A hijacked empire

In the mid-1980s, the Iran-Contra scandal occurred in the United States when the Reagan administration authorized the prohibited sale of arms to Iran under the assumption that this would lead to the release of seven American hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon. When the details of this exchange and the diversion of money from the arms sale to the Nicaraguan contras were revealed, the scandal led to condemnation from the highest ranking members of the administration including Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger.

A few months ago, some figures from the Biden administration, repeating that disastrous policy and forgetting this precedent, sat down with members of the government of the mafia dictator Nicolás Maduro to negotiate two things, oil and the exchange of some hostages or kidnapped persons in exchange for benefits for people close to the regime.

As in the Iran-Contra scandal, the epicenter is the White House, since the person who led the delegation was Juan González in charge of the Latin American Security Council and who was accompanied by the United States ambassador to the recognized Venezuelan government of Juan Guaidó. , JimmyStory.

Several results came out of that meeting. The first was the release of two Americans illegally kidnapped by Venezuela, held in legal terms with illegal and arbitrary detention. And the second was undoubtedly the facilitation of operations for an American oil company, Chevron, and permission for two European companies, Repsol and Eni, to supply the thirsty world market due to the war in Ukraine.

But this beginning of exchange continued. On June 17, the United States government removed the sanctions from Carlos Malpica Flores, nephew of Maduro’s wife, Celia Flores, and who, as treasurer, was the epicenter of the theft and laundering of more than 11 billion dollars. of PDVSA, the Venezuelan oil company.

A few days later an American plane takes another kidnapped by the Maduro regime through Colombia and takes him to Orlando. The quid pro quo between the Maduro mafia and the Biden government was consolidating. The operation under the command of Juan Gonzalez, as Oliver North did in Iran-Contra, was consolidating and giving results to the White House.

But where González and Story went wrong was in trusting a criminal like Maduro. The truth is that like the Russians, who know this game very well and who today want to change the innocent basketball player Brittney Greiner for Victor Bout, a Russian arms dealer sentenced to 25 years in the United States for conspiring to assassinate Americans, Maduro and his delinquent friends also learned to play.

A few days ago various American media published how the Venezuelan government uses all kinds of traps to take Americans to Venezuela where they arrest them as spies and use them as leverage in the negotiations they want to do. Some of these arrests, says the New Herald, citing American officials, were made in Colombia and on some Caribbean islands.

Moreover, the United States placed Venezuela on a list that includes North Korea, Russia, Iran, China and Burma. This list warns Americans that in these countries they are at great risk of being unjustly arrested, or kidnapped, as it should be called.

The question now is, what does Maduro want? It is not Mexico that is dead because that fight has already been won. What else then? As an analyst in the Miami Herald says and Marshall Billingslea, deputy director at the United States Treasury Secretary in charge of combating money laundering and financing of terrorism, warns in a Twitter a few days ago, he apparently wants the United States The United States accepts that Alex Saab is a diplomat and returns him to Venezuela. If finally the United States removed the sanctions from Malpica Flores, who was Saab’s predecessor, because they cannot let go of the right-hand launderer of Nicolás Maduro’s criminal clan.

It is not unreasonable because Saab’s secrets about Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Turkey and the entire laundering network they use for oil, gold and drug trafficking currencies are of great value to them. But there is an even more terrible possibility. And it is that before the request for extradition from Colombia they hand over Saab to the new President Gustavo Petro. That is to say that the United States does the same thing that Juan Manuel Santos did with the biggest Venezuelan narco Walid Mackled. Despite the extradition request from the United States, he handed him over to Venezuela.

Soon we will know what this is going to be. And if that door opened by the Biden administration gives Alex Saab freedom. The truth is that the lesson of the Iran-contra crisis does not seem to have been learned by Gonzalez, Story, Blinken or Biden. And today they have direct responsibility for the lives of Americans who in recent weeks fell into the clutches of Maduro.

Therefore, this is not over yet. And I am very afraid that at the end of this shameful episode in which the United States is kidnapped by the international criminal organization of Putin and Maduro, the Venezuelan criminal without guts and without restraint will ultimately win.