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</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">fox cheerleader venez
</font></div><div><a href="https://www.foxnews.com/world/drug-trafficking-maduro-venezuela"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.foxnews.com/world/drug-trafficking-maduro-venezuela</font></a></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx pix [vid?]</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">-
<b>Drug trafficking keeping Maduro in power in Venezuela, analysts say</b>
Hollie McKay [who?]</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Hollie McKay | Fox News
Pence says Venezuela ambassador 'shouldn't be here' while addressing the UN Security CouncilVideo
Pence says Venezuela ambassador 'shouldn't be here' while addressing the UN Security Council]
It has been more than three months since the <b>U.S. accelerated its onslaught of economic sanctions on Venezuela</b>,
coupled with the back of a new interim President – heightening official
expectation that the Nicolas Maduro-led regime would crumble.
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Only the <b>socialist dictatorship</b>
has failed to fall. While there an array of factors to blame, analysts
are pointing to illicit trafficking rings as a fundamental Maduro
lifeline.</span>
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
“The
Venezuelan military forces has become a narco-criminal, armed
organization. Most of the top and mid-commanders are deeply involved in
corruption, drug operations, and serious human rights abuses,” Johan
Obdola, president of Latin America-focused global intelligence and
security firm IOSI, told Fox News,</span> noting that cartel-led,
massive drug operations continue to spawn the country keeping the top
echelon well-fed and financed. “Small pro-regime policing agencies and
military units across the nation conduct these criminal operations
centered on drug trafficking, kidnapping, and robbery to survive the
crisis.”
<b>Kevin Ivers, Vice President and Latin America expert at <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">public policy firm DCI Group</span>,</b>
pointed out that years ago, the elite of the Venezuelan military was
put in charge of the core elements of the domestic economy, such as the
importation and distribution of food and consumer goods.</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">[In
this Feb. 14, 2019 file photo, Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro
speaks during an interview at Miraflores presidential palace in Caracas,
Venezuela. (???????AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos, File)
“This has
encouraged corruption and profiteering that has made key elements of
the military part of what can be called the regime’s ‘mafia,’ and this
has extended beyond consumer goods to drug trafficking,” he explained. <b>“Maduro
has also spent years systematically splintering the military into
factions and playing them off each other to make it difficult for them
to unite against him.”</b>
PENCE CONFRONTS VENEZUELAN AMBASSADOR AT UN: ‘YOU SHOULDN’T BE HERE’
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Emanuele
Ottolenghi, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of
Democracies, concurred that many in the upper echelons receive a cut
from the regime’s illicit trafficking network – from drugs to food and
medicine racketeering.</span>
“There aren’t enough <b>incentives </b>(for military leaders) to leave and disincentives to stay to tip the balance, especially at the top,” he noted.
Indeed,
military defections – once considered key to Maduro’s expulsion – have
dipped from 80 to 100 per day earlier this year to just two or three,
according to the Washington Post. And of those, very few have come from
the highest ranks and thus failed to generate a game-changing ripple
effect.
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“There
were no key defections, roughly 500 members of the military without any
real commanders. In a 110,000 military it had no impact,” explained
Carlos Ponce, a senior fellow, and director of Latin America Programs at
the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. “There was no real
analysis of the military structure and the breaking points.”</span>
Ponce
said that former leader Hugo Chavez intentionally dismembered the lines
of command to avoid a coup d’état while he was in power. He also
pointed out that those who did make the leap have been paying the price.
“The
commanders and high-ranking officials allegedly caught in anti-Maduro
meetings have been tortured and their families isolated from any social
or food program,” Ponce noted. “So there is a disincentive for anyone
who showed discontent with the regime – jail or torture and abandonment
to their families.”
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Maduro’s
reign is also being held together by external players. The U.S
estimates that more than 20,000 Cuban agents alone are now planted
within the Venezuelan military and law enforcement, presiding over
internal operations and the movements of the top brass.</span>
<b>“Maduro relies heavily on foreigners to prop up his regime – Cuba, Russia, and Iran</b>.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
They have a vested economic and political interest in ensuring he
succeeds. Economically, to ensure that it is they that control the
largest proven oil reserves in the world,” </span>said <b>John Wood, analyst and author of 'Russia, the Asymmetric Threat to the United States</b>.' “Politically, to render the U.S. visibly impotent in its own backyard and thereby lay the groundwork for<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b> building a viable military threat to the USA in its own hemisphere.”</b></span></font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">[Eight-year-old
Franyelis feeds her baby brother Joneiber as their mother Francibel
Contreras holds a bowl of scrambled eggs and rice, at a soup kitchen in
the Petare slum, Caracas, Venezuela. Contreras brings her three
malnourished children to the soup kitchen in the dangerous hillside slum
where they scoop in spoonfuls of food in what could be their only meal
of the day. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd)
]
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Obdola
also underscored that the Cubans have “established an intense regional
intelligence and surveillance operation” in bordering areas and in
countries that support regime change in Venezuela.</span>
“This
operation is intense and mostly in Colombia, Brazil and other nearby
nations where a very unique gathering of spies, intelligence and even
terrorist operations are very active,” he said.
FIRST SHIPMENT OF RED CROSS AID ARRIVES IN VENEZUELA]
But
the U.S., which has vowed to refurbish the rule of law and bring about
new leadership in Venezuela, is yet to dramatically change its strategy.
Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo said last week that “all options” are on the table
when it comes to Venezuela, insisting that the strategy is “not just an
American strategy” but the “Venezuelan’s people’s strategy.”
“Sometimes
people think Maduro is winning, and yet he’s handed over all his power
to the Cubans, to the Russians,” Pompeo told the<b> Voice of America </b>Spanish.
“This is weakness from Maduro. And so this weakness will ultimately
lead to his departure, and democracy and prosperity will be restored in
Venezuela.”
<b>He has also taken aim at China’s role in standing
by Maduro financially, mandating that their role is prolonging the
protracted crisis in Venezuela.</b>
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">[People
cross the Tachira River into Colombia near the Simon Bolivar
International bridge, which Venezuelan authorities only open to students
and the sick, in Cucuta, Colombia, Tuesday, March 12, 2019, on the
border with Venezuela. People crossing the river are using makeshift
bridges as the water level grows with the approaching rainy season. (AP
Photo/Schneyder Mendoza)
]
Once awash will oil wealth and
deemed the richest country in Latin America, Venezuela has been
beleaguered by an economic crisis since 2015 which has since spiraled
into a grave humanitarian catastrophe and prompted the exodus of almost
four million into now overburdened neighboring nations. Maduro has
consistently blamed the U.S. for purporting to wage "economic war," but
has largely denied that there are mass problems.
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On
the ground in the poverty-plagued Venezuela, it’s a mix of exasperation
and desperation with the vast majority continuing to push for change
and turn to the U.S. for support as time rolls on.
<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>
“There is more room for applying sanctions</b>,” Ivers added. “Anything that cuts off the regime’s ability to generate cash, that disrupts its flow of<b> contraband </b>goods
and drug trafficking finances, and increases the pressure of possible
prosecution of senior military and regime figures for <b>crimes against humanity or other criminal acts</b>, will bring the regime closer to the negotiating table to seek an end to the conflict.”</span></font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hollie
McKay has a been a Fox News Digital staff reporter since 2007. She has
extensively reported from war zones including Iraq, Syria, Yemen,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Burma, and Latin America investigates global
conflicts, war crimes and terrorism around the world. Follow her on
Twitter.
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