On Tuesday, Marco Rubio sat down for an interview with Sean Hannity. As you can imagine, Venezuela was a hot topic. Hannity asked if we’re on the verge of conflict.
Rubio responded by saying, “No… what the President has authorized is a counter-drug mission in the region.” He then went on to explain that Nicolás Maduro’s regime is not a legitimate government, but a narco-terrorist organization. Oh, and it’s providing terrorist organizations from the Middle East with a safe space here in our own backyard as well.
He added, “In addition to that, the Venezuelan regime is a source of instability in the entire region. Over 8 million Venezuelans have flooded into neighboring countries as a result of the regime’s activities within their own country, including into the United States. They also happen to be the foothold of Iran. That’s not spoken about enough. Iran, its IRGC, and even Hizballah has a presence in South America, and one of their anchor presence – especially for the Iranians – is inside of Venezuela. So we just finished talking about Iran and the hostility it has towards the United States. Where they have planted their flag in our hemisphere is on Venezuelan territory, with the full and open cooperation of that regime.”
I’d also add that the Maduro regime is inviting China and Russia into our hemisphere and propping up Cuba, but you get the idea. It’s a problem with a semi-simple solution. The people of that country voted overwhelmingly for a president last summer, and he’s sitting in Europe in exile with a strong plan for the first 100 days after Maduro falls, waiting to take over. We’ve got allies in the region who are ready to help and support any action we take.
But Democrats who have become awfully mouthy about it lately don’t seem to care. If Donald Trump is in favor of it, they are not.
“Until the President decided to do something about it, no one disputed that Maduro was in the drug trafficking business. No one,” Rubio pointed out. “Now that he’s doing something about it, you have all these people on the left and others that are coming out, saying, well, it’s not true, and it hasn’t been proven. We have an indictment by a grand jury – not by politicians — by a grand jury in the Southern District of New York that indicted him and a bunch of people in the regime. So that’s what’s important to point out here.”
But don’t just take his word for it. Let’s hear it from the regime itself.
Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal Barrios is an ex-military intelligence officer for the Venezuelan government and was a powerful official within Maduro’s Cartel de los Soles. Today, he’s in U.S. custody, charged with narco-terrorism, among other things. As part of a plea deal for a lighter sentence, he’s agreed to help the U.S. government by telling it everything he knows about Maduro and the cartel.
I’ve written a little about this in the past. He’s “provided information on how he collaborated with Colombian guerrillas and supervised the shipment of tons of cocaine to North America,” and in October, “during his pre-sentence hearing, his legal team admitted that Hugo Chávez and Maduro illegally used funds from PDVSA — Venezuela’s state-run oil and natural gas company — to finance other left-wing political movements in the world for at least 15 years.”
But on Wednesday, the Dallas Express exclusively obtained and published a letter that El Pollo wrote to Donald Trump, and boy, is it a doozy. To sum it up, he confirms something a lot of us already knew: Venezuela’s “government” purposely and consistently targets the United States.
In the letter, he explains that he fled Venezuela in 2017, knowing that he was wanted in the United States and would face charges, but he wanted to “dismantle Maduro’s criminal regime and bring freedom to my country.”
“Today, I see the need to address the American people about the reality of what the Venezuelan regime truly is—and why President Trump’s policies are not only correct, but absolutely necessary to the United States’ national security,” he wrote.
There are four main parts to Barrios’s letter. The first is narco-terrorism (emphasis mine):
I personally witnessed how Hugo Chávez’s government became a criminal organization that is now run by Nicolás Maduro, Diosdado Cabello, and other senior regime officials.
The purpose of this organization, now known as the Cartel of the Suns is to weaponize drugs against the United States. The drugs that reached your cities through new routes were not accidents of corruption nor just the work of independent traffickers; they were deliberate policies coordinated by the Venezuelan regime against the United States.
This plan was suggested by the Cuban regime to Chávez in the mid-2000s and has been successfully executed with help from FARC, ELN, Cuban operatives, and Hezbollah. The regime has provided weapons, passports, and impunity for these terrorist organizations to operate freely from Venezuela against the United States.
The second part is on Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan prison gang turned terrorist organization that Maduro — and many Democrats — claim does not exist or is not that big of a deal.
I was present when decisions were made to organize and weaponize criminal gangs across Venezuela to protect the regime—among them the group known as Tren de Aragua. Chávez ordered the recruitment of criminal leaders inside and outside prisons to defend ‘the revolution’ in exchange for impunity. After Chávez died, Maduro expanded this strategy by exporting criminality and chaos abroad to target Venezuelan political exiles and artificially reduce crime statistics within Venezuela. Gang leaders were instructed to send thousands of members out of the country. This was coordinated through the Ministry of Interior, the Ministry of Prisons, the National Guard, and national police forces. Tren de Aragua became the most effective and fastest growing.
When the Biden–Harris open-border policy became widely known, they seized the opportunity to send these operatives into the United States. They now have obedient, armed personnel on American soil. To finance their operations, they were explicitly instructed to continue kidnapping, extorting, and killing. Every crime they commit on your soil is an act ordered by the regime.
The third part, entitled “Counterintelligence and Espionage Against the United States” is particularly unnerving.
I was present when Russian intelligence came to Caracas to propose to Hugo Chávez the tapping of submarine internet cables that connect most of South America and the Caribbean islands with the United States for the purpose of penetrating United States Government communications.
