Tommy Vitor

There's papers by The Crisis Group that were really great.

And then our friend Juan Gonzalez had a great piece in Foreign Affairs magazine that's worth reading.

And Juan also pointed out to me when we were talking that like you have a lot of very experienced fighters hanging out kind of in and around Venezuela, like, you know, the remnants of the FARC.

uh, the group called ELN, they are skilled fighters.

They are skilled in urban combat.

They could stage operations that do just enough to scare away these oil companies.

And there is no surge in energy.

Because I don't think- Politics get worse.

Yeah.

One other important thing we've learned in the last couple of days from the new indictment of Maduro is that the Justice Department is no longer alleging that he is the leader of an actual cartel called Cartel de los Soles.

That claim was first made in their indictment of Maduro back in 2020.

And then that language from that indictment was used to designate Cartel de los Souls as a terrorist organization by both the Treasury Department and the State Department.

And then you repeatedly heard guys like Marco Rubio say, well, Maduro is a designated leader of a narco terrorist group.

So, of course, we have to like take him out.

But, you know, actual Venezuela experts kept pointing out that Cartel de las Souls is not a real organization.

It is a slang term invented by the Venezuelan media to refer to corrupt officials who are corrupted by drug money in particular.

And so this new Maduro indictment reflects that reality, Ben, and says cartels de la souls refers to a patronage system or a culture of corruption that is fueled by drug money.

In other words, the Trump administration, they knew the 2020 claim was bullshit.

So they had to pull it because they knew they couldn't get it passed in a court of law.

And so they dropped the thing.