Prosecuting Dictators: The Indictment of Nicolas Maduro

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Dean Reuter:  Welcome to Teleforum, a podcast of The Federalist Society's practice groups. I’m Dean Reuter, Vice President, General Counsel, and Director of Practice Groups at The Federalist Society. For exclusive access to live recordings of practice group teleforum calls, become a Federalist Society member today at fedsoc.org.

 

 

Greg Walsh:  Welcome to The Federalist Society’s Teleforum conference call. This afternoon’s topic is titled “Prosecuting Dictators: The Indictment of Nicolas Maduro.” My name is Greg Walsh, and I’m Assistant Director of Practice Groups at The Federalist Society. As always, please note that all expressions of opinion are those of the experts on today’s call.

 

Today, we are fortunate to have with us Professor Manuel A. Gomez, a Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Global Engagement at Florida International University. We also have the Honorable Roger F. Noriega, a Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and Former Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. We also have the moderator, Harout Jack Samra, an Associate at DLA Piper.

 

After our speakers give their opening remarks, we will go to audience Q&A. Thank you all for sharing with us today. Harout, the floor is yours.

 

Harout Jack Samra:  Thank you very much, and thank you to The Federalist Society for hosting us in this, I think, timely and very interesting program. As you mentioned, Greg, at the very beginning of the COVID crisis—which seems, I think, in many ways a long, long time ago but really wasn’t very long ago at all—U.S. government and the Department of Justice announced the indictment of former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, as well as 14 current and former Venezuelan officials. The charges against these individuals included violations of sanctions, narcoterrorism, corruption, drug trafficking, and a variety of other violations.

 

This is not without precedent. We look back to, in 1988, the prosecution of former Panamanian dictator, Manuel Noriega. But it is, of course, a very, very rare thing to have a government, including U.S. government, prosecuting the dictator of a foreign regime. This program, I think, as a result will touch on all of the unique legal and political challenges involved in just this kind of endeavor, prosecuting a foreign dictator.

 

As Greg mentioned, we have two really terrific panelists. The first is Professor Manuel Gomez, who’s an Associate Professor of Law and Associate Dean of International and Graduate Studies at Florida International University in Miami. He specializes in international law and dispute resolution with a focus on Latin America and has taught and lectured extensively throughout the Americas, Asia, and Europe, as well as published in those places. He has significant litigation experience throughout the region, including as an expert. He’s a graduate of the Universidad Católica Andres Bello in Venezuela, as well as having completed advanced legal studies and an SJD at Stanford University School of Law.

 

Also, we have the Honorable Roger F. Noriega. Ambassador Noriega served as visiting -- currently is a Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and formerly served as the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Prior to service in the U.S. Department of State, he also served as ambassador to the Organization of American States, as well as on the staffs of U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House International Relations Committee.

 

So with that, as we jump into the topic, I think it’d be helpful just to set the table a little bit and talk about the current situation in Venezuela, what has been transpiring over the last several months and how does the current U.S. policy in response to that play out. So Manuel, if you can just introduce us a little to the current situation, I’d appreciate it.

 

Prof. Manuel A. Gomez:  Thank you, Harout, and it’s an honor to be here. I’m delighted to share some thoughts about this topic, which of course is not a happy topic, but it’s a topic that in all seriousness requires the attention not only of Venezuela and the United States but the rest of the region and also the world. It has implications that go beyond national borders.

 

So the situation now in Venezuela -- going at the epicenter of this is an institutional tug of war that involves an interim president, Juan Guaidó, who became an interim president of Venezuela in January of 2019 pursuant to a constitutional provision that says that when there is no valid president then the head of the National Assembly, which is the equivalent to the U.S. Congress, will be the president. And it’s an interim position. It’s an emergency provision of the Venezuelan constitution that had not been used before that vested Guaidó with those powers.

 

The idea was that that was going to lead to a quick resolution. It didn’t happen that way. We are halfway through 2020, and that transition is still on the way. It’s not only the head of the executive -- or the head of the state that is at stake, but it’s also the judiciary. There is a supreme court that had been appointed by Maduro that is still exercising or carrying out its functions. And there is also a supreme court that is functioning in exile. And there’s a number of other positions that are dual positions in a way.

 

That’s kind of the general landscape. There have been a number of developments. Right after Guaidó became the interim President of Venezuela, there was a widespread international support, more than 60 countries, depending on how you count because some countries were very clear in saying, “We will support this transition.” Others were not so clear in mentioning that they were supporting a Guaidó administration. But they wanted a solution.

 

The United States was the first country to give support or declare support for this solution. It had given, then, legitimacy to the Guaidó solution. Let’s call it the Guaidó solution. Guaidó was able to appoint a special attorney general, someone based here in the United States, and that gave some effectiveness to his functions. They were able to preserve some assets and prevent further looting of Venezuelan owned assets by the Maduro regime. There are some downsides, and we can talk about those later. I think this is probably a good overview. Let me know if you want anything else.

