A pressure campaign against Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro is being amplified by the voices of Venezuelan exiles in America who support the anti-Maduro opposition.
A lot of those exiles live in Doral, Florida, just outside Miami. You can feel the Venezuelan presence in Doral: people speaking Spanish at a public park during their kids’ soccer practice, the restaurants making arepas and tequeños.
An estimated 2 in 5 people in Doral are from Venezuela, many with stories of persecution.
Gustavo Garagorry was born in Caracas. In the early 2000s, he spoke out against Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s predecessor. Then he got threatening phone calls.
He says Chavez’s henchmen even assaulted him.
“One time, when I go back to my home from the movies, people in a car [assaulted] me,” Garagorry said. “And I say, ‘What the hell?’ And they say, ‘You are [a] target of us because you don’t support President Chavez.”
Garagorry left Venezuela shortly afterwards. He’s been in the U.S. for 23 years and is now president of the Miami-Dade Venezuelan American Republican Club.
To him, now is the time to take out not just Venezuela’s authoritarian socialist government but also Cuba’s communist regime.
“Cuba has control over Venezuela. That’s the main reason the United States [goes] to Venezuela and Cuba and Nicaragua,” he said. “Cuba is … the head of the snake.”
Cuban natives in Florida are closely allied with Venezuelan exiles.
Cuban American Jorge Jaen also helps run the Venezuelan American Club in Doral.
He visits Washington often to meet with members of Congress. He also reaches out to the Trump administration and says all military options against Maduro should be on the table.
“Maduro is a bully. He’s always been a bully. So how do you take care of a bully? You punch him as hard as you can on the nose and you give him a bloody nose. That’s what the United States is going to do to him,” Jaen said. “It’s up to him whether he wants to leave out peacefully or there’s gonna be some sort of intervention there.”
According to Jean, Trump is the man for the job.
“Donald Trump has no filter. I think that he’s a strong president. He’s the president that we needed a long time ago in this country,” Jean said. “What he says that he’s going to do, he’s gonna deliver on it.”
“A lot of what these regimes do around the world it separates the nucleus of the family,” he said. “When your parents have to leave everything behind, you have to start from new, separate your brothers, your sisters, your uncles, that’s one story that we all have in common.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio shares that family story. His parents left Cuba in the 1950s, and he’s a staunch anti-communist.
Now, as a leading Trump administration voice on national security, Rubio just declared Maduro the head of a foreign terrorist group.
Adding to this chorus is this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado, who heads the Venezuelan opposition from an undisclosed location in Caracas.
“Maduro started this war. And President Trump is ending that war,” Machado said to the American Business Forum in Miami earlier this month. “Iran has turned Venezuela into its satellite. They’re building drones, armed drones, in our country, and they have used Venezuelan financial system to launder their resources for groups like Hezbollah and other terrorist groups to operate.”
Put these messages together, and you get claims of: Maduro the socialist, the authoritarian, the terrorist, the drug kingpin, according to the Trump administration.
It all comes at the right political moment in Washington, according to David Smilde, a longtime Venezuela scholar at Tulane University.
“They had this message that fit in with what Donald Trump wanted,” Smilde said. “Trump was campaigning on this idea that immigrants were the source of crime, violence, and drugs. And along comes this narrative that says, ‘Hey, Nicholas Maduro is sending the Tren de Aragua to the United States.’ It fits really well with that, and it fits really well with Marco Rubio’s long-term desire for regime change.”
But Smilde says there’s a problem: The exiles are pushing partial truths and misinformation. For instance, the accusation that Maduro heads a cartel.
“Maduro and other government officials likely know about some of their officials being involved in drug trafficking,” Smilde said, “but the idea that he’s a kingpin or that there’s a cartel, you know, a cartel actually has a meaning. It means that different drug trafficking networks are coordinating to try and control prices, control suppliers, control markets, and there is no cartel in Venezuela for Nicholas Maduro to control or anybody else.”
And on terrorism, Smilde says assumed links between Maduro and Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah are what he calls “complete exaggerations”
He said there’s a long and sordid history of political exiles in the world, using dodgy evidence to lure America into war: Iraq in the Bush administration, Libya in the Obama years, and Cuba and the Bay of Pigs in the Kennedy administration.
Smilde says none of those interventions ended well.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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