Socialist Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro has appointed strongman and long-suspected drug lord Diosdado Cabello his minister of the interior to “bring peace” to the country. The designation puts Cabello in charge of the socialist regime’s repressive security and intelligence agencies, courts, and prisons used to silence anti-socialist dissent. Venezuela is experiencing a new wave of protests and other forms of resistance against the regime in response to Maduro hosting a sham election on July 28 that he claims to have “won.
Cabello is widely considered one of the most powerful members of Venezuela’s socialist regime and stands accused by U.S. authorities of leading the Cartel of the Suns (Cartel de los Soles), an intercontinental cocaine trafficking operation. The administration of former President Donald Trump sanctioned Cabello in 2018 for corruption, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, and other illegal activities.
The Southern District of New York federal court indicted Cabello in March 2020 on charges of conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine, and associated firearms charges. Since then, U.S. authorities have enacted a still-active $10 million bounty for information that can lead to Cabello’s arrest and/or conviction.
Maduro praised the socialist strongman’s “ability to consolidate peace” in the face of “so much conspiracy.” The designation also occurred one month after the July 28 sham presidential election, which Maduro and his regime’s institutions insist he “won” despite evidence that opposition candidate Edmundo González had actually won.
The Maduro regime’s ongoing attempts to keep the dictator in power for an additional six years through fraudulent results has sparked nationwide protests that Maduro immediately responded to with a brutal crackdown and persecution campaign. One of the main elements of Maduro’s latest crackdown wave is the relaunch of Operation Tun Tun (“Knock Knock”), a dissident-hunting campaign Cabello first launched in 2017 that targets individuals who protest or publish social media content against the socialist regime. The ongoing crackdown has left at least 25 dead and resulted in the arbitrary detention of more than 2,400 individuals, including more than 120 children.