 

Harout Jack Samra:  Sure. Guaidó began his term as the interim president in January of 2019. Is that right?

 

Prof. Manuel A. Gomez:  Yes. And -- sorry.

 

Harout Jack Samra:  Manuel, please -- Professor Gomez, go ahead.

 

Prof. Manuel A. Gomez:  No, no. Go ahead. Go ahead. I cut you off.

 

Harout Jack Samra:  Well, since then, as you suggested, the U.S. has been very, very involved, including as the first government which recognized President Guaidó as the democratically elected president of Venezuela. U.S. policy has been very -- I think U.S. policy has been an important part of this sort of global process that you’ve outlined. If I could ask maybe Ambassador Noriega to talk about the U.S.’s role and the policy that it sought to implement through this process.

 

Hon. Roger F. Noriega:  In the last six years, U.S. efforts against the Maduro regime were intensified. It began with legislation passing the Congress under sponsorship of Bob Menendez, cosponsored with Marco Rubio, that specifically denied visas and authorized financial sanctions against persons involved in gross violations of human rights. That began with maybe several dozen officials, particularly notorious people, identified by U.S. authorities and sanctioned.

 

But at the end of the Obama administration, they were more interested in keeping some momentum behind their normalization, unilateral concessions to the Castro regime. So there was a conscious decision where they dispatched a senior U.S. official, Tom Shannon, to Caracas asking Maduro to cool it in his confrontations with Obama and there would be no additional sanctions applied. So we really started at that point to pull our punches under the Obama administration.

 

In the meantime, you had the DEA in particular digging in on investigations of suspicious transactions and some outright drug trafficking by individuals within the Chavez and then Maduro regime. And it really began rather intentionally under Chavez in the year 2012, really, where they were conspiring with the FARC to send cocaine to the United States and then some vast money laundering exercises basically beginning to bust out Venezuela as a country the way the mobsters would bust out a pizza parlor, except this is an oil rich economy that took in $1.5 trillion in this period since Chavez took power in ’98.  

 

And so they sort of -- there was vast money laundering that was detected by different authorities in the United States, U.S. attorneys in the Southern District of New York, Eastern District of New York, certainly Houston, Southern District of Florida, U.S. agencies, HSI, DEA, as I mentioned, and others. And so you saw the law enforcement efforts going on. Then, in earnest, these sanctions against individual leaders of the regime began when President Trump took office. Tareck El Aissami, the former governor of Aragua State, former Minister of the Interior—I think he’s Minister of Industry now—was designated as a drug kingpin by Secretary Mnuchin in February of 2017.

 

And since then, very intense efforts by the Treasury Department in interagency process designating particular individuals under violation for -- using IEEPA authorities, Kingpin Designation Act as well, Global Magnitsky Act, and again the Menendez legislation to sanction individuals. So it’s been targeted individuals for the most of the last four years.

 

But in the last seven months—actually more like a year—the Trump administration, in support of its effort to promote Guaidó as the legitimate successor and the rightful president, began to adopt sectoral sanctions. It made it harder and harder to do business with PDVSA. It made it harder and harder to make any sort of investment or engage in any transaction with that government.

 

And then, you folks have seen very specifically in kind of dramatic fashion the tankers trying to deliver oil to the United States, and the Treasury Department literally designated particular ships because they’re calling on the Venezuelan ports and carrying Venezuelan oil. So this targeted sanctions thing has become so broad it’s against probably 100 Venezuelan government officials and then against particular commercial entities within Venezuela.

 

Harout Jack Samra:  Thank for that, Ambassador Noriega. And before we jump into the indictment, which I’ll ask Professor Gomez to give us an overview of, you mentioned the Chavez and Maduro regimes’ relationship with FARC. Just for the benefit of our audience, if you can tell us a little bit about FARC, what it is and what its relationship with the Venezuelan regime has been over the last, well, eight years, as you mentioned, since 2012.

 

Hon. Roger F. Noriega:  So all of this criminal conspiracy that I talked about in Venezuela has involved a partnership, really, with narcotrafficking organizations. Before he was captured, Chapo Guzman spent a good deal of time in Venezuela hosted by a Venezuelan cartel, formed by, initially, Chavez, that involves the military, called the Cartel de Soles, named after the symbol on the epaulets of generals in the Venezuelan government and the Venezuelan military.

 

      So there is this ongoing criminal conspiracy that involved the FARC, which is the Colombian revolutionary armed forces, that recently signed a peace agreement but has all along, and certainly in the last 15, 20 years, been engaged in cocaine smuggling. So you actually had the Venezuelan authorities using oil revenue from PDVSA to pay for cocaine.

