The January 3 operation that seized Nicolás Maduro defied the rules of foreign intervention, sending shockwaves through world capitals and the criminal underworld alike. Ordinary Venezuelans celebrated, while the drug trade mourned the loss of a valuable patron.
Maduro’s successor, Delcy Rodríguez, was both constitutionally appointed and anointed by Washington. Otherwise, the Chavista regime, which has ruled Venezuela for more than 25 years, remains unchanged. General Vladimir Padrino López remains defense minister, a post he has held since 2014; Diosdado Cabello, long seen as the second most powerful figure in the regime after Maduro, is the interior minister; and the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela – PSUV) still holds almost every political office in the country.
*This article is the first in a six-part investigation, “Cocaine and Venezuela’s Cartel of the Suns Post-Maduro,” exploring the current drug trafficking dynamics in Venezuela, the nature of the Cartel of the Suns, and their future without Maduro. Read the full investigation here.
Thus, the state-embedded drug trafficking structure is also largely intact, although the conditions under which it operates have shifted dramatically. In criminal terms, two state elements have managed access to illegal rents: the Cartel of the Suns, whose origins predate the Bolivarian Revolution of Hugo Chávez, and the system of hybrid criminal governance that Maduro built to keep himself in power amid economic collapse and international sanctions.
Rodríguez is walking a political tightrope with enormous criminal implications. On the one hand, she must appease Washington to prevent further military intervention that could threaten the survival of the Chavista system that has governed the country for more than 25 years. On the other, she must keep the regime’s powerbrokers – and its radical elements, weaned on anti-US and anti-imperialist ideology – from rebelling.
The Chavista regime is a quasi-praetorian one. Its founder, Chávez, was an army lieutenant colonel who led a coup in 1992 (in which a young Cabello, then a lieutenant, took part). The coup failed but propelled the charismatic Chávez onto the political stage and into the presidency in 1999. Up until his death in 2013, Chávez placed old army buddies, people he trusted, into every organ of the state. He introduced many of them to Colombian drug-trafficking rebels for ideological and foreign-policy reasons, only to watch them get involved in the cocaine trade. Under his watch, drug trafficking in the military – the Cartel of the Suns – flourished and spread corruption throughout the ranks. Chávez tolerated it as the price of loyalty. Today, that involvement is not only tolerated but institutionalized.
When Maduro took office in 2013, he faced an economy in freefall and widespread protests that threatened to topple the Chavista regime, which was weakened by Chávez’s death. He responded by turning to the military and reshaping it into a force of political repression, the guardian and guarantor of the Bolivarian Revolution. As state coffers emptied, he could no longer provide generals and senior political figures with the funds necessary to buy their loyalty. Instead, he took the corruption model of the Cartel of the Suns and transformed it into a system of hybrid criminal governance, granting important players access to criminal rents – cocaine smuggling routes, gold mines, human smuggling corridors, or contraband hubs – in exchange for loyalty. Under Maduro, the state became the regulator and manager of several illicit economies, allied with criminal players both national and international.
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As part of the justification for taking action against Venezuela, US authorities described Maduro as a major drug trafficker.
Authorities “seized 30 tons of cocaine linked to Maduro and his associates, with nearly 7 tons linked to Maduro himself,” US Attorney General Pam Bondi said in August last year. “He is one of the largest narco-traffickers in the world and a threat to our national security. Therefore, we’ve doubled his reward to $50 million,” Bondi added. “Maduro uses foreign terrorist organizations like TDA (Tren de Aragua), Sinaloa and Cartel of the Suns to bring deadly drugs and violence into our country.”
The kingpin strategy – capturing or killing the top leaders of drug trafficking organizations – has had little long-term effect in containing the growth of the cocaine trade. It has reshaped the business, away from vertically integrated cartels into more fluid network models. The removal of Maduro is likely, in the short term at least, to have even less effect on the drug trade in Venezuela, as he was not the head of a drug trafficking organization, but rather the facilitator and protector of a corruption system that allowed generals and senior political figures to profit from the drug trade. That system – the Chavista regime – remains in place, although the architect of the hybrid criminal governance model is now on trial in New York.
Rodríguez, though outside the praetorian core of the Chavista regime and not facing any US indictments, is believed to have been involved in criminal activity, corruption, and even drug trafficking. The criminal dimension of the tightrope she is walking involves preventing public scandals of corruption and drug trafficking that might provoke further US intervention, while still allowing the flow of criminal rents to regime figures to preserve loyalty. This is especially true of the military and Cabello. The latter has long been linked to the Cartel of the Suns, and in control of much over the state security apparatus and the colectivos – the political shock troops of the regime, deeply involved in illegal activity.
The US deployment to the Caribbean had already altered drug trafficking dynamics before the removal of Maduro. InSight Crime interviews towards the end of last year in the state of Falcón, one of the principal departure points for maritime drug shipments, revealed that the movement of large cocaine loads was suspended.
“Maritime traffic has been shut down since the United States deployed off the coast of Venezuela,” said a member of the National Guard, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “For example, the top brass aren’t shipping goods (cocaine) by sea because it would be disastrous—not so much the loss of the merchandise itself, but the potential arrest of a key figure, which would worsen the persecution or generate more evidence than already exists. They’re waiting for things to calm down before resuming operations.”
The missile strikes on go-fast boats alleged to be carrying drugs have further interrupted shipments from the north coast. However, while this has forced drug traffickers to adapt, it has not shut down either the production of cocaine in Venezuela, nor the transit of shipments. Many loads – especially those bound for Europe – are now moving through southern Venezuela towards the eastern seaboard, or into neighboring Guyana and then Suriname. In all three places, InSight Crime has found evidence of the construction of semi-submersible vessels or “narco subs,” which can take cocaine loads as big as nine tons directly to Europe.
SEE ALSO: Venezuela’s Cocaine Revolution
The snatching of Maduro has removed the patron of the Cartel of the Suns and the architect of the criminal hybrid governance model. Yet Maduro’s direct involvement in the drug trade has been the subject of wildly different interpretations, and his fall opens several possible scenarios. The precise nature of Maduro’s role in the cocaine business is now at the heart of his trial in the United States, where he faces charges of drug trafficking.