Narco, Terror, and Politics in Southwestern Europe (10/10)

Conclusion

Since Hugo Chávez seized power, Venezuela became a node of connections in what is already a growing convergence of Transnational Organized Crime (TOC), terrorism, including international jihadism, and politics around the world, in general, and, specifically, in Latin America and in Southwest Europe.

General Hugo ‘El Pollo’ Carvajal ratified multiple reports, from various sources, including The New York Times’s or InSightCrime’s, that Tareck El Aissami Maddeh (a.k.a. TEAM), a leading figure of Venezuelan Maduro’s regime, maintains close ties with Hezbollah to the point that TEAM, as responsible for managing Venezuela’s illegal economy, supports Hezbollah for its money laundering operations around the world out of Caracas.

TEAM’s father is a Syrian activist with a long history of connection with terrorist organizations, something that helps TEAM to have credibility and be well seen as the main Venezuelan regime interlocutor in its relations with Hezbollah or other terrorist groups.

In fact, Hezbollah‘s Organization of External Security is present and very active in Venezuela thanks to the network that it managed to embed in all corners of the country’s illegal economy, from its headquarters in Venezuela, which are located on the paradisiacal Margarita Island, where today it is more likely to run into people from the Middle East than into natives of that enclave.

Thus, the Maduro regime reinforces, supports, and collaborates with the global movements of Hezbollah’s funds, people, products, and materials and provides its organization with identification documents and Venezuelan passports to help them in all their international operations.

However, Venezuelan Narco State relationships with international terrorism is not limited to its connection with Hezbollah – Palestinian terrorist cells have also settled in Venezuela and are actively participating in the opportunities its regime provides them to exploit money laundering, drug trafficking and terrorist activity networks to their advantage.

In this convergence of crimes of all kinds, it is often forgotten that Maduro’s boss is Cuba, and the manager of that relationship is the Cuban Intelligence Directorate, popularly also known as G2, which, amongst many other tasks it performs for the Venezuelan regime, had reformed its Intelligence services.

If they lived today, Pablo Escobar and Fidel Castro would be proud of how deeply rooted their legacy is on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean*.

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* “Hugo Carvajal, the Chavista general who knows too much”, El Imparcial, April 21, 2019; “TareckEl Aissami”, InSight Crime, June 17, 2019; “Hezbollah Networks in Venezuela”, Centre for a Secure Free Society Fact Sheet, October 7, 2020; and “In addition to Hezbollah, Venezuela a safe haven for Palestinian terrorists”, Israel Hayom, www.israelhayom.com, January 11, 2021.

NB: All information and data about the facts and people in this article were taken from open and public sources, which are cited here. Any errors they may have made are not attributable to the author of this article, but to those of the publications from which they were taken. This series of articles was completed on July 29, 2022.