 

And this has all been borne out by a series of indictments in great detail where Chavez began this criminal conspiracy. So in addition to those cocaine smugglers, this whole criminal corruption, money laundering, all of that, has been abetted by the Russians and the Chinese. So this is a massive crime scene, really.

 

Harout Jack Samra:  And so that, I think, sets the table a little bit for the discussion of the actual indictment. That leads us to the drug trafficking indictments against Maduro and a number of the other officials. They relate directly to some of the specific issues in the relationship with FARC that you’ve outlined. But there are issues that go beyond, as well, drug trafficking, including violations of some of the sanctions measures that have been imposed that you mentioned and outright corruption, including by high government officials who had considerable property here in south Florida.

 

      Professor Gomez, if I can ask you to just go into a little bit more detail and tell us a little bit about the indictments that were issued in March by the Department of Justice and some of the individuals who were involved in those.

 

Prof. Manuel A. Gomez:  Okay. So on March 26, as you pointed out at the beginning of the call, there was a press release that basically announced the unsealing of a four count superseding indictment led by -- led in the Southern District of New York against Nicolas Maduro and other members of the so-called Cartel of the Sun, or Cartel de los Soles in Spanish, including Diosdado Cabello, Hugo Carvajal, Cliver Alcala. And there were also other co-defendants mentioned, which are FARC people. Arango and Santrich were also mentioned in this indictment.

 

What’s important overall about the indictment is that, based on investigations, it connects Venezuelan officials with FARC leaders that are involved in drug trafficking activities. And that’s what makes this not only -- expands the interest of the indictment beyond Venezuela. It really puts it into the regional perspective. This is not just something that happened involving Venezuelan public officials in Venezuela using Venezuelan resources, but, obviously, there is an impact on the United States because the drugs are being imported into the United States. But the drugs are being also transported in conjunction with the FARC.

 

So the charges are narcoterrorism conspiracy, which is kind of interesting because narcoterrorism is not a technical offense by itself. But it’s a broad category that involves drug trafficking and terrorist activities. And that has, unfortunately, become endemic in the region.

 

Now, Venezuela being on top of the list, there were also charges involving cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices. The indictment explains in detail that this is something that goes back to the ‘90s, as Ambassador Noriega was mentioning. It’s interesting also that this indictment connects the criminal enterprise with another case that garnered a lot of media attention a few years ago involving two Venezuelan nationals, Campo Flores and Flores de Freitas. In Venezuela, they’re known as the narcosobrinos, or the narco nephews, because they are related to Maduro.

 

So what’s interesting is that this is -- this indictment, which also made the news, it displays a great deal of coordination among different agencies in the United States. It also comes in line with a number of other cases that Ambassador Noriega was mentioning, other cases in the D.C. district against Padrino Lopez, who’s the minister of defense. There are cases in the Southern District of Florida against the chief justice of the Venezuelan supreme court.

 

There are cases against El Aissami in the Southern District of New York. There are at least two cases against other Venezuelans in the Eastern District of New York. There are cases in the Southern District of Texas, the Villalobos Cardenas case, the former vice minister of energy. And there’s even a case in the District of Arizona against Colmenarez Villalobos, who’s a former Venezuelan air force officer.

 

The allegations in all of these cases have the common thread of corruption. The common thread is also the trafficking of narcotics. But there are also charges related to other illicit activities. So it’s a pretty dense group of cases. And the indictment that was revealed on March 26, it’s really the tip of the iceberg so to speak, or that’s how it appears from the outside.

 

Harout Jack Samra:  Right. And if I can just ask a quick follow-up question, you’ve mentioned, and I think Ambassador Noriega mentioned as well, PDVSA. If you can tell the audience a little bit about PDVSA, its role in the Venezuelan sort of government and broadly in Venezuela, and how that ties in in these cases.

 

Prof. Manuel A. Gomez:  Right. So PDVSA is the acronym of Petroleos de Venezuela, the oils of Venezuela. So it’s basically -- it has been, since the 1970s, the main public corporation in Venezuela, being an oil economy, which means that it derives most of its income from the exploration and exploitation of hydrocarbons. It had nationalized the oil industry in 1975. It created the holding company that, over time, became a very efficient -- one of the top 30 companies in the world, very well organized. It was really run as a private company, but the main shareholder was the government.

 

Things changed. When Chavez became stronger and stronger, he took control over PDVSA. PDVSA continued to be a very profitable company, now politicized—a big difference—but then it was used as an arm of the government. First of all, it was the cash source for the Chavez government. But then, according to some of the cases, it became also used as a vehicle for illicit activities, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly.

 

PDVSA is the crown jewel -- or was the crown jewel of Venezuela. So there’s a great deal about PDVSA regarding the control of PDVSA, regarding the control over the subsidiaries that PDVSA owns, including a company formed in the United States called Citgo. There have also been a number of cases involving PDVSA, unrelated to the criminal stuff, unrelated to the drug trafficking stuff.

