Maduro Is Gone. The Mafia State Remains.

0:00Coleman Hughes:Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Thor Halvorssen. Thor is a Venezuelan-born human rights activist who founded and leads the Human Rights Foundation and also founded the annual Oslo Freedom Forum. Thor has a rather dramatic origin story as an activist, which involves his mother being shot by pro-regime elements while attempting to deliver a letter to former President Jimmy Carter. But I'll let him tell that whole story in his own words. In this episode, we dissect the four different possible rationales for the current regime change operation in Venezuela.

0:37Coleman Hughes:Drugs, oil, geopolitics, and humanitarianism. We talk about the differences between regime change in Venezuela and our recent attempts at regime change in the Middle East. We talk about the scope of the humanitarian disaster in Venezuela over the past two decades. We talk about why the New York Times and other left-leaning outlets have run so many articles sympathetic to the regime. We talk about Delcy Rodriguez, Diosdado Cabello, and how the remnants of the Maduro regime are likely to behave in the near future. We talk about why Delcy Rodriguez said the U.S. capture of Maduro had, quote, Zionist undertones, and much more.

1:17Coleman Hughes:So without further ado, Thor Halverson.

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2:09Coleman Hughes:It's the highest-rated CBT-I program in the App Store. Thousands of people have used it to fall asleep faster, stay asleep, and actually wake up feeling refreshed. No medication required. It may even be covered by your insurance. For our listeners, Sleep Reset is offering a free seven-day trial available only at thesleepreset.com slash podcast. Start your first week of real clinician-designed insomnia treatment tonight. Okay, Thor Halverson, thanks so much for coming on my show. Thank you, Coleman. It's a pleasure to be on your show. I'm a huge admirer of your intellectual integrity. Thank you.

2:49Coleman Hughes:I learned just before we started recording that we crossed paths at my ill-fated TED talk. I guess this was two or three years ago now. I think it was two years ago. And people might remember the fallout from that. You can read all about it. That's not what we're here to talk about today, but it's cool that you were in the room for that. I first learned of you, I think, on the fifth column. I think you've been friendly with those guys for a while. Michael Moynihan, a friend of mine, has been a long-time ardent supporter of the Venezuelan opposition and has paid quite close attