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- [00:07]
A
Hey, John Lee.
- [00:08]
B
Hi, Tyler, how are you?
- [00:09]
A
I'm good. Thanks so much for being here.
- [00:11]
B
Real pleasure.
- [00:12]
A
So, just to start out, you know, you've reported on conflict zones, revolutionary movements, strongmen, extensively on Latin America and a lot on US Intervention across the globe. And so when you look at US Policy toward Venezuela today, specifically what we've been seeing with the Trump administration referring to vessels as narco terrorist targets and striking small boats, is this best described as a drug war, a political pressure campaign, or is it just like a return to old school gunboat diplomacy? Like what is actually, like the operating logic in the White House right now, in your view?
- [00:53]
B
I would choose the latter. Performative gunboat diplomacy, you know, if you take together the sort of rhetorical vilification campaign by Trump and his coterie towards Venezuelans, first, as you know, criminal migrants, beginning in his campaign this time around, to assigning roles to Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela, as a cartel chief.
- [01:23]
Putting a narco terrorist label on him and giving him a, you know, $50 million bounty. It's rhetorical, it's performative. This is black ops at its most baroque. You know, you have a president who tweets constantly, you have a defense secretary who calls himself the Secretary of War, and you see back and forth statements by Trump about what he might or might not do to the Venezuelans. So it's. It's all about creating a drama, creating suspense. In that sense, it's great theater. Here we are all watching and waiting, and the entire world is asking, what's going to happen? And I think Trump loves this kind of thing because he's the master of ceremonies. And ultimately, it'll be what he decides will be the curtain raiser. But the only actionable part of this so far, very grandiloquent rhetorical exercise of bellicosity by Trump towards Venezuela is these rather horrific, gruesome killings of men on boats in the Caribbean. These small, really fishing boats and launches mostly, which may or may not be carrying drugs. And then the videos of the action of the killing of these people displayed for the world as some kind of exercise in showing who's boss. And there we are. That's as far as we've gotten, Tyler.
- [02:45]
A
That's John Lee Anderson, who's been covering global conflicts for the New Yorker for more than 20 years. For the past three months, the US has been conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean that it says are carrying members of Venezuelan drug cartels. The administration cast this operation as a legal effort to combat drug trafficking and eliminate narco terrorists who threaten US national security. But experts have questioned whether the strikes violate U.S. and international law. This weekend, Congress announced plans to launch an investigation into Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth after a Washington Post report alleged that he ordered that no survivors be left during a September strike. I wanted to talk with John Lee about the legality of these boat strikes, Trump's larger war on drug trafficking in the region and how effective it's been, and whether this escalation of military action has less to do with drugs and more to do with the Trump administration's attempts to put political pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. This is the political scene. I'm Tyler Foggatt, and I'm a senior editor at the New Yorker.
- [03:54]
Can you give us more information on what has happened up until this point? I mean, we're all talking right now about this recent Washington Post story that the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, ordered basically everyone aboard an alleged drug boat to be killed. You know, kill them all, was the quote. And even before that, and, you know, I think in early September, we were starting to get stories about these boat strikes. And so I guess I'm just wondering if you can talk a little bit about how many people have been killed so far and what we know about these boats. I mean, I think you were just talking about how it's kind of maybe unclear if there's even drugs on these boats or at least if there is drugs on the boats, then that's not like intelligence that's been, you know, declassified. This isn't like JFK giving us information, you know, during the Cuban Missile crisis or something. It's just, it seems like we're all kind of in this black hole of information right now.