 

So PDVSA is really at the epicenter of everything that has to do with Venezuela. So it’s that big of a deal. You have a country that had a single commodity economy, oil, and the unit or the agency in charge of it was a company that is PDVSA. So that’s how important PDVSA is to Venezuela and how tangled up it is with the rest of the Venezuela related cases.

 

Harout Jack Samra:  Right. And Ambassador Noriega, before we jump into the next topic, I don’t know if you’d like to comment a little on the overview that Professor Gomez has given us of the indictments and maybe referring back to the prior point that we talked about, U.S. policy towards Venezuela, how these indictments played in to the broader U.S. policy.

 

Hon. Roger F. Noriega:  Right. Well, they’ve -- the professor’s done a very good job, and I’m sure he could talk for another two hours explaining the way that PDVSA was at the core of massive theft, really. When oil was selling for $150 a barrel, PDVSA was issuing bonds to generate revenue. And the bond trading was the object of a lot of corruption, people soaking these assets for their own benefit, leaders of the regime, yes, and bagman of the regime, these billionaires who are sort of cronies of Chavez and Maduro serving as a conduit for channeling money away from PDVSA, away from the Treasury for structuring offshore accounts.

 

Just to give you an idea of how massive this is, the Lava Jato, the infamous Brazilian Odebrecht corruption scandal, they chronicled $700 million and called this the biggest corruption scheme in the Americas. The fact is one guy, who’s now sitting in federal prison, Alejandro Andrade, had a billion dollars. And he was not a fast learner. He was not the sharpest tool in the shed. A billion dollars.

 

Another person who’s free right now, not indicted, as a matter of fact who actually serves as a source for the U.S. Intelligence, he manages a fund worth $50 billion. That’s ten times the international reserves of the Dominican Republic. One guy. And you have others.

 

There’s a man who’s sitting now in Cape Verde who was captured there. His name is Alex Saab, who is basically an architect of all of the money that the -- much of the money that the cronies of the leadership of the regime have looted, managing this in global accounts and assets all over the world. He’s waiting indictment in the United States. And people are very concerned that maybe Cape Verde will not turn him over to U.S. authorities because we’ve lost two others who have been held in custody wanted for extradition under the Obama administration. And they got away.

 

So again, massive fraud. And all of the sanctions that I referred to where they designated targets, we’ve basically frozen probably no more than 5 percent of the roughly $350 billion these people have looted.

 

Harout Jack Samra:  Wow. And so turning to, I guess, the inter-governmental dynamic here. You, in your presentation, Ambassador Noriega, mentioned a number of the organizations of the U.S. government that are engaged here, whether it’s the various U.S. attorneys offices that have been involved, the Southern District of New York, the Southern District of Florida, as well as the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Houston. But some of the agencies, Department of -- rather DEA, Department of State, and the Treasury -- having had the experience on the Department of State side, as well as the OAS, how do these kind of interagency dynamics play out on a matter as sensitive as this one internationally?

 

Hon. Roger F. Noriega:  Well, this is really complicated because it’s law enforcement. And generally, U.S. officials do not want to get in the way of U.S. Department of Justice and law enforcement organizations like Homeland Security or the DEA. So it’s a very sensitive, complicated sort of situation because, obviously, U.S. diplomats want to know if the U.S. Attorney’s going to indict leaders of another government. It will have implications for us.

 

      But the U.S. law enforcement has been driving forward on this for most of the last ten years. And I think the State Department, at least under the Obama administration, was not crazy about this. It’s well documented that the Obama administration shut down investigations about Iranian involvement in narcotrafficking, Hezbollah involvement in narcotrafficking and in Latin America.

 

But certainly in the last -- since President Trump made Venezuela sort of a priority, the DEA and the Homeland Security and the various prosecutors you mentioned have had the bit in their teeth and have pushed forward in this omnibus, unsealing indictments and additional indictments that were announced by AG Barr. And this has been in the service of a foreign policy meant to bring down, frankly, the Maduro dictatorship, an illegal regime that’s involved directly in criminality.

 

So lest folks at The Federalist Society think that this is prosecuting dictators, just going after people for human rights violations or constitutional problems in their own country, no. This is prosecuting criminals, people who are involved in the violation of U.S. law, trafficking in cocaine, heroin, illicit gold, and engaged in money laundering activities all in violation of U.S. law.

 

Harout Jack Samra:  Right. And that’s actually a good point maybe worth clarifying—and I open this up either to Professor Gomez or to Ambassador Noriega—that the allegations in these complaints do very closely touch the U.S., whether it’s the drug trafficking allegations, but more specifically extensive money laundering. One of the individuals, I believe, was indicted, at least, here in the Southern District of Florida, actually resided here part of the year and spent a lot of money here. And that was part of the recitation in the indictment.

