Weakness has a price. So does giving in when there’s a hostage crisis. That’s how you get more hostage crises.
Biden gave in to China when it took two Canadians hostage. Now Venezuela’s narcosocialist government is trying it too.
Five United States citizens and a permanent resident who were serving house arrest in Caracas, Venezuela, were picked up by the country’s intelligence service SEBIN on Saturday, just hours after the extradition of Alex Saab, a Colombian financier close to embattled Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the families of two of the detainees and one of their lawyers told CNN.
Saab, a Colombian businessman close to Maduro, was extradited to the US from Cape Verde earlier Saturday. Saab was detained in the African nation in June 2020 following an Interpol red notice due to his indictment in the US.
Saab, one of a laundry list of the Arabs in the inner circles of the Chavez/Maduro mafia, poses a risk to the regime because he may know where the money is buried. But the targeting of Maduro’s regime as a criminal drug smuggling cartel, which it is, dated back to the Trump administration. Because of the way the government works, the DOJ went on running some of the priorities from that era. The crackdown succeeded in netting some top people from the narcosocialist regime and undermining its drug smuggling operation.
But Maduro and his allies are betting that Biden would love an excuse to opt out and, like the Iranians and the Chinese, they’ll give him one. They expect that they can actually extract a major rollback under the guise of yet another “ransom”.
And they’re probably right.
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