- [04:46]
B
Exactly. Yeah. Well, since I think it's September 2nd, there have been now 15 or 16 strikes. Whether they're by missiles or aircraft or drones, we don't even know. But against various launches and boats, a couple of what they call semi submersibles in the Pacific, which are these sort of handmade submarines that go just below the water. But most of them are these open boats with outboards like you might see anywhere. You know, 20, 30 foot long boats. And then we see them being blown up just after they appear on the screen. And Pete Hegseth, or sometimes Donald Trump shares the information that X number of men were killed on this boat. Narco terrorists, no proof provided as to what was being carried on board or anything else or how they got the intelligence or for that matter, how they were killed. We see the explosions. President Trump has a number of times alleged that with every boat that they blow up, 25,000Americans, lives will be saved. And the campaign itself has been anchored in the idea that America is stopping fentanyl through these strikes from coming into the United States. And we all know that there's a fentanyl crisis that's killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. Now, we also know from lots of good reporting and the government's own communiques that the fentanyl's precursors are made in China, smuggled in Mexico, where various gangland cartels put them together and smuggled them across into the United States. Cocaine originates, for the most part in Colombia, and it finds its way north and to Europe via a variety of countries and means. So, yes, some comes in launches, but these, these launches, by the way, these boats that are. And about 83 people, I think have been killed, they say, we don't know for sure. By and large, these would appear to be men who are hired hands, stevedores, fishermen, guys who, you know, live in port areas and probably agreed to go along on a run to, say, Venezuela coast to Trinidad, a nearby island or Aruba or somewhere else where the drugs would be offloaded and another group would take them further on. You know what I mean? It's that sort of thing. We're not talking, you know, you don't go very, very far at sea in a 30 foot open dory with a couple of outboards on the back. So these are assuming they are all drug boats, which we, again, we're not sure. These are men at the very lowest end of the business. These are hired hands. These are not narco capos or cartel leaders themselves. These are hired hands who are getting a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars for the risk they take in, in moving cargo from one place to the other. But they are just the first leg in a long leg that ultimately gets these drugs to their destination. So it's not really about a drug war. This is a kind of mashup, which seems to be a good way to describe, I think, much of Trump's behavior in the world. It's a mashup of interests, people lobbying him to do this or that. This idea that Venezuela is a pariah state that's sort of low hanging fruit. This country that ascribes to a notional socialism that's mouthy and anti American, where the Chinese have been able to do business and some of the Russians too, at which has been a fly in the ointment in the region for the past 25 years. All of that sort of true. But in the past, administrations, including Trump, number one, usually resorted to diplomacy in order to try to get the regime to change.
- [08:34]
A
They use sanctions. I mean, yeah, it's like now we act like sanctions are the most normal, non aggressive thing. But yeah, I mean, I just feel like there's been this crazy escalation and I guess I'm wondering if you were anticipating that escalation with Trump's second term or if this is something that even given everything you've seen from Trump and just these kinds of conflicts, if even you were surprised by what we're seeing now.
- [08:58]
B
I'm surprised by the killing of people on boats because it seems to be extrajudicial killing. This is probably the fact that we even qualify it. It's this. I'm not a legal scholar, but this is clearly illegal behavior. We don't execute drug mules when they're found in Miami airport with condoms stuffed with cocaine in their belly or in cars once they've crossed the border stuffed with marijuana or cocaine or even fentanyl. We don't shoot them at the side of the road, which is effectively what we are now doing in the high seas. So this part of it could not have been expected, I don't think. But I did think that this Trump regime would up the ante against Venezuela and for that matter the other socialist regimes in the region, Nicaragua and Cuba particularly. And the story I did before last, last summer was in fact on Cuba and Trump's policy towards it. And one of the things I was trying to ascertain was to what degree the Trump crowd wanted to use Venezuela as a sort of fall guy, as the first step in a series of actions that would ultimately try and take out Cuba 60 years on from its revolution. And the fact that we now had a, not just a Florida based president with those, you know, Cuban Americans around him, but a lot of Cuban Americans in his regime, not least Marco Rubio and, and a couple of other people. You know, he's very close to that crowd in Florida. And it does seem that Marco Rubio is the man who lobbied the most for an aggressive policy towards Venezuela. And ultimately most believe that the idea is, you know, there's a saying in Spanish, la Villa Lavana Villa Caracas, which is the way to Havanas through Caracas. And the thing is, Venezuela is low hanging fruit in the sense that Maduro has, you know, has lost a lot of friends. And in the last election in the country, you know, a year ago, which by all accounts was Gerrymandered by him, and he won in unfair circumstances, caused even some erstwhile allies to back off, like Brazil, Lula's regime in Brazil to back off and to chastise him for it. So Maduro is more isolated than he's ever been. Over the past 10 years, we've seen an outflow of between a third and half the population, something like 8 million people out of a population of, I think it's 24 million throughout the hemisphere. And to the United States, they are a noisome presence in the region. And so everybody would like to see the Venezuelan issue crisis go away. My feeling, Tyler, is that bottom line, and again, this is sort of, it's a gut read, is that Trump basically, you know, oil is certainly part of it, right? The fact that Venezuela is known to have the world's largest, depending on who you talk to, oil reserves in the world. So there's, there's money to be made, you know, and so I think there's that as a kind of main incentive. And there's also, I think, this idea that Trump wants to. We've saw from the moment he. His inaugural speech this time, which is that he wants to be boss man in this hemisphere. You know, Cheese got East Asia, Putin's got the stands and that periphery he wants, including that country, Ukraine, right. That used to be his. And Trump wants this hemisphere. What are the Danes doing up there in Greenland? And who are the Canadians anyway? And as for the canal, why did Carter give it away? Those Democrats gave it away. This is my hemisphere. This is my near beyond. I'm going to impose my will on it. And he has done ever since he got in bullying first Petro, the president of Colombia, by sending deportees, using the deportation policy as a way to get leaders to bend to his will. He used different bullying tactics in various countries and of course, reserved the most performative for Maduro in Venezuela. And that's what we're seeing now.
