By Gustavo de Arístegui
21 December 2025
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THE VENEZUELAN NARCO-DICTATORSHIP: GUSTAVO DE ARÍSTEGUI
THE VENEZUELAN NARCO-DICTATORSHIP 2
GUSTAVO DE ARÍSTEGUI 3DEC 21, 2025 4
EL DEBATE
FOUNDED IN 1910 5
ON THE FRONT LINE: GUSTAVO DE ARÍSTEGUI 6Chavista Venezuela: A terrorist narco-dictatorship7
Chavism has ceased to be a Venezuelan political problem and has become a global security urgency8. Chavism is a criminal corporation that has taken an entire nation hostage; it is a terrorist narco-state that exports chaos, drugs, and misery9.
There are authoritarian regimes, and then there is Chavism, which for twenty-six years has been converting an immensely wealthy country into a laboratory for repression, organized crime, and institutional colonization10. What began in 1999 as a populist experiment has transformed—under Hugo Chávez Frías, Nicolás Maduro, and Cuban tutelage—into a transnational criminal structure that combines the worst of Latin American Marxist-Leninist caudillism with the most toxic elements of the Iran-Hezbollah axis and Colombian terrorist narco-guerrillas11. Venezuela today is a lethal hybrid of dictatorship, drug cartel, and sanctuary for global terrorism12.
The regime’s first front is internal repression13. Since its inception, Chavism converted justice into a weapon and the political police into an instrument of terror14. Reports from the UN International Mission detail a systematic pattern of atrocities: extrajudicial executions—more than 6,800 between 2018 and 2019 alone—torture with electric shocks and mechanical asphyxiation, and sexual violence used as a method of punishment15.
Following the massive electoral fraud of July 2024, the repressive machinery reached unprecedented levels, with thousands of arbitrary detentions, including the inhumane arrest of 220 children and adolescents16. The brutal machines of repression—Dgcim (military counterintelligence), the special forces (FAES), and Sebin (political police, the Venezuelan Stasi)—constitute a system designed to nullify dissent through panic17.
Upon this repression, an epidemic of violence was built that made Venezuela the most insecure nation in the world according to Gallup, with a homicide rate that peaked in 2015 at 90 per 100,000 inhabitants18. The human cost of this induced collapse is the largest exodus of the 21st century in the Western Hemisphere19. According to UNHCR, 7.9 million Venezuelans have fled the country, a figure higher than the total population of many neighboring countries and comparable to the crises in Syria or Ukraine20. They are not escaping a conventional war, but a country looted to its very foundations21212121.
The larceny of national wealth defies the imagination: in PDVSA alone, once a global energy pride, 529 billion dollars were diverted through corruption schemes and exchange controls, while oil production collapsed to levels seen nearly a century ago22. Faced with the oil bankruptcy, the regime turned toward the direct predation of the land: the Orinoco Mining Arc23. This territory of 111,000 square kilometers has become the most sinister face of contemporary Chavism24242424. There, criminal unions and guerrillas—under the complicit gaze of the “Bolivarian” Armed Forces—impose a regime of modern slavery, human trafficking, and ecological devastation to extract “blood gold”25252525.
But the mining hides a darker secret: the nuclear connection26. Since 2008, and confirmed by Israel in June 2025, Venezuela has facilitated uranium for Iran27. The circuit is perverse: extraction in Venezuelan mines, transfer to the fake Cerro Azul cement plant, and final shipment to Tehran on PDVSA vessels28.
This criminal ecosystem has allowed Venezuela to become the bridgehead for jihadist terrorism in the Americas29. The presence of Hezbollah is both operational and financial: active cells on Margarita Island, training centers, and a massive money-laundering network30. The regime issues diplomatic passports to Iranian agents—from both the Ministry of Intelligence and the Revolutionary Guard—as well as to Hezbollah terrorists31. It utilizes the airline Conviasa (which Venezuelans call “AirTerror”) to connect Caracas with Tehran and Damascus, fully integrating into the so-called “axis of resistance” alongside Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and pro-Iranian terrorists in Iraq32323232. Leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah are received with state honors at Miraflores33.
The symbiosis with organized crime completes the picture34343434. For years, the FARC and ELN found their strategic rearguard in Venezuela35353535. From this alliance, the Cartel of the Suns was born—a drug trafficking organization embedded within the Venezuelan military leadership that floods the United States and Europe with cocaine36363636. The confessions of Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal in December 2025, via a letter to President Donald Trump, finally uncover the sewer: the former intelligence chief confirms that Chávez created and armed criminal gangs, that Maduro exported them to destabilize the region, and that drug trafficking is state policy37373737.
In this context, the rise of the Tren de Aragua is not accidental38. This mega-gang, born in the Tocorón prison, has mutated into a transnational threat operating from Chile to the United States, dedicated to contract killing, extortion, and human trafficking39. Its designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the United States, like the Cartel of the Suns, is not rhetoric; they have become a very grave threat to hemispheric security that uses asymmetric violence and territorial control for criminal purposes40404040.
For all these reasons, the recent offensive by Southern Command against narco-boats in the Caribbean cannot be judged through the lens of ordinary police incidents41. The 22 attacks carried out since September 2025, resulting in 83 eliminated, respond to a logic of self-defense against a narco-state that uses drugs as a mass chemical weapon against the American population42. The presence of the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford in the region underscores the gravity of the threat: they are not fighting smugglers; they are facing a state terrorist structure43.
Arguing in favor of these attacks and terrorist designations is an imperative of security and morality44. First, because the Cartel of the Suns and the Tren de Aragua operate with total impunity within Venezuela, protected by a state they have hijacked45. Second, because their links with Hezbollah and the Iranian nuclear program elevate the risk to a global level46. And third, because cutting the flow of resources to this criminal machine is the only way to restore freedom to a people that refuses to die in silence47.
About the Author: Gustavo de Arístegui (Madrid, 1963) is a Spanish diplomat, politician, and academic. He has served as a diplomat since 1989 and was the Ambassador to India (2012-2016)48.