Verdict with Ted Cruz
Venezuela Victory part 2-Historically Transforming Latin America & What Happens Next
07 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Welcome, it is Verdict with Senator Ted Cruz, Ben Ferguson with you. It is nice to have you with us as we are doing part two of our in-depth conversation on Venezuela. What has happened since Maduro has left? What is next? And Senator, we've got three different things we're going to talk about. And if people missed episode one, it's one that really went viral.
So make sure you go back and listen to it. But we're going to go in-depth again in this episode on three major different aspects of this story.
Well, listen, Episode 1, which came out Monday, we did a deep dive into, number one, what happened? What happened in Venezuela? What President Trump did sending in the military to capture and arrest Nicolas Maduro and his wife? We secondly discussed why Venezuela matters.
Chapter 2: What role does Cilia Flores play in Venezuelan corruption?
What are the geopolitical concerns? consequences of Venezuela, the massive oil reserves, the massive gold reserves and other minerals. We talked about why Russia and China and Iran and Hezbollah were all in Venezuela. And finally, we did a very careful explanation of the legal basis, the legal authority for why President Trump had the authority to order this attack, to order this arrest.
We laid it out in detail. We're seeing a lot of Democrats in the media and law professors, all of which are coming from exactly the same place, claiming this is illegal, this was a kidnapping. All of that is nonsense. And if you didn't listen to Monday's podcast, you should go back and I lay out the legal basis and, in fact, the opinion from the U.S. Department of Justice for...
the January 3, 1990 arrest of Manuel Noriega in Panama under very similar circumstances. And so those are three big questions we addressed. Today, we're going to address three additional questions. Number one, a lot of folks are asking, Who is the First Lady of Venezuela and why was she arrested? Why was she included in that? We're going to lay out some more detail as to what her background is.
Secondly, we're going to talk about what are the geopolitical consequences of Maduro being arrested, being prosecuted for the rest of Latin America and for the Western Hemisphere. They are significant. We're going to break them down carefully and systematically.
And finally, and this is important, we're going to talk about what's next in Venezuela, what we can expect in the days and weeks and months ahead. What does this mean? What's the leadership going to be in Venezuela? And what should the United States want to happen next in Venezuela? All of that on today's pod.
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Chapter 3: How does the Monroe Doctrine influence U.S. foreign policy towards Venezuela?
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All right. So, Senator, we're going to pick it up literally where we left off in Monday's pod. And there have been so many questions about the wife of Maduro. Why was she arrested? Why was she charged? Why was she brought to America? I had to watch some of the crazy liberals and debate them on TV.
They're angry that she was arrested instead of others around Maduro that they would have rather have had arrested. It was the argument that was being made, which just made my head explode as I was listening to the incompetence. But let's go through why she was actually indicted, why she's being held, why she's arrested, why she's probably going to be found guilty of a lot of major crimes.
Yeah, look, look, she has been indicted. She has been charged and she's being prosecuted. And yes, she is Maduro's wife. She is also a lawyer. She's a longtime Hugo Chavez loyalist.
Chapter 4: What details surround the military operation to arrest Maduro?
She's a communist. She's a Marxist. She is viciously anti-American. She is corrupt. She was intimately involved in the narco-trafficking that Maduro was engaged in. She has been sanctioned by the Treasury Department for her involvement in that. And she's also been a senior government official. And in fact, here, I'm going to give you some of the background the New York Post reported.
So, Celia Flores... was arrested. Celia Flores is the first lady. She has been called the Latin Lady Macbeth. She's 69 years old, and she's been described by a former head of intelligence in Venezuela as being, quote, behind the curtain, pulling the strings.
And here's what one prosecutor in the Maduro government said, quote, she is a fundamental figure in corruption in Venezuela, absolutely fundamental, and especially in the structure of power. And he continued, many people consider her far more astute and shrewd than Maduro himself. Now, what is her background? Her background, she was a lawyer.
For Hugo Chavez, the original Marxist who took over Venezuela, was elected and drove the economy into the ground. She has been nicknamed, in addition to Latin Lady Macbeth, she's been nicknamed First Warrior. And she's accused of accepting massive bribes from drug dealers.
And in fact, her nephews and in fact, they've been called her narco nephews were both previously arrested in the United States for cocaine trafficking. And they plan to use the money from their drug sales. This is the narco nephews. to fund Flores' 2015 campaign for National Assembly in Venezuela. She is a political leader.