- [13:13]
A
And I mean, it seems to me that Trump has gone just way too far here. I mean, it's not even a controversial thing to say, but it seems like even Republicans are upset about this particular strike on September 2nd. And now there's this congressional investigation. Would you be able to talk a little bit about that strike and why it has become a flashpoint in this conversation and how it's complicated Trump's larger strategy? I mean, it seems like you were mentioning that he has all these Republican allies who want him to take a hard line toward Venezuela. But I guess I just wonder if this is going to be something that sort of jeopardizes that approach, I think.
- [13:51]
B
It has the potential to jeopardize that approach. Right. And I think the guy out on a limb here is Pete Hegseth, who by all accounts has alienated a lot of people in the security establishment through his own misbehavior, really, and his posturing. And the story is that in the, in the first of these strikes, a number of men were killed and a number were seen to be alive in the water or hanging onto wreckage. And that Hegseth told the military to finish them off, that he wanted no survivors and a second strike came and did kill them. Now, that's just my understanding of this current revelation and ongoing controversy, which if it's true, is really shocking. The last time I think any of us heard about an equivalent kind of behavior, you have to go back almost to World War II, the Japanese or the Germans machine gunning survivors of a ship they wrecked in the Pacific or somewhere like that. U boat behavior. It's a hallmark example of a war crime. But the idea that our country might be doing this sort of thing, this goes against every law of history, first of all, naval law, if, even if it's your enemy, if there's someone in distress at sea, you must help them. This is required to my knowledge, by the way, going on beyond that particular incident, which, frankly, look, I know that Trump says that Hegseth told him that's not true. I didn't order that. However he said it, whether he said kill them all or whether he said I don't want survivors, it wouldn't surprise me coming from this particular person. I think this person is, is unbalanced and, you know, should not be in that job. And I do think that quite beyond killing survivors after you've struck their ship or their boat in the water being a war crime, the whole panoply of shooting these boats in the water is most certainly some kind of war crime. Apparently there was one survivor. I don't know whether it was the fourth or fifth or sixth boat that was struck and everybody was killed except one. And I think he was an Ecuadorian. I don't know the circumstances of how he was plucked out of the water and returned to his homeland. But guess what? He was set free by his government. Now President Noboa of Ecuador, I happen to know him, is very law and order. He has openly asked Trump to reopen a military base that a predecessor closed down there to help him fight the country's drug cartels and all the rest of it. Well, if President Noboa, who's seen as a law and order freak, goes to the extent of freeing one of the survivors of the American military strikes, it tells you something. And it may tell you that these men should not be getting killed. Now, the question is, let's say, even if it turns out that Hegseth did order these men killed and that that would be a war crime, would, would Trump protect him based on his behavior thus far, pardoning other criminals and ignoring calls to see people out of their jobs after egregious behavior? Not, not least his own? I can't see it happening. I think he'll probably double down in the belief, not least, that by owning up to any kind of weakness, that it would just be the slippery slope for him.