 

But then of course, also, flow of funds related to PDVSA, as Professor Gomez mentioned, with Citgo, which is maybe one of the principle subsidiary entities of PDVSA is a major refinery here in the U.S. and all these other precedents. I don’t know if either of you wants to expand on sort of the connection here to the U.S. beyond just the policy of the government but some of the actual violations of U.S. law that you referenced. Maybe Professor Gomez, if you want to kick that off, or whoever.

 

Prof. Manuel A. Gomez:  Yeah. Just to add quickly, what the Ambassador said is true, and that’s also a distinguishing factor between U.S. actions and the actions that have been taken by other countries, including Canada, most recently last week. The Swiss government announced that it was extending its sanctions to other Venezuelans. Switzerland had, following the European Union, agreed sanctions against Venezuelan public officials back in 2018.

 

Most of those sanctions had to do with human rights violations, extrajudicial hearings, other crimes that are not deemed anymore as domestic or national offenses, but they’re repugnant to the civilized world. The big distinction between those type of sanctions, which held -- which obviously they don’t have the teeth that criminal sanctions or the criminal trial looming over someone may have. But they’re helpful in the sense that they reveal, number one, that this is not just one country against another; two, that it’s not just one type of criminal act that is being carried out but a catalog, a panoply of criminal conduct that is repugnant to the world.

 

So going back to the United States, because of the close connection between Venezuela and the United States, the likelihood of those offenses affecting the U.S. legal system was much, much higher. And what’s really interesting is that even after many of those investigations were underway, you see that many of the public officials or former public officials were coming to the United States, were living in the United States.

 

So it’s really interesting from the standpoint of an outsider to see that, despite the fact that there were active investigations against public officials, that people were still coming back and forth. Fortunately, it seems that the authorities have made a decisive move against those people.

 

Harout Jack Samra:  Mm-hmm. Ambassador Noriega, do you want to chime in on this as well?

 

Hon. Roger F. Noriega:  No, that’s fine. I’ll wait for your next question.

 

Harout Jack Samra:  All right. Sure. So I think Professor Gomez’s response just on the last point is a good transition point to talking about the international policy consequences of this. And he mentioned in his introduction that somewhere around 60 countries have, in one way or another, recognized Juan Guaidó as the president of Venezuela, including the United States. A handful of countries have actually recognized Nicolas Maduro as the president. Can you tell us about how this has played out globally, particularly in the last few months since the indictments?

 

Hon. Roger F. Noriega:  Right. Well, I would say that, as we’ve tried to make the case, this is a criminal regime. This isn’t a mere dictatorship. And it has vast resources at its disposal. And these are people who are not going to give up the privileges and immunities of being criminals protected by the Venezuelan state and security services, are not going to give them up because they lose an election. They will never lose an election. They will not leave power voluntarily.

 

And so most of the countries that recognize Juan Guaidó as the president and support that gambit also say they are against the use of force. Most of them would probably criticize the extraterritorial application of U.S. law against individuals because they see themselves as potential victims of this sort of thing. So they’re not really helping. They’re not doing very much. They’re basically preventing us from doing more and doing what is necessary to fix the problem. But I think, at the very least, we need to press forward on the criminal investigations.

 

But I will say -- I wanted to point out the very dangerous role that Russia and China play in all of this, along with the Iranians. They are deeply involved in helping the Maduro regime evade sanctions, very complicated triangulated transactions, some outright violations of U.S. law to move money, to tap into money that they have in accounts, billions of dollars that they have in accounts involving oil sales.

 

Oil is literally overflowing in Venezuela because they can’t move it. So moving oil out of Venezuela to other countries, marketing it, blending it offshore so they can sell it somewhere else is all underway to evade sanctions, to generate capital for the regime, and with the full support of the Russians, Chinese, the Turks, and the Cubans being involved in this.

 

So there’s a bigger conspiracy going along. And the fact is Maduro’s allies are doing more to help him than President Trump’s allies are doing to help him deal with this dictatorship so close to the U.S. shores that’s not only looted a country but tormenting 30 million people and inviting the kind of economic social meltdown right here on our doorstep.

 

Harout Jack Samra:  Mm-hmm. And you’ve alluded to this. In addition to sort of the international consequences of this, there are other stakeholders here in the U.S. as well who have been instrumental, I think, in affecting U.S. policy, whether that the Venezuelan community, which has been growing and has become, I think, a very relevant force, particularly here in Florida, but also the oil and gas sector and a variety of others.

 

How has that played out in shaping policy? I understand that we want to separate the U.S. government’s foreign policy as it relates to Venezuela from the law enforcement component to these indictment. But how have those various stakeholder tied into the U.S. policy?

