OPINION:
Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro lied to the world and his people this week by declaring victory in his country’s Sunday presidential elections. The election was the culmination of an intense standoff between the Marxist Chavista regime and a coalition of opposition organizations united to defeat Mr. Maduro.
Shortly after the coalition nominated its charismatic leader, Maria Corina Machado, Mr. Maduro misused the law to ban her candidacy. Passing the torch to former Venezuelan diplomat Edmundo Gonzalez, Ms. Machado showed no fear in using her nationwide popularity to rally millions behind her successor.
Polls before Sunday’s election showed the opposition with more than twice as much support as Mr. Maduro. Hours after the voting ended, reports surfaced from about 40% of the country’s polling stations that the opposition had a 7-in-10 vote lead over the dictator. By Monday evening, with 73.2% of the voting tallies in, the opposition showed a total of only 2.75 million votes for Mr. Maduro and 6.27 million for Mr. Gonzalez, according to Reuters.
Those numbers were in sharp contrast to the figures announced by the Maduro-controlled National Electoral Council, which said the dictator received 5.15 million votes and Mr. Gonzalez 4.45 million. The council declared Mr. Maduro the winner shortly after midnight, asserting he won 51% of the vote despite exit polls suggesting Mr. Gonzalez had 65% support and Mr. Maduro had only between 14% and 31%.
In addition to fabricating voting results, Mr. Maduro has misused law enforcement, the military and even state-sponsored gangs to intimidate voters, obstruct roads, shut down fueling stations, turn off power and even shut down businesses that welcomed the opposition. In the past, Mr. Maduro has even starved Venezuelans by denying them ration coupons when failing to show proof of electoral support for his socialist party.
Several outcries from Venezuela’s Latin American neighbors, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Peru, Uruguay and the Dominican Republic have cast doubts on Mr. Maduro’s claim to another six-year presidential term, and Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. has “serious concerns that the result announced does not reflect the will or the votes of the Venezuelan people.”
While the Western world continues to demonstrate its outrage about Mr. Maduro’s apparent election fraud, the question remains what, if anything, it will do about it.
According to former White House national security adviser John Bolton’s 2020 memoir, President Donald Trump was intrigued by the idea of using military force to remove Mr. Maduro from power in 2018, and then proposed using other methods to oust the dictator during the 2019 uprisings.
In a July 19 article for the Council of Foreign Relations, former Reagan State Department official Elliott Abrams proposed the U.S. consider the transitional justice tool of amnesty as an incentive to lure Mr. Maduro out of Venezuela. This was the same offer the Reagan administration made to Gen. Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian dictator, in 1988.
While this is a possible solution, it did not work with Noriega. Such a negotiation would also potentially enrage millions of Venezuelans who have suffered under the tyranny of the Maduro regime for more than a decade.
Still, Mr. Abrams may have been on to something. The U.S. learned a lot from how Noriega’s tale ended. While the U.S. tolerated Noriega’s de facto rule for about five years because he acted as a CIA source, Washington soured on the Panamanian general after his significant role in the drug trade came to light. In 1988, he was indicted by two U.S. federal grand juries, and in 1989 he annulled a presidential election as part of a desperate move to retain power.
On the morning of Dec. 20, 1989, President George H.W. Bush commenced Operation Just Cause. Rather than engage in an invasion as President George W. Bush did with Iraq in 2003, Operation Just Cause was a limited engagement that lasted less than six weeks with one objective: the arrest and extradition of Noriega for criminal prosecution in the U.S.
Of the nearly 27,000 troops that landed in Panama, only 23 were killed, and as a result, 2.4 million Panamanians were freed from human rights abuses and the U.S. pierced a stake into the heart of the Latin American drug trade. Noriega was captured, extradited, prosecuted, convicted and sentenced to 40 years in federal prison.
In my time in as a presidential appointee in the Trump administration, one of the most brilliant moves our Justice Department made was indicting Mr. Maduro and 14 of his cohorts on federal drug trafficking and narco-terrorism charges. This created a legal justification and mechanism for arresting and extraditing the communist dictator for criminal prosecution in the U.S.
“The scope and magnitude of the drug trafficking alleged was made possible only because Mr. Maduro and others corrupted the institutions of Venezuela and provided political and military protection for the rampant narco-terrorism crimes described in our charges,” said then-U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman. “As alleged, Maduro and the other defendants expressly intended to flood the United States with cocaine in order to undermine the health and wellbeing of our nation. … The defendants betrayed the Venezuelan people and corrupted Venezuelan institutions to line their pockets with drug money.”
Drug trafficking. Narco-terrorism. Human rights abuses. Nullifying a failed presidential election. Sound familiar? One has to wonder if Mr. Maduro inherited Noriega’s strategy and tactics manual. When Bush launched Operation Just Cause, two of the mission’s objectives were to capture Noriega to answer for his crimes and safeguard Panama to defend human rights and democracy.
Like his Panamanian predecessor, Mr. Maduro has evaded justice for several years. The U.S. should ensure he faces a similar fate and answer for his crimes against the United States and humanity — by facing the scales of justice in an American court.
• Jeffrey Scott Shapiro is a former Washington prosecutor and journalist who served as a senior adviser and director of the U.S. Office of Cuba Broadcasting from 2017 to 2021. He now serves on the editorial board of The Washington Times.
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