- [17:21]
A
Yeah, that's certainly the behavior we've seen so far. So I think you're probably right about that. Let's take a quick break and then when we come back, I want to talk more about drug cartels and this concept of narco terrorism. This is the political scene from the New Yorker.
- [17:45]
C
It's one of Britain's most notorious crimes, the killing of a wealthy family at White House Farm. But I got a tip that the story of this famous case might be all wrong.
- [17:58]
B
I know there's going to be a twist one day, a massive twist at every level of the criminal justice system. There's been a cover up in this case.
- [18:05]
C
I'm Heidi Blake. Blood Relatives is a new series from in the Dark and the New Yorker. Find it now in the in the Dark podcast feed.
- [18:24]
A
So we talked a little bit about this earlier, but I feel like we've seen Trump use his kind of crusade against the drug cartels to justify a bunch of different policies, whether it be the tariffs, kind of invoking the fentanyl trade, which he then used also to put tariffs on countries like Canada and of course, a lot of his immigration policies. This idea that drugs are coming across the border and if Trump actually wanted to take down the cartels and curb the drug trade, what is the way to do that? You mentioned earlier that even putting aside just the enormous ethical and legal concerns that striking these boats full of civilians who are kind of at the lowest end of the totem pole, that that probably isn't the best way to go about trying to curb the drug trade in Venezuela, if Trump were acting in good faith, what would that look like in your opinion?
- [19:20]
B
Look, fentanyl is the biggie, right? If fentanyl comes across the border, there are obviously wholesalers it's not just a retail industry. There's obviously people operating within the United States, Americans and perhaps others who are physically in the United States who control that industry. Now, I'm unaware of any busts of those sorts of people. Are you? We hear about El Chapo, Chapo's son, and Juan Orlando Hernandez, who, curiously, Trump just decided to free the former president of Honduras who had been sentenced to 45 years for cocaine distribution in this country. So who are they? It's something, by the way, that all my Latin American friends ask. It's a refrain in Latin American countries that are besieged by US Drug policy. They say, what happens to the drugs when they go to the US you're the guys who buy them, you're the people who use them. Where, where are your cartel leaders? Maybe they aren't cartel leaders. Maybe they are, you know, like we've seen in Breaking Bad, you know, some guy that owns a, a fast food chicken chain. We don't know. But it seems to me that the US Itself has been remiss in investigating within its own territory in terms of who controls the illegal drug trade in the United States. Right. So clearly, then, you know, the next, there's another component which is obviously dealing with our neighbors who are the receptacles or the transshipment points for some of these drugs, for a lot of these drugs, whether it's fentanyl or cocaine. And there you have a kind of mixed bag of American policies that have mostly failed since the drug war was announced by President Nixon in 1970, and therefore begs the question of how to change it, how to make it effective. I think the way Trump is going about it is certainly not effective because bullying tactics, I mean, we know this from history. It may work in the short term, but it's not going to work in the long term. And it's going to create a lot more enemies than friends. So our DEA Drug Enforcement Administration operates in our near beyond that is to say, let's say, Mexico, Trinidad, Haiti, Colombia, much as our vice cops do in American cities. How is that? Well, Hollywood doesn't have it very far from the truth, actually. They tend to work with one group against another. They get down and dirty and they do the same in these other countries, unfortunately. I have a friend who investigates. He's an investigative reporter, just a great investigative reporter, Josh Goodman in Miami. And he, he goes to all these trials and I don't know, a few months ago I called him and I said, what's going on? Because it seemed to me I'd read about the sixth, for the sixth or seventh time, the trial of a DEA agent who was involved in the drug trade himself. And I said, so, what's going on with the dea? And he said, hey, what you see is what you get. It's dirty, man. You know, and this is not some conspiracy theorist. It's a problem with an agency that has almost no oversight and is able to operate internationally. And ultimately, in order to do its work, it partners with people in the underworld to take out other people in the underworld. And the money that is running through these economies is so vast that inevitably a portion of those agents are paid off, are bought off, just as they are in Mexico, just as they are in Colombia. So it's a problem. Again, one other anecdote to show just how difficult and complex these problems are. President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, who did the peace deal with the FARC guerrillas 10 years ago. I went to see President Santos just