 

Hon. Roger F. Noriega:  Well, there are -- it’s a terribly complicated situation, frankly. There are some American companies that have asked for waivers who’ve lobbied against sanctions against Venezuela over the last six or eight years. More or less, they’ve gotten out of the way. They’ve found fewer and fewer members of Congress to do their bidding for them.

 

But in certain cases, for example, Chevron has had a toehold in the country. They’ve gotten a license to be able to continue their activities, which were sort of on the margins. And they were minority stockholders. I think they’re not going to get an extension again—this is just my gut feeling—because they’ve become a much more important part of the oil exports that are -- production that is going on. Because they’ve had this waiver, I think the Venezuelans or the people that manage the oil production there have put more and more in that Chevron basket. So I would imagine that the Trump administration or the Treasury Department would be less likely to give them an extension of their waiver.

 

On the foreign policy side, on the political side, I think President Trump came to know Venezuelan people because of his Doral Country Club, which is very close to the community here in south Florida—West Venezuela, they call it—in western Florida that has been the place where a lot of Venezuelan immigrants have come. And the President was in the hospitality industry before he was in the presidency, I know for a fact interacted with these people, and I think he got a really good feel for what wonderful people they are and how bad the stories are from back home. So he’s been strongly committed on this.

 

I think the problem is he hasn’t gotten the policy, the creative ideas that were needed to break the stranglehold. I think that the State Department’s policy has underestimated Maduro and overestimated the ability of their allies, the Venezuelan opposition, to carry the fight to him. And part of that is that many elements of that opposition are compromised by the same kind of corrupt testaferros cronies of the Venezuelan regime. And so they’ve kind of pulled their punches in certain respects.

 

But I think if you read Bolton’s book—and I’ll shut up real quick—the President recognized this. I think he had misgivings about whether Guaidó was tough enough to face down Maduro. And certainly, I don’t think we have the kinds of policies—and I think he feels this—the tactics in place that are going to be required to defeat a criminal regime with vast resources at its disposal, enough resources to corrupt the opposition, as a matter of fact.

 

Harout Jack Samra:  Yeah. And actually, that dovetails with the last topic. And I should mention we will be opening up for questions in about eight minutes. So if anyone has questions, please start thinking through them now. And you’ll have an opportunity at about 1:50 to ask those.

 

But turning back to the last conflict that we wanted to walk through today is really how effective has this been, how effective has the U.S. policy been, and what is the end game on these prosecutions? You’ve already, I think, gone into some of the related points on that, Ambassador Noriega, but if you want to expand on the endgame here and where you see this going.

 

Hon. Roger F. Noriega:  Should I let Professor Gomez jump in?

 

Harout Jack Samra:  Sure. Yeah. Professor Gomez, if you want to chime in on this point, maybe follow up on some of what Ambassador Noriega has said, and then we can have a conversation about it.

 

Prof. Manuel A. Gomez:  Thank you. Well, the future we cannot predict. So what’s the endgame, you know, it’s hard to say. The steps have seemed to be the right step at some moments. In some of the moments, there is frustration.

 

As Ambassador Noriega pointed out correctly, the Maduro regime is a very powerful regime that -- and let me add something to this. This is something in the making for almost two decades. The strength, the capital, the amount of money, the political power that Chavez amassed when he was alive, and then that Maduro really reaped the benefits of it, are no small problem.

 

Guaidó came about to be a -- he had the refreshing look of someone who had not been tainted, young, grew up under Chavez, so basically this is someone who knows how it feels to have his future taken away from him and from his generation, lots of energy. But quickly after the honeymoon period, you keep getting all these statements of endorsement by different countries from around the world, the U.S. leading the charge, but then the European Union, a lot of Latin American countries, the Organization of American States. So there was momentum.

 

The humanitarian aid that Guaidó seemed to have focused on at the beginning of his -- let’s not call it a mandate, but at the beginning of his functions. But quickly enough, the Maduro regime fought back. There was also, at least from the outside, it looks like there was some lack of transparency from the Guaidó team regarding how the goals would be accomplished, regarding appointments to people who were key in his team. People were basically appointed on a volunteer basis, Venezuelans of good will who lived in other parts of the world. But it’s really hard to have a government that works that way. And then, in the last few months, we saw some lack of coordination within the Guaidó team that was leaked to the public. And that’s not good.

 

And let me just end with a comment that I think ties into your question of how effective or what’s the endgame. At times, Venezuelans have seemed to hope that the solution to the problem that Venezuela is facing because of the magnitude of the crisis, because of the regional and international impact, is something that is going to be achieved by foreign powers. There is a lot of Venezuelans who often talk about the U.S. coming into Venezuela, liberating the country, and so on and so forth.

