Nicolás Maduro offers Trump his ‘experience’ in security to combat crime

Nicolás Maduro has offered the United States his “experience” in combating crime to improve internal security, one of the main concerns of president-elect Donald Trump. Maduro’s message occurs at a time of uncertainty about what kind of relationship the Chavista government can expect with the incoming White House administration, especially in the context of the crisis in Venezuela following the presidential ballot of July 28, in which Chavismo claims a victory that the international community refuses to recognize due to suspicions of large-scale electoral fraud.

The Venezuelan president explained during his television program, Con Maduro +, that he tried to reach such an agreement with the Biden administration but received no response. “This government [Biden’s] did not want to work seriously. I made the proposal to this government to work on the issue: ‘We are going to coordinate to be able to combat criminal gangs.’ With the experience that we have, in which we have achieved a great space for peace and coexistence, freed Venezuela from these criminal gangs, we can work with the government of the United States and American society in a climate of cooperation for peace and internal security. We have always had that will, and we still have it,” he said.

Trump’s current position on Venezuela remains unknown. In his first term as president, the real estate magnate promoted a parallel president to Maduro, Juan Guaidó, a diplomatic adventure that was unsuccessful. Trump has been very critical of Chavismo in public, but, according to one of his advisers, in private he often praises Maduro for being a “strongman,” in the authoritarian manner that the president-elect admires and that he sees reflected in other world leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan. According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, oil businessmen in his inner circle are urging him to reach agreements with Maduro to take advantage of the country’s enormous crude oil reserves and, in the process, deport hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who have entered the United States in recent years.

Maduro, in this line, has extended a hand to Trump: “To anyone in the U.S. who is concerned about this issue, modestly, in Venezuela we have good experience. In 2025, as Diosdado says, we are already in better shape to give all the criminal and extortionist gangs a beating. We will advance even further to give peace and security to Venezuelans.” Diosdado Cabello, Minister of the Interior and de facto the second most powerful person in the country after Maduro, attributes the decrease in crime in Venezuela to the good work of the security forces: violent deaths decreased in 2022 and 2023. “Criminal gangs are linked to a destabilization plan that involved assaulting prisons. Thanks to God and to military, popular, and police intelligence, we are three steps ahead,” Maduro added.

However, an investigation by the regional NGO InSight Crime points out that this reduction is due, among other reasons, to the mass migration that Venezuela has experienced in the last five years, in which it is estimated that more than five million people have left the country. “Recession in Venezuela has led criminal gangs like the Tren de Aragua, Yeico Masacre, and The Meleán to infiltrate Venezuelan diasporas settled in other Latin American countries,” says the report from the think tank.

Maduro also made reference to the demonstration called by the opposition in Caracas last Sunday, which had little power to attract supporters. The opposition candidate who apparently beat the Venezuelan president in the July elections, Edmundo González Urrutia, currently in exile in Spain, stated days earlier that on January 10, 2025 — the date of the inauguration of the new president — he would be in Caracas to take office. “Edmundo, if you are not capable of going to a march in Madrid, right next to the palace where you are living, will you be capable of coming to Venezuela? How far are they going to take their show? You will end up in the garbage dump of history,” Maduro concluded.

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