before he left office, and in our conversation, I congratulated him for this peace deal he'd done. He'd managed to get 15,000 armed men and women out of the jungle and reduce the scale of violence in his country hugely. And he said, yeah, but I'm worried about the growth of the cocaine trade in my country. And this was private. This is 10 years ago, I can say it now. But he said, I think he said it had grown the production nine times during the eight years he was president. So he left office knowing that, yes, he'd reduced guerrilla violence somewhat, but the drug trade was more powerful than ever. And that was in spite of a 10 year or 15 year, $10 billion US funded plan Colombia program that had run in the country. And yet under their noses, somehow or other, the drug trade just escalated and escalated and escalated. So when you hear Trump or Hexath or whoever Rubio calling Nicolas Maduro a narco guerrilla or narco terrorist, it's just not true. You could have said the same thing about President Santos. So Nicolas Maduro might know of a minister or a governor or even a general or more who he believes is involved in the drug trade, but how does he move against them? You know, what are the power plays he has to do to pull that off without getting killed or overthrown. It's. It's a mixed bag. Every country has its own quotient of difficulties in dealing with it. Look at the wonderful Claudia Sheinbaum, the President of Mexico. I'm sure she knows some officials within her government who are involved, but it may not be just a simple matter of moving against them. We're talking about political economies and sovereignties that are vitiated and compromised by illegal drug networks and the underworld itself. And I think you could probably say the same about the United States. We just don't see it as well.
- [25:24]
A
I wonder if we can go back to Honduras really quickly. I mean, would you consider Juan Orlando Hernandez a narco president, or how does he fit into all of this? Because I think a lot of people are kind of confused by the fact that while Trump is going hard against the drug trade and, you know, striking boats in Venezuela that he would pardon someone who was in prison for drug trafficking offenses. I mean, the New York Times piece about it was just the lead. It's like, it's worth reading. He once boasted that he would stuff the drugs up the gringo's noses. He accepted a $1 million bribe from El Chapo to allow cocaine shipments to pass through Honduras. A man was killed in prison to protect him. He orchestrated a vast trafficking conspiracy that prosecutors said raked in millions for cartels while keeping Honduras one of Central America's poorest, most violent and corrupt countries.
- [26:16]
B
Yeah, so I did a story on Juan four years ago in the magazine while he was still president. Interesting. He wouldn't talk to me then, but when he was in prison, he began reaching out to tell his side of the story. And I gather he. He managed to tell it to Roger Stone and a couple of other people who, as we know, are friends of Trump. And then apparently they lobbied Trump to free him, which he has done now without knowing for sure whether Juan Orlando Hernandez, as was being said five years ago, was a drug trafficker. What logic there is to freeing him I have not grasped, other than what some of his defenders are saying, which is that he was railroaded by the American system, which means the Southern District of New York. Right. That notorious temple of nefarious activity, I guess. Right. That judiciary, the Biden judiciary, the maniac lefty communist, right, who run that part of the judiciary in New York. And it was the lefty friends of the American Democrats that railroaded him because it made them look good and got rid of an ally. Well, it's true that when Trump was in office the first time, he was quite friendly with Juan Orlando Hernandez. And Juan Orlando Hernandez made a lot of noises that he was very friendly and happy with Donald Trump. And he also signed on to Donald Trump's request to make Honduras a partner in the expulsion of migrants from the United States. Well, quite a few of whom came from Honduras, which is a very poor country the poorest after Haiti in the Western Hemisphere. But there was a lot of news percolating about his narco activities even at the time. And yes, it wasn't until Donald Trump left office that procedures were taken against him, and he was ultimately tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison. And that's come full circle since then. In a sense, maybe it has the same kind of logic as Trump turning all of the people who violently assaulted the US Capitol on January 6, freeing them from prison, and now going after the prosecutors who went after them and saw them into prison. So maybe it's as simple as that. It's kind of deterministic historical revisionism happening before our eyes, but in a very cartoonish way.
- [28:41]
A
Yeah, I mean, I guess it's just his willingness to kind of forgive those actions, even if, you know, they kind of had a personal relationship that was friendly. I feel like it does really just kind of drive home the hypocrisy of what we're seeing in terms of the administration's actions toward Venezuela.