 

If you look around the world, and if you look at a little bit of history, the countries are owners of their own destiny. The final solution, the endgame solution, has to have Venezuelans in it, has to involve Venezuelan institutions or whatever is left of them, has to involve Venezuelans making decisions for themselves. This is something that every government that has supported Guaidó has said.

 

The conundrum or the difficult situation is that -- the big question is how do you do it if you have your hands tied? How do you rebuild something that has been so badly wounded? How do you create a strong team or a strong administration when you’re building it from nothing?

 

So I think the help from other countries, including the United States, because of some of the reasons that Ambassador Noriega mentioned but also because of the close historical relationship between Venezuela and the United States, I think it’s very, very important, very helpful, very welcomed by Venezuelans. But it’s probably not the only thing that is needed to get to an acceptable outcome.

 

Harout Jack Samra:  Mm-hmm. Ambassador Noriega, did you have anything you wanted to say in follow up to that?

 

Hon. Roger F. Noriega:  Well, I will say that Venezuelans that I know are among the first to say, “This is our fault. We made mistakes. We shouldn’t have elected Chavez,” etc., etc. “We made mistakes because we followed a poor opposition in all of this.”

 

But I will say, as a non-Venezuelan, that this is a country that’s been mugged by the Cubans, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Russians, and by criminal organizations that are murderous and powerful and have all of the money they need to subdue that population. And I just pray that people don’t say, “Well, this is Venezuela’s problem. They elected Maduro.” By the way, they didn’t. But they did elect Chavez. I was there when that happened.

 

But they proceeded to -- these dictators have proceeded to dismantle the weak institutions where Venezuelans maybe could have wrestled back control of their country. But in a very ruthless way, systematically, and while most of the western countries, including the United States, ignored this, they have made it almost impossible for Venezuelans to extricate themselves from this situation.

 

We will either be involved in a solution there very directly, frontally, and having to be provoked to use force, or you’re going to have another Cuba, completely subject to the denial of basic fundamental freedoms. But just as importantly in this case, with oil resources and with Chinese, Russian, and Iranian backing and sponsoring narcotrafficking and terrorism, which is already having a significant impact on U.S. security, I would suggest that’s unsustainable and that we will have to respond.

 

Harout Jack Samra:  Yeah. Thank you, Ambassador. So Greg, if there are any questions, we can take them. Otherwise, we’ll keep the conversation moving forward.

 

Greg Walsh:  Well, let’s go to audience questions.

 

Caller 1:  Hello. I have two questions. One is what is the relationship, if any, with what was at one time going on in Europe and other -- Spain, I think, that were enacting laws that could have ensnared U.S. officials under the law? I think it was Spain, or wherever it was. Isn’t this opening that door for other countries who think that the U.S. has violated human rights and specific individuals in the U.S.?

 

      And the second question is where are the rest of the South American and Central American countries in all of this? I mean, there are a lot of countries down there. That’s my questions.

 

Harout Jack Samra:  Yeah. Thank you, sir. So maybe Ambassador Noriega, if you’d like to take the second question first, on how this has played out in Latin America.

 

Hon. Roger F. Noriega:  Sure. I think the gentleman was referring to Balthazar Garcon, who invited -- I’m sorry, who indicted and sought to have arrested, like 20 years ago, Augusto Pinochet of Chile. And Garcon has been a judicial celebrity, international judicial celebrity. Basically, he is an enemy of the United States and of the West, Western values, and he uses his legal expertise to advance an ideological cause.

 

For example, he’s been advisor to many of the Chavista types and FARC types, Colombian guerrilla types. So that was a partisan agenda. And that’s why I hasten to add and point out that what we’re talking about isn’t prosecuting people for human rights violations. We’re talking about people who are using the U.S. financial system to violate U.S. laws. We’re applying sanctions to deny them access to the U.S. judicial system. You can do what you want to do, perhaps, in your country. It may be bad. It may be good. But you can’t do it with the U.S. greenback. You can’t use our financial system to violate these rights.

 

And you certainly can’t import cocaine into the United States, heroin into the United States, and in other parts of the western hemisphere where it has a bearing on our security. And when you violate our law, you’re subject to indictment and prosecution in our law. It’s not an extraterritorial application of our democratic or human rights values, although there are other ways of pursuing those causes. In this case, we’re talking about applying U.S. criminal law, applying the rule of law against people who violate it in a systematic way.

 

Harout Jack Samra:  Right. And as far as how this has played out within South America -- as a former ambassador of the OAS, the OAS has been pretty forward on this as well, hasn’t it?

 

Hon. Roger F. Noriega:  Yes, they have. And these collection of countries have undertaken explicit commitments to deny the ability of people to travel from within the Venezuelan regime for most of the Maduro regime, deny them ability to travel to their countries, to do business in their countries. And there’s been sort of spotty application in the last year, but there’s at least a political recognition generally of these American states of the Guaidó government and explicitly of the fact that the Maduro regime is a dictatorship that has no legitimacy.

