CIA director John Ratcliffe met with Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodríguez for 2 hours Thursday in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, to “ship the message that the USA appears ahead to an improved working relationship,” a U.S. official informed CBS Information Friday.
The official described the journey as historic, noting that Ratcliffe was the primary Cupboard-level official to go to Venezuela for the reason that U.S. navy operation to take away the nation’s autocratic chief Nicolás Maduro practically two weeks in the past.
On the assembly, which was first reported by The New York Occasions, Ratcliffe was mentioned to convey a warning that Venezuela should cease supporting drug trafficking.
“Through the assembly in Caracas, Director Ratcliffe mentioned potential alternatives for financial collaboration and that Venezuela can now not be a protected haven for America’s adversaries, particularly narcotraffickers,” the official mentioned.
The assembly got here the identical day that President Trump met with Venezuela’s opposition chief María Corina Machado on the White Home.
Although Mr. Trump has publicly praised Machado, the administration seems to view Rodríguez — who was vice chairman below Maduro — as extra succesful of sustaining stability in Venezuela within the close to time period.
That aligns with the findings of a CIA analytic evaluation that modeled potential political management eventualities in Venezuela if Maduro have been now not president, CBS Information can affirm. The evaluation, which was intently held and briefed to a restricted group of senior administration officers, concluded that present Maduro-aligned officers — together with Rodríguez — could be greatest positioned to keep up short-term stability.
Throughout his Senate affirmation hearings final 12 months, Ratcliffe promised that, as he put it, the company could be much less risk-averse below his management. This go to to Caracas mirrored the U.S. intelligence chief’s perception that he wouldn’t ask the CIA workforce to take dangers he wouldn’t take himself, the U.S. official informed CBS Information.
CBS Information has beforehand reported that the CIA had a small staff working clandestinely on the bottom in Venezuela as early as August to put the groundwork for Maduro’s seize, together with a human asset serving to it monitor Maduro.
After months of preparation that included constructing a reproduction of Maduro’s compound and finding out his each day habits, U.S. forces arrived on the Venezuelan president’s residence simply after 2 a.m. native time on Jan. 3.
The shock operation concerned U.S. forces dismantling and disabling Venezuela’s air protection methods as U.S. navy helicopters neared Caracas, and U.S. navy personnel deployed weapons “to make sure the protected passage of the helicopters into the goal space,” Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Dan Caine mentioned earlier this month.
Maduro was apprehended alongside along with his spouse, Cilia Flores, and delivered to the U.S. to face costs together with costs of narco-terrorism, conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism, drug trafficking, cash laundering and corruption.
Maduro and Flores appeared earlier than U.S. District Choose Alvin Hellerstein in a federal courthouse in decrease Manhattan on Jan. 5.
“I am harmless. I am not responsible — I am a good man,” Maduro mentioned by way of an interpreter, insisting that he was “nonetheless president of my nation.”
Maduro has lengthy been accused of human rights abuses, together with extrajudicial killings, torture and repression throughout his rule over the South American nation. He saved his grip on energy regardless of what the U.S. known as “overwhelming proof” that he misplaced reelection in 2024 to opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia.
U.N. consultants on the United Nations Human Rights Workplace of the Excessive Commissioner have expressed concern over the U.S.’s unilateral motion to abduct Maduro as a possible violation of worldwide regulation.
“These actions characterize a grave, manifest and deliberate violation of probably the most elementary ideas of worldwide regulation, set a harmful precedent, and danger destabilising your complete area and the world,” the group mentioned in a press release final week.
