VP Mike Pence says that Nicolas Maduro is proving a safe haven for terrorists from Iran and terrorist they sponsor to create a beachhead in South America from which it can plan and launch attacks in this hemisphere for the first time.
If that’s true, we need to get a multinational partnership together to go in and take Maduro out along with any terrorists he might be housing. We should not go in alone because of the Russian troops there and who cares about the Cuban troops?
Maduro is dangerous only because of the partnerships they are making in order to hold on to his power.
“The Iranian regime has been working with Venezuela’s corrupt dictatorship to establish a safe haven for its terrorist proxies,” Pence said in an address before the Council of the Americas.
Maduro loyalists deny that Hezbollah, the preeminent terrorist subsidiary of Iran, has a presence in Venezuela, even though the regime’s top diplomat traveled to Beirut to meet with a Hezbollah leader last month. U.S. officials have contradicted those denials for years, but Pence’s State Department speech intensified the allegations just days after the dictator withstood an opposition-led call for a military uprising to overthrow the regime.
“Venezuela is a failed state,” Pence said. “And as history teaches, failed states know no boundaries. Drug traffickers, criminal gangs, terrorist groups seeking to destabilize the region and profit from the misery of the Venezuelan people every day.”
Maduro has held onto power using a variety of outside forces. He has relied on local gangs to crack down on protesters when the Venezuelan military might refuse to do so. Foreign governments, chiefly Cuba but also Russia, have fortified the regime’s internal security and defenses.