She is alleged to have participated in the trafficking of cocaine, quote, "...much of which had been seized by Venezuelan law enforcement with the assistance of armed military escorts," that's according to the indictment, "...while guarded by, quote, state-sponsored gangs known as colectivos." And the gangs, according to the indictment, were to, quote, protect their drug trafficking operation.
By the way, 10 years ago, it had to be at least 10 years ago now, I went back to a conversation I had in New York City in the green room at Fox. There was a Venezuelan dissident, basically, that had been put into exile. And we were sitting talking about the oil and the narco-terrorism. This was over a decade ago from him.
And they described the wife to me as, quote, not a housewife, but a brilliant mastermind. They said that Chavez would have never gotten to where he was without her being behind him, that she was able to really. And as you mentioned, a lawyer, they said she's very smart. She understands how to set this stuff up. She understands how to work it to the family's advantage and to make money.
And the idea they were laughing, basically, as they were describing, they're like, if you think this is just some first lady, in essence, a housewife, you are mistaken. She is ruthless to the core, as they described it, saying that she was a businesswoman that the mob would even be afraid of.
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Chapter 5: What impact does Maduro's arrest have on other leftist regimes in Latin America?
But other than that, she's a sweet little old lady.
Yeah, this is why I, by the way, love doing this show, because no one else is talking about this. And I hope people that listen, they're like, okay, well, now we know. So you can correct the record and be like, well, it was just an easy one for them to grab, so they grabbed her. No, this is a woman who literally helped set up all of this corruption and was heavily involved in it.
Which brings me to the big issue, and we've seen a lot of conversation about this as well by the talking heads, members of Congress that you serve with. And the word that I wrote down was Western Hemisphere. There has been a fever pitch of Western Hemisphere and how Venezuela fits into this and what happens if China or Russia or Iran, Cuba gets involved, X, Y, and Z in Venezuela.
Can we just take a half a step back? Explain politically what the meaning of Western Hemisphere means for people that maybe don't understand why it's so important and how it relates to national security with the United States of America as a broader point before we go into then why so many other countries want to be involved in Venezuela.
Yeah, look, the Western Hemisphere is just North America and South America. It's our half of the world. And also the Caribbean islands. But it's essentially the land that has the Atlantic Ocean on the east and the Pacific Ocean on the west. And the Western Hemisphere is distinct from the Eastern Hemisphere, which is Europe and Asia and Africa and Australia.
All of that's in the Eastern Hemisphere. But the Western Hemisphere...
Going back to the very earliest days of America where the Monroe Doctrine laid out that we are going to protect the Western Hemisphere, this is our hemisphere, and we talked about in Monday's podcast how Donald Trump believes very much in the Monroe Doctrine, so much so that it's now being widely referred to as the Donro Doctrine because he's put his own stamp on it.
And I'm going to give a couple of stories to give some context, because I think this is massively consequential for other countries in the Western Hemisphere and for U.S. national security. I mentioned on Monday's pod that the Office of Legal Counsel is who prepared the legal memorandum that laying out the basis for arresting Noriega in Panama.
And I mentioned Bill Barr was the head of the Office of Legal Counsel who wrote that memo. But I also mentioned that there had been lots of very respected lawyers who had headed OLC, including Antonin Scalia, including William Rehnquist.
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Chapter 6: What is the future of Venezuela under Interim President Delcy Rodríguez?
And I mentioned Chuck Cooper, who was my very first boss when I came from clerking for Chief Justice Rehnquist. and I was a 27-year-old lawyer. My first boss was Chuck Cooper. He's one of the top Supreme Court litigators in the country. And as it so happened, we recorded Monday's pod Sunday evening, and then we finished recording the pod, and I went to have dinner with Chuck.
So I literally went to Chuck's house as soon as we finished recording, and he told me a story I didn't know, which is during the Reagan administration, Chuck, as a young 30-something lawyer, was the one that Reagan sent down to Panama to negotiate with Noriega. No way. And so he went down there and he was sort of laughing.
He was like, I was the only one kind of foolish enough to accept the assignment. And he went down and he said, you know, Noriega came and arrived in like a caravan of big armored cars and he had all sorts of soldiers with automatic weapons. And, you know, Chuck sitting there is this, you know, young lawyer from DOJ and they were trying to negotiate
noriega's leaving voluntarily and he was going to leave voluntarily and go to a third country and he could live in exile and live in peace and by the way trump tried to do the same thing which is negotiate with maduro if you want to leave in peace we'll let you leave in peace and and noriega just noriega and maduro both made the same stupid mistake they said no I'm not going to leave.