- [29:01]
More with John Lee Anderson after the break. This is the political scene from the New Yorker.
- [29:13]
D
What the hell is going on right now? And why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis. And maybe you are, too, Katie. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.
- [29:40]
B
I want a shark that, that eats.
- [29:42]
D
The Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.
- [29:46]
B
So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every.
- [29:55]
D
Week we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times, meaning and context. True or false? You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day, at some point as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to the Big Interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [30:31]
A
Going back to Venezuela. Now, you know, Maduro has framed these boat strikes and the increased military presence around Venezuela as part of a larger US Attempt led by Trump to overthrow him. Is that possible? I mean, do you think that that is probably the intended goal here? And is that what this could all be building toward it seems so.
- [30:51]
B
I mean, at least look, at the very least, it's a, it's a, what they call a psyOps operation aimed at making Maduro and his people nervous as hell. Right. I mean, I would be if I was sitting in Miraflores palace and they had the world's biggest anti aircraft carrier was sitting off my shores. And there were senior officials being quoted every day on the Washington Post and the New York Times to the effect that the real policy is to get rid of Maduro. So they've been leaking this since the first boat strikes and since the flotilla began pitching up off Venezuela's shores. So while Trump does his kind of like, oh, I don't know, well, let's see, land strikes might be next. We'll see. But I'm also talking to him and it's this kind of, watch me, you're not going to figure this out kind of policy, which with the military component is the one thing that no previous American administration has, has attempted so openly over such a period of time. In other words, if nothing else has worked, let's try this now. I suppose option, the first and most desirable option is not having to use Tomahawk missiles or anything, but just Maduro getting frightened and saying, okay, I'm going to leave. Give me safe passage to Turkey or wherever and along with the coterie of the people that are seen as the, the worst, the worst characters, and then they can whisk Maria Corina Machado out of the embassy where she is hiding, you know, the, the woman who was given the Nobel Peace Prize this year and who has been aiding, you know, advocating a military intervention ever since and whisk her into the metaphor's presidential palace. Then everything will be hunky dory. Reminds me of Dick Cheney and the idea that it was a cakewalk in Iraq, frankly, this idea that the Venezuelans won't fight. The majority really wanted her to be president. Everybody's tired of Maduro and his gang of thieves. Well, I think, you know, there's truth in both of those statements. But the problem with anything like this is that the virus mutate once you let it out of the petri dish, as we've seen before in so many ways. Now that's, that's option one. No, no guns. Maduro just decides to go. That would be wonderful. And Trump could go around with the bounce in his step, saying, look, I did that, I won. We got rid of the worst dictator in the regime. Now we're going to go to after Cuba, whatever. Option two is probably land strikes, which frankly, Trump has been saying he's going to do for some time. Yeah, we've done the ocean. We've really knocked down the drug trafficking in the ocean. Now we're going to go after the land bases. Now, what are the land bases? My guess is they have a range of targets which include places where drug traffickers use trails on the Colombian Venezuelan border, some of them controlled by guerrillas, some controlled by right wing paramilitaries, and possibly some military outposts around Venezuela where they will claim that drugs are, you know, transshipped through them, part of the drug route. And it would be a way to probe the defenses or the equilibrium within Venezuela and decide whether and to see whether or not this would cause one Maduro to leave. Okay, okay, I'm going. Or a coup against him. Now, if it's the latter, who's going to take over? How can you guarantee it's going to be someone you like? Option 3 is you really go for it. And you, you not. You don't just do a series of like, say 20 airstrikes or drone strikes on inert objects. Not too many victims. But you also land some special forces teams to engage with, you know, people you call narco terrorists, whoever they are. Now, there's a risk there, but let's see. Look. Past administrations of the United States have gotten it wrong sometimes even with the best of intentions in wars that they have engaged in over the past quarter century. This regime.
- [35:00]
In the United States is a far different kettle of fish. There's no adults in the room here. There was one adult in the room as the commander of southcom, that is to say Southern Command. The American general who was supposed to be in charge of this whole area of operations, what did he do? After several of these boat strikes, he resigned his commission. And he has not spoken, to my knowledge, about why. But symbolically at least, it seems that this was a man, by all accounts, people who know him is an honorable American military officer who saw that this was something he did not want to be associated with. Was it because he knew about people being killed in that first post strike on Pete Hegseth's orders, Or was it just simply that he saw the whole thing as a criminal enterprise? We don't know. But I think it tells you something that the man who should have been the commander of this entire area of operations quit. You know, took early retirement.