In 2015, I warned Maduro that allowing Russian intelligence to build and run a secret listening post on La Orchila Island would one day invite American bombs. He ignored me.
For twenty years, the Venezuelan regime sent spies into your country—many are still there, some disguised as members of the Venezuelan opposition. Cuban intelligence showed me their networks inside your naval bases on the East Coast. They bragged about having sent thousands of spies over decades, some now career politicians.
U.S. diplomats and CIA officers were paid to assist Chávez and Maduro in remaining in power. These Americans acted as spies for Cuba and Venezuela, and some remain active to this day.
And the fourth and final section is called “Smartmatic and Your Elections.” This one’s juicy.
Smartmatic was born as an electoral tool of the Venezuelan regime but soon derived into a tool to help keep the regime stay in power forever. I know this because I placed the head of IT of the National Electoral Council (CNE) in his position, and he reported directly to me. The Smartmatic system can be altered—this is a fact. This technology was later exported abroad, including to the United States. Regime operatives maintain relationships with election officials and voting-machine companies inside your country. I do not claim that every election is stolen, but I state with certainty that elections can be rigged with the software – and has been used to do so.
He concludes the letter with this:
People of the United States, make no mistake about the threat posed by allowing a narco-terrorist organization to roam freely in the Caribbean and throughout Latin America, doing everything possible to harm the American people—to finance anti-Americanism across the continent, and to facilitate the operations of other terrorist organizations and enemies of the United States within Venezuela and now within your borders.
The regime I served is not merely hostile — it is at war with you, using drugs, gangs, espionage, and even your own democratic processes as weapons. President Trump’s policies against the Maduro criminal regime are not just justified, but necessary and proportionate to the threat. He may even be underestimating what the regime is prepared to do to hold onto power. They have contingency plans for every extreme scenario to ensure they never relinquish control.
I absolutely support President Trump’s policy towards Venezuela, because it is in self-defense and he is acting based on the truth. I remain ready to provide additional details about these matters to the United States government.
I’m not sure it gets much clearer.
I’d like to also remind you that, as I wrote back in October, the Venezuelan regime doesn’t just facilitate terrorist organizations, like Hezbollah, or send its own groups, like Tren de Aragua, to the United States, but it also heavily funds our own homegrown radical organizations, like Black Lives Matter, Code Pink, and most likely Antifa.
If we do end up taking military action against Maduro, we’re not starting a war. We’re ending one.
But on Wednesday, Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and Rand Paul (R?-Ky.) filed a war powers resolution to prevent the Trump administration from using the U.S. military to engage with Venezuela without congressional approval.
And that’s fine. I’m all for checks and balances. But where have these guys been for the last two and a half decades while the dictatorship of Venezuela was waging war with our country and its neighboring allies? They had no problem with the regime “using drugs, gangs, espionage, and even [our] own democratic process” against us, as Carvajal put it. And the information he provided isn’t necessarily new, just confirmed by someone who was there on the inside. Several members of Congress, including Rubio when he was in the Senate, have been saying this for years. Where was the outcry?
This just tells me that these senators don’t care about the people of the United States. They care about stopping Donald Trump from being the one president who gets things done. And I can’t roll my eyes hard enough. If Trump were looking to start an “endless war,” as Paul put it, he would have already done so. That’s now how this president rolls, and that’s not exactly what the situation in Venezuela calls for. A little study can teach them that. Then again, I’d like to ask these senators if they can actually find Venezuela on a map. Either that or how much the regime has contributed to their campaigns.
Rubio pointed out that past presidents have made deals with Maduro, but he never holds up his end of the bargain. At some point, when dealing with someone like that who is hurting your country, you have to take action. What will that end up looking like? We don’t know. But I highly doubt that the guy who calls himself the “peace president” is looking to invade a country that merely needs a little decapitation.
“They suckered Joe Biden. They’re not going to sucker Donald Trump,” Rubio said. “And so that’s really the fundamental problem we have here. I think the president is a unique figure in modern American history. He is prepared to sit down and meet and talk to anybody. But at the end of the day, there has to be somebody that you can actually make a deal with.”
Related: This Dude Does a Lot of Dancing for Someone With a $50 Million Bounty on His Head
On a related note, the Treasury dropped a bunch of new sanctions on several people in the entertainment industry who provide support for Tren de Aragua on Tuesday. At the same time, the State Department issued a $5 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Mosquera Serrano, the first Tren de Aragua member to appear on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, who orchestrates the terrorist organization’s global drug trafficking and financial operations.
Additionally, on Wednesday, the State Department reissued a Level 4 travel warning for Venezuela: “Do not travel to or remain in Venezuela due to the high risk of wrongful detention, torture in detention, terrorism, kidnapping, arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest, and poor health infrastructure. All U.S. citizens and Lawful Permanent Residents in Venezuela are strongly advised to depart immediately.”
This comes on top of the Federal Aviation Administration’s recent warning to pilots to avoid the skies over Venezuela last week.
More pressure or a sign of things to come? We’ll see what happens. In the meantime, I guess Maduro will just keep dancing.
US-Venezuela conflict update:
Maduro is currently dancing onstage at a public rally. pic.twitter.com/gkD22JnAUW
— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) December 1, 2025
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