And Chuck told me he said he was negotiating and Noriega was like, absolutely not. I'm not going anywhere. That will never happen. And Chuck told me he finished the meeting at the end of the meeting. And he said, said, Mr. President, I need to tell you something. which was, I'm going to leave now. I'm going to go back to the United States.
But people are going to come after me, and they're not going to take no for an answer. And he did that.
By the way, isn't it amazing that Chavez, this happened to him, Maduro saw it, Maduro's wife saw it,
And they still somehow believe... Not Chavez, Noriega.
Sorry, yeah, Noriega, excuse me.
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Chapter 7: How does the U.S. plan to restore stability in Venezuela?
Because frankly, it could have gone wrong a thousand different ways.
And there's also part of it when you make those orders that I think people don't realize you've been around it and I've been around it. You are making a decision that very well could cost an American their lives.
Well, and the president and I talked about that.
That's a lot. I mean, people don't realize, I think, how much that weighed even on President Bush when I was around him, when he knew that there were Americans dying because the decision that you're making. Donald Trump, I think, really understands that as well.
Yeah, and we talked about that, and we both talked about it. We marveled at the incredible military precision that they carried out. The fact that this attack, they went in, and they landed in the middle of a major metropolitan city with 5 million people. They landed in the middle of a huge military base.
You know, it's been now publicly reported that there were 32 Cuban soldiers guarding Maduro, all of whom were killed. And we did not lose a single U.S. serviceman who was there. Two were shot, but neither was killed. And I'll tell you something, a fact I learned today, which I didn't know.
which is when they had Maduro and the First Lady, and the Cuban security forces were opening fire on them, and they were engaged in a firefight, our soldiers blocked Maduro and the First Lady with their own bodies. Now, they had body armor, but they were trying to make it an arrest. They actually treated it under the protocol for a hostage extraction.
because they didn't want them shot in the process. They wanted them to come back to the United States and face prosecution and face justice. And so you want to talk about the bravery of Delta Force literally putting their bodies with body armor in front of Maduro and the First Lady so that they didn't get shot by the Cubans. That's extraordinary.
And I got to say, so when I was talking with President Trump, he actually asked me, he brought up, he said, he brought up in the first term his taking out General Soleimani in Iran. He talked about his taking out Baghdadi. He talked about his launching the military bombing attack on the nuclear facilities in Iran. And he talked about this, and all of them were spectacular successes.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of Venezuela's oil and gold reserves for economic recovery?
And it's interesting. The president said, you know, I agree that that's exactly how I would rank those two. And so it was an interesting, you know, Trump is rarely, I would say, deeply introspective. That's not just his nature. And he was kind of reflecting on that. We had a good conversation. And to be honest, I hadn't, until he asked me that question, I hadn't really thought of.
But hands down, those are the two most important foreign policy decisions that he's made. And in terms of the Western Hemisphere, what does that mean? Well, let's take Cuba. Cuba is probably the country most impacted. We talked about this a little on Monday's podcast. So Cuba for years, it's a communist dictatorship.
It's been under communist control since Fidel Castro led a revolution that succeeded in 1959. And the people, just like Venezuela, the communists in Cuba destroyed the economy. The people suffer in misery and poverty, but they've been ruthless. And for many decades,
They survived in significant part because the Soviet Union sent them vast amounts of money, and so they were a satellite power of the Soviet Union. Obviously led to things like the Cuban Missile Crisis, where the Soviets were trying to put missiles in Cuba to target the United States.
But in the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union collapsed, suddenly Cuba did not have that financial lifeline anymore. And when that happened, the country that stepped in was Venezuela. And because Venezuela has these massive oil reserves, and at the time still had significant money, essentially the trade-off that Venezuela has done for years...
is Venezuela sends massive amounts of oil to Cuba, and it fuels the Cuban economy, what little of it there is. And Cuba, in effect, pays for it by sending thugs, by sending soldiers and guards. And the Cuban thugs, they, number one, they... repress the Venezuelan people, they murder people, they torture people.
But look, it speaks volumes that Maduro's guards were the 32 Cubans who were guarding him. I mean, that's literally his armed forces around him.
Yeah, it wasn't Venezuelan armed forces. It was Cubans.
And... President Trump is continuing to enforce the oil blockade so there is not Venezuelan oil flowing to Cuba right now. That is putting massive pressure on the Cuban economy. And I got to say, the communist leadership there is looking around. And number one, you want to talk about their military prowess. They had 32 soldiers guarding Maduro. All 32 Cuban soldiers are dead. Not a single U.S.
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