- [36:04]
Just at the moment when he was at the apogee of his career. I think we're looking at something and it's. It's staring us in the face.
- [36:12]
A
I guess I'm wondering, if the US Were to continue escalating in this way, what do you think the response from other Latin American countries and just the rest of the world would look like? Have we seen evidence of certain countries aligning themselves with or against Maduro and even some countries signaling a willingness to join cause with the US if there's further military escalation?
- [36:37]
B
I mean, look, one of the concerns I have is that for the people who are doing this, the timing may seem to them to be right. And, you know, the regime has been, I'm speaking of, the Maduro regime here has been at pariah now for some years, and even its staunchest defenders either have backed off or are not in a position themselves to help it. So it's on its own. By and large. The problem is Latin Americans with any sense of history or national pride will be looking at this with huge misgivings because they know that what happened in Venezuela could happen to them, too. They remember, even if Americans don't, what they know, their history and about gunboat diplomacy and the number of times American Marines were sent into Haiti, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, and on and on and on, not to mention the CIA interventions of the 60s and the 70s. So nobody will cry for Madudo, but Venezuela will not be a problem. It will easily go away. And Americans have not shown themselves to be particularly good at the after war, at putting the money into rebuilding societies after they have, you know, unmoored them. So where do we think that it will have. It'll be any different this time, and particularly with the Trump government, It won't be any different. It'll be worse, probably. Now, you know, look, everything I just said could be turned on its head tomorrow if Maduro leaves and Maria Corina Machado comes into the presidency and it'll be a cakewalk and there'll be dancing in the streets. Well, you know, I would love to think that the world was a storybook like that, but the fact of the matter is Venezuela is a piece of work. It is a piece of work. You have the farc, the Colombian guerrillas next door. But there's another group of guerrillas, the Elnito de Liberacion Nacional, who've been fighting since the early 60s, who didn't used to be part of the drug trade, but now are and have moved into some of the areas the FARC used to have vacated. And then there's another group who, because the peace deal didn't work that well in Colombia, went Back to war. So there's several groups now. To my knowledge, those groups overlap the border and in some cases operate within Venezuela, and they work in tandem with different factions within that regime, which is a military regime, which has also had 25 years to build up a kind of anti imperialist ideology. I remember Chavez telling me how he. This was one of his big priorities was to make a military that understood our history and that would be, you know, proud to fight against imperial invaders. And he also, I'll never forget that, especially in light of what's happening today with the successor. He said, I'm never going to be taken like Noriega was. And I think Maduro, for all his bravado and, you know, bluster, probably sees himself as an heroic figure who would rather go down with a ship than, you know, skedaddling off somewhere to cower until he's sold out or turned over to the Americans eventually, you know, so it's a messy proposition to invade a country like Venezuela or to bring about democratic change through the threat or the use of violence. I think this is a. A very dangerous proposition and one that could have any number of consequences. And so on that basis alone, I think this is one of the most absurd scenarios that I've seen come out of this crowd in Washington yet. But like I say, my. My gut tells me that it's all of a piece, and all of it has to do with Trump's ego. Venezuela is the country he wants to see bend at the knee to him, just as he wants sanctuary cities to do the same. He'll use bluster and force and violence if necessary, the threat of it, to pretty much do whatever he wants everywhere. I think it's not too complex.
- [40:51]
A
Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time today to walk us through sort of everything that's happening in the region.
- [40:57]
B
Thank you, Tyler. Appreciate it.
- [41:01]
A
John Lee Anderson is a staff writer for the New Yorker. You can read his latest piece, can Trump's Peace Initiative stop the Congo's 30 year war? @newyorker.com this has been the political scene from the New Yorker. I'm Tyler Foggatt. This episode is produced by John Lamay, with mixing by Mike Kutchman and engineering by Pran Bandy. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Our theme music is by Alison Layton Brown. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next Wednesday.
- [41:39]
From prx.