By Erin Banco, Sarah Kinosian and Matt Spetalnick
NEW YORK/MIAMI/WASHINGTON, Jan 17 (Reuters) – Trump administration officials were in discussions with Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello months before the US operation to capture President Nicolas Maduro, and have been in communication with him since then, according to several people familiar with the matter.
Officials warned Cabello, 62, against using the security services or militant supporters of the ruling party he oversees to target the country’s opposition, four sources said. That security apparatus, which includes the intelligence services, police and armed forces, remains largely intact after the January 3 US raid that captured Maduro.
Cabello is named in the same US drug-trafficking indictment that the Trump administration used as justification to arrest Maduro, but was not taken as part of the operation.
The communication with Cabello, which also touched on the sanctions that the United States has imposed on him and the charge he is facing, goes back to the first days of the current Trump administration and continued in the weeks just before Maduro’s expulsion from the United States, said two sources familiar with the discussions. The administration has also been in contact with Cabello since Maduro’s ouster, four of the people said.
The communications, which have not been reported before, are critical to the Trump administration’s efforts to control the situation inside Venezuela. If Cabello decides to release the forces he controls, this could fuel the kind of chaos that US President Donald Trump wants to avoid and threaten interim President Delcy Rodriguez’s grip on power, according to a source familiar with US concerns.
It is unclear whether the Trump administration’s discussions with Cabello extended to questions about Venezuela’s future governance. It is also unclear whether Cabello heeded the warnings of the United States. He has publicly promised unity with Rodriguez, which Trump has so far praised.
While Rodriguez has been seen by the US as the linchpin for Trump’s strategy for a post-Maduro Venezuela, Cabello is widely believed to have the power to keep those plans on track or overturn them.
The Venezuelan minister was in contact with the Trump administration both directly and through intermediaries, said a person familiar with the conversations.
All sources were granted anonymity to speak freely about sensitive internal government communications with Cabello.
After the publication of this story, the Venezuelan government said in a statement: “We categorically reject the malicious information published on social media about alleged secret conspiratorial conversations aimed at dividing the country’s political high command and seeking to undermine the prestige and revolutionary integrity of Diosdado Cabello.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
CABELLO WAS A MADURO LOYALIST
Long considered the second most powerful figure in Venezuela, Cabello was a close aide to the late former President Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s mentor, and went on to become a longtime Maduro loyalist, feared as his main enforcer of repression. Rodriguez and Cabello have been operating in the heart of the government, the legislature and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela for years, but they have never been considered close allies of each other.
A former military officer, Cabello wielded influence over the country’s military and civilian counterintelligence agencies, which carry out widespread domestic espionage. He was also closely associated with pro-government militias, notably the colectivos, groups of armed motorcycle-riding civilians who were deployed to attack protesters.
Cabello is one of a handful of Maduro loyalists that Washington has relied on as temporary rulers to maintain stability while it accesses the OPEC nation’s oil reserves during an unspecified transition period.
But US officials are concerned that Cabello – given his record of repression and history of rivalry with Rodriguez – could play spoiler, according to a source briefed on the administration’s thinking.
Rodriguez has been working to consolidate her own power, installing loyalists in key positions to protect herself from internal threats while meeting US demands to boost oil production, Reuters interviews with sources in Venezuela showed.
Elliott Abrams, who served as Trump’s special representative to Venezuela in his first term, said many Venezuelans expect Cabello to be removed at some point if a democratic transition is to advance.
“If and when he goes, Venezuelans will know that the regime has really begun to change,” said Abrams, now at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.
SANCTIONS AND PROSECUTION OF THE UNITED STATES
Cabello has long been under US sanctions for alleged drug trafficking.
In 2020, the United States issued a $10 million bounty for Cabello and accused him of being a key figure in the “Cartel de los Soles,” a group the United States said is a Venezuelan drug-trafficking network run by members of the country’s government.
The United States has since increased the grant to $25 million. Cabello has publicly denied any links to drug trafficking.
In the hours after Maduro’s ouster, some analysts and politicians in Washington questioned why the United States had not also seized Cabello – listed second in Maduro’s Justice Department indictment.
“I know only Diosdado is probably worse than Maduro and worse than Delcy,” Republican US Representative Maria Elvira Salazar said in an interview with CBS’ “Face the Nation” program on January 11.
In the following days, Cabello denounced the intervention of the United States in the country, saying in a speech that “Venezuela will not give up”.
But media reports of residents being searched at checkpoints – sometimes by members of the security forces in uniform and sometimes by plainclothes people – have become less frequent in recent days.
And both Trump and the Venezuelan government have said that many detainees who are considered by the opposition and rights groups to be political prisoners will be released.
The government said Cabello, in his role as interior minister, is overseeing that effort. Rights groups say that the liberations are proceeding extremely slowly and hundreds remain unjustly detained.
(Reporting by Erin Banco in New York, Sarah Kinosian in Miami and Matt Spetalnick in Washington; Editing by Don Durfee, Rosalba O’Brien and Paul Simao)