 

Harout Jack Samra:  All right. Professor Gomez, if you could comment maybe on some of the international criminal legal issues that the questioner asked about, including about Judge Garcon in Spain.

 

Prof. Manuel A. Gomez:  Sure. Yeah. So I think first is something that in international criminal law is known as the principle of universal jurisdiction, which is related to [inaudible 53:37]. You have a controversial principle, and the controversy relies on the fact that it’s not so well defined all over the world, but it’s pretty much a legal principle that allows or requires -- and that is the distinction there. Some states think there is a requirement, some say that [inaudible 54:02].

 

Harout Jack Samra:  Professor Gomez, I think you’re cutting out. Would you mind speaking a little bit more clearly?

 

Prof. Manuel A. Gomez: Yeah. Can you hear me now?

 

Harout Jack Samra:  Yes, sir.

 

Prof. Manuel A. Gomez:  Okay. So I was saying that I think the comment -- and certainly the Garcon comment on the Pinochet affair has to do with this notion that a criminal judge or a prosecutor could file an action, irrespective of the location where that crime was committed. In the Pinochet case, Pinochet was -- the idea was to go after Pinochet for crimes committed during his regime against Spanish nationals in Chile.

 

Anyway, so it’s very controversial. Interestingly, in the Venezuela case -- so Venezuela is a party to this [inaudible 55:08] party to the Rome Statute. But Venezuela is a party to the Rome Statute. And the Rome Statute is basically the international law solution for situations like that, for crimes against humanity, and so on and so forth. Interestingly, there have been several petitions filed before the international criminal court against Maduro, not only by Venezuelans but also congresspeople from Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru, and so on and so forth.

 

So what’s interesting here is that a principle that may seem -- or an approach that may seem averse to what people think has been turned against Maduro. And of course, we cannot say that there is an effective remedy as of today. But it’s really something that has worked against them. So because basically that exposes them for actions in other part of the world, so there’s no safe haven. So that’s my comment on that one.

 

Harout Jack Samra:  Yeah. Thank you, Professor Gomez. So we have two minutes left. Greg, if there are any other questions?

 

Greg Walsh:  There is one more. Caller from 414, you’re on the line.

 

Harout Jack Samra:  And I’d ask the caller just to keep it quick.

 

Caller 2:  Thank you. My question is whether the magnitude of the threat posed to the United States by the crimes illuminated or induced in the indictments against Maduro and his cronies, coupled with the absolute unlikelihood of extradition, justifies military action to apprehend him, à la Manuel Noriega, and whether that’s feasible either militarily and/or from a policy perspective for the United States.

 

Harout Jack Samra:  And so with the last word—we have about a minute left—Ambassador Noriega, would you address that question?

 

Hon. Roger F. Noriega:  I think that when you see that Venezuela is a platform for criminality that has destroyed institutions in neighboring countries, certainly in Colombia, certainly in Central America, and the same criminality that is fueling the transnational organized crime and that’s eating away at Mexican institutions right on our border, this criminal threat, yes, represents a threat to us that requires a much more robust and, I would say, law enforcement response. It’s not going to be diplomats or OAS resolutions that get these criminals to give up power.

 

However, I also think that there is a possibility that there will be some provocative action as to regime, if the regime comes under much more internal pressure where we would have not just the U.S. but other countries, probably Colombia, maybe Brazil, be willing to step up in a humanitarian response. But I do think that this is something where the U.S. should consider creative application of force. The President started that with the deployment of the military in the Caribbean that has sought to quarantine the country and cut off the ability of them to generate revenue through this narcotrafficking.

 

And certainly, we have two people at large who are within our grasp. Hugo Carvajal, principal, probably top ten narcotrafficker, is at liberty in Spain, a NATO country, which refuses to capture him, and Alex Saab, who is an architect of this criminal enterprise, that is in Cape Verde. If either one of those ends up in U.S. custody making declarations in the U.S. court, this will have a very dramatic impact on the regime in terms of infighting and stability potentially in the country that could, in a way -- that could destabilize it in a positive way.

 

Harout Jack Samra:  Wonderful. Well, thank you, Ambassador Noriega. And thank you, as well, to Professor Gomez and to The Federalist Society for enabling us to have this wonderful conversation today, I think a provocative and interesting one. I turn it back to you, Greg.

 

Greg Walsh:  Perfect. On behalf of The Federalist Society, I want to thank our speakers for the benefit of their valuable time and expertise today. We welcome listener feedback by email at [email protected]. Thank you all for joining us. We are adjourned.

 

 

[Music]

 

Dean Reuter:  Thank you for listening to this episode of Teleforum, a podcast of The Federalist Society’s practice groups. For more information about The Federalist Society, the practice groups, and to become a Federalist Society member, please visit our website at fedsoc.org.