the US, but that the Venezuelan regime uses the natural migration flow of people who flee them to infiltrate criminals

and gang members. Well, this is what I was going to ask you because there was one thing that we didn't have in the Soviet Union because it was on authoritarian, maybe even totalitarian regime, we did not have criminal gangs that were roaming, kidnapping people, trafficking drugs. That, like, if you want to talk about the benefits of totalitarianism, crime tends to be really under control, right? As far as I understand, in China, there are no huge gangs that are doing any

of this stuff. So how does a country with an authoritarian socialist regime end up having such a strong presence of organized crime?

That is such a good observation on your right. Cuba also doesn't have a major crime problem.

Right.

Venezuela is unique among these socialist nations in that it allowed crime to fester. And I think it was a political strategy. So if you see the charts of all the independent groups of the independent groups, of the crime rate, homicide rate, kidnapping numbers,

everything of Venezuela, Chavez got selected and sworn into office, linear increase up. Caracas became one of the cities with the highest homicide rates in the planet. And that was all during my lifetime.

It became so dangerous that when I went to parties as a teenager in friends' homes, we would stay overnight because we didn't want to be picked up or leave in the dark. My own family in the early 2000s were kidnapped in the beach at home. They stole everything. They took our cars, they took our belongings. And so this became commonplace.

I have friends who, some of them got robbed two times a day. Like, it became a joke at this point. It's like, really? And like, when they come, like, they already stole my phone.

I can't give it to you.

So we became used to the crime. That was one of the greatest life, quality of life improvements for me coming to America was being at peace in the street, not thinking that a man in a motorcycle was gonna come next to me in the sidewalk

and then point a gun at me and say, give me everything you have and then kill me perhaps.

Yeah, we know how you feel coming from London. I guess what I'm asking is, is the crime and these gangs that we're seeing, particularly the ones that are infiltrating the United States, Is that simply a failure of the Venezuelan regime to assert its authority, or is there something more nefarious going on?

I think it's more nefarious. I think that the other authoritarian regimes chose to just squash crime, and Maduro and Chávez chose not to. Inside Venezuela, the purpose of the gangs was to repress protests. They used these armed groups so that when there were large protests, they would send them, it's called colectivos, colectives.

And they would come in motorcycles, dressed in red, and then they would shoot some people, kidnap others, torture them, and diffuse the protests that way. And then say, oh, that wasn't the police. It was them with Russian weapons, by the way. I mean, how else do you get weapons in a country where weapons are illegal, right?

Well, the weapons are illegal for law-abiding citizens, not for the gang members and the collectives. So that's how it all began. And then these gangs also grew on themselves, right? They control the prisons, which are totally packed with people. Part of what President Trump has said about the gangs

is that Maduro released the people from the prisons. Actually, the problem is that people just didn't go to prison in the first place. The prisons are actually the place where criminals thrive. They have chicken inside the prisons. They have banks.

They bring in people from outside. There are several good documentaries of people who go into the prisons, Americans and others. So I think it was a political strategy at the beginning, internal, and then when they saw that people were coming to the United States through the border, they were like, we can exploit this.

So the gang members came with them.

Do you think that there's going to be some kind of military action in Venezuela

involving the US? I hope so. You know, right now, where we're only seeing is striking the boats. Trump has hinted at striking inside Venezuela, the land. Look, why do I say I hope so? Because it's really the only way we see this regime end. This regime will not end because they feel pressure from sanctions. As much as I support it because I don't think they should get to enjoy the financial benefits of what they stole. It's the just thing to do to sanction the regime.

If you want to see a prosperous Venezuela where millions of people are fleeing, where criminals aren't going to other countries, where we're actually exporting oil instead of exporting people. The only way is for Maduro not to be in power and Venezuela become a free country again.

And I think it's such a good point, Daniel, what people don't understand, because Venezuela isn't the focus of most people's attention is this is not sustainable either for Venezuela or actually for the United States and something really does need to be done.

Indeed. I mean, we're all paying for what socialists admit to Venezuela. We're paying it in higher gasoline prices because there are millions of barrels that are not being produced every day from Venezuela. We're all paying it in crime. I mean, how many people have been killed by gang members from Venezuela in the US? Every time I was seeing the news, like migrant crime, whatever,

I was like, please let it not be Venezuela. Please let it not be Venezuela. Venezuela. You know, like, oh, please, at least another Latin American nation, please, come on. So that is not a coincidence.

And so we're paying the price and we would all benefit so much if Venezuela became free, not just Venezuelans. So many people would go back to Venezuela, millions of people. And I think, you know, so much suffering has been done. People starving, so much lost human potential of valuable people

that could be innovating and doing good things. It's the same thing with the Soviet Union when it was still a socialist regime. How many smart Russians were there? I mean, Russia had some of the smartest people in the world that couldn't fulfill their potential and innovate for all of the world's benefit

because of Soviet socialism.

And a lot of them are here now and in Israel.

Very true, very, very true. But still, it was a loss of human potential. Of course. Same in China, same in so many authoritarian countries. And I think President Trump has the opportunity not only to get a huge win on foreign policy, but to do the greatest foreign policy achievement of the US, perhaps in many decades. Well, here's the question, Daniel,

and look, I think what you're saying I totally get particularly from your perspective I also think I think you'd agree with me over the last 20 years regime change It's got a bit of a bad rep right and partly I think for very good reasons, which is one of the things I think Americans have discovered that you know, I always try to explain this to our American friends It's like not everyone in the world is American. So even if you remove the evil guy at the top, they don't necessarily end up in a, you know, social democracy or liberal democracy or democracy at all. So

for example, you know, I think there was a few people who were a little bit too enthusiastic when the Ukraine war, when Russia invaded Ukraine, and they were like, oh, we just need to get rid of Putin. And I was like, well, I agree with you that what's happening is bad, and I'm super pro-Ukraine. You remove Putin, I'm not sure you're going to get something better. So if you're saying, well, it would be better to remove Maduro, I totally get the sentiment,

but make the case to me that he's not going to be replaced by Nicolas Paduro and he's even worse.

That's very important. And obviously, during the last 20 years, I mean, because of the Iraq war, which was a massive mistake, a trillion dollar mistake, that's a big problem. But people forget that there have been many successful use of forces in US foreign policy in the past, even in Latin America, that led to great prosperity.

Tell us about that.

Panama, for example. Panama is one of the richest countries in Latin America after the US deposed Manuel Noriega. Granada. In Granada, they celebrate Thanksgiving on the day of the US intervention in Granada. It took one day.

Now, Granada is an island. It's much smaller. Panama had the Panama Canal. I understand it's not the same, but what I'm trying to say is that it can be successful and it has been successful in recent period, in the 80s. So what happens in Venezuela is also similar in that we have a democratically elected government. We have an active opposition, something Cuba doesn't have, unfortunately.

And so we have who, with people, you know, a democratic alternative that has massive popular support. And we have a regime that totally depends on drug trafficking. We don't have a country with ethnical religious division, right?

We're not gonna have an Iraq Shiite versus Muslim war. We're not gonna have, you know, these ethnic genocides, right, that happen in Africa. It's a very different situation. And we don't need troops on the ground either. That would be a massive mistake

because it would be very costly. The US is simply not capable of doing that in Venezuela, which is a very large country, larger than Iraq too. So what President Trump could do is actually strike at the military facilities of the regime and even strike at some of the major regime members,

such that Maduro gets the message, I need to leave because my life is at risk. And where would he live? The same face that Bashar al-Assad had. He will go to Russia, probably. I don't think he wants to go to Cuba.

I don't think he wants to go to Cuba. It's too poor.