Andrew Sage

And it primarily follows the Venezuelan diaspora, people who have left Venezuela.

And at this point, it's an incredible trafficking.

20% of the population over the last 10 years of Maduro's presidency.

So nearly 8 million people, wherever they go and they take advantage of them, they extort them for money.

They will also take money to move them across borders, but they're not a cartel in the way that we traditionally think about cartels like the Sinaloa cartel or some of the Colombian cartels that are engaged in international cocaine trafficking.

And so it's highly unlikely that if the Trump administration is striking boats that they claim to be vessels transporting cocaine or fentanyl, which is not made in Venezuela, it's primarily made in

Mexico using precursor chemicals from China, and increasingly it's actually made in the United States, even though it's an entirely synthetic drug, that's possible.

And Venezuela, of course, is not one of the countries where coca is grown and therefore cocaine comes from.

If they are indeed striking drug boats, then they probably wouldn't be trained in Aragua.

And if they're striking boats with trained in Aragua, they would be most likely striking migrant smuggling vessels, in which case the death count would likely be much higher.

Yeah, yeah.

So we should talk about the other Caribbean nations now, I guess.

I want to talk about Trinidad and Tobago, but we should probably cover Colombia first, right?

Because we've seen significant pushback from Petro, president of Colombia.

And then we've recently seen the president of the United States accuse Petro, who is, again, president of Colombia, of being a drug trafficker himself.

which is a fairly ludicrous claim on the face of it.

But let's talk about Petro, because he has some background in opposition to organized crime and drug smuggling, actually, right?

He's been in this for a while.

Can you explain a little bit of his career and then his recent stances?

Yeah, so Petro is a mercurial figure in Colombian politics, has been for a long time.