Photograph Source: Wilfredor – CC0
So the U.S. military and CIA kidnapped the duly elected, legitimate president of Venezuela in January, shackled him, brought him to a U.S. prison, and now the white house is desperate to pin crimes on him that fit the unjustifiable punishment it has inflicted. That would be money laundering. And, apparently, the gang in the white house worries, per CBS May 19, about the absence of this charge from the New York indictment of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, because their case is weak, and they know it. In fact, it’s a good guess – mind you, a guess – that it’s been fabricated, spun out of whole cloth to frame Maduro for whatever might stick, because Donald “We’ll Take the Oil” Trump despises Maduro’s political pedigree – socialist – and coveted, before grabbing, his nation’s energy.
I suppose if the money laundering charges don’t work, there are always gun charges, and if those don’t pan out, the Department of Justice (sic) can try a drug indictment. Meanwhile, Washington, having evidently co-opted the acting president in Caracas, Delcy Rodriguez, has finally got its hands back on luckless Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab, deported over the weekend of May 16 from Venezuela back to the U.S., whence he had previously been released from prison by Joe Biden on December 20, 2023.
Saab’s an ally of Maduro, and according to the AP on May 19, “was charged Monday with bribing top officials to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from lucrative contracts to import food at a time of widespread hardship” in Venezuela. Who caused this hardship, Saab allegedly exploited? The government for which that so-called justice department works, the government whose sanctions starve Venezuelans, the government that had the brazen nerve to blame an admittedly shady character like Saab for the atrocious damage it inflicted on Venezuela. That would be the government of the USA.
So there is “a single count of money laundering tied to a decade-old conspiracy” against Saab. He was previously kidnapped in the first iteration of Trump’s rule, back in 2020, during an airplane refueling stopover in Cape Verde on “a high-level humanitarian mission to Iran.” Those who saw Israel’s hand in this kidnapping of the Venezuelan with supposed Hezbollah ties and in the renewed nabbing of Saab could perhaps be termed paranoid, but be that as it may. Trump, as was seen with Maduro, is perfectly capable of doing horrible things without Israel’s instigation.
Trump’s original Saab caper involved flouting the law of diplomatic immunity by seizing Saab, then on a diplomatic mission, a move that stupidly endangered diplomats everywhere, including American ones. As I wrote in this space on November 3, 2023, “Washington especially loathes Saab, 51, because he was such a SUCCESSFUL Venezuelan diplomat, one who arranged deals for his country with Iran, deals that evaded the stranglehold of U.S. sanctions on both nations.” This was at a time of indisputable hardship for ordinary Venezuelans, due to illegal U.S. sanctions. So Saab, sketchy as he may be, was nonetheless doing this very good, altruistic work, trying to obviate starvation sanctions to aid his financially blockaded country. Saab was likely tortured in Cape Verde, and he wasn’t exactly treated with kid gloves thereafter in the Miami Federal Detention Center, where he rotted away, among other things, vomiting blood, not receiving the life-and-death medical care he desperately required.
One wonders with what threats of lawless violence Washington twisted Delcy Rodriguez’s arm to get its hands on Saab. Anything is possible. After all, look what they did to Maduro – a kidnapping that ranks up there as one of the greatest international crimes of the century. But a white house that has deployed the departments of justice and war like its own private mercenary army has few cards left to play. Gangsterism is its ace, though it may well have maxed out with that: if it crucifies Maduro on phony charges, not only does it lose any credibility a fool might attribute to it, but it also creates a martyr. Maduro was far from a perfect president, but thanks to this revolting kidnapping (and to many of Maduro’s own policies) that is not how he will be remembered. He will be remembered as a president who represented his people and was, in one of the most repellent military operations in recent history, abducted so that Washington could plunder oil.
Maduro and his wife, Cicilia Flores, are in federal custody in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn and scheduled to return to court on June 30. The feds have been after him – one could reasonably conclude for his politics – for a long time. The original indictment against him and other Venezuelan officials was filed in the Southern District of New York in 2011 and unsealed in March 2020. Per Wikipedia, that indictment alleged that they “conspired with Colombian guerrilla groups to traffic cocaine into the U.S. in a narcoterrorism conspiracy.” “On January 3, 2026, a superseding indictment was unsealed” after Maduro’s and Flores’ forcible removal to the U.S.
Meanwhile, again per Wikipedia, Argentina had leapt into the act. There, a case against Maduro’s alleged crimes was filed in 2023. An international arrest warrant for Maduro was issued in 2024. In February 2026, an [Argentine] extradition of Maduro was requested after his capture. Argentine judge Sebastian Ramos signed a warrant on Maduro for crimes against humanity. Charges include torture, arbitrary detention and enforced disappearance by the Bolivarian National Intelligence.” In this connection, of course, one must note the politics: Argentina is under the economically incompetent, far-right president Javier Milei, who, it appears, will do almost anything to curry favor with Trump. How and if this political atmosphere influenced the recent extradition request for Maduro in Argentina is an open question, but one worth considering.
On May 20, news via Reuters came that the U.S. is pursuing a second criminal investigation into Maduro. “The second investigation, run out of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Miami, has been ongoing for months,” according to two anonymous sources. Per google, it acts as a “legal fallback to the superseding indictment unsealed last January. An unnamed DOJ official told Reuters that “the Florida probe was active at the time that President Donald Trump ordered the US military raid that captured Maduro.” Reuters credits CBS with being the “first to report on the second investigation fun out of Florida. It is not clear if that probe will lead to additional charges…The Florida investigation could give the Justice Department a fallback option if it faces legal complications in Maduro’s New York case.” On May 18, that same U.S. attorney’s office unsealed money laundering charges against…Alex Saab. The office is also expected on [May 20] to charge Cuban President Raul Castro over the downing of planes piloted by a Cuban exile group in 1996.” Indeed, it promptly did just that, causing RT to wonder, May 21, if Washington had the same scheme in store for Raul Castro as it did for Maduro. So that week in May is officially the “feds get a commie week.” Apparently, it doesn’t matter much which one.
“Interim president Delcy Rodriguez’s action against Saab [turning him over to the U.S.] was one of treachery and should be referred to as such,” wrote Margaret Kimberly in Black Agenda Report, May 20. “The pain of seeing the Bolivarian revolution being picked apart by Donald Trump with the help of some willing participants in Venezuela is devastating to anyone who supported the rights of sovereignty and self-determination for that country and its people.” Kimberly cites the Trump regime’s use of lawfare not only against Saab, Maduro and Flores, but also against Rodriguez, who “is the nominal head of state, but she is following Washington’s orders.”
Years of cruel U.S. sanctions have killed multitudes of Venezuelans by making hungry poor people skip meals, diabetics ration their insulin and cancer patients forgo chemo. Now, under Trump, Washington wants to finish the job. If Rodriguez makes an infernal pact and assists in this endeavor, well, call it what it is: a deadly assault on some of the most vulnerable people in Latin America. You don’t know how Chavista Rodriguez, whose father was tortured to death by the CIA, has been threatened, but you’ve got to assume it was horrifying, not just for her personally but for her country. She has probably avoided a guerrilla war, but in the process, it sure looks like she is making a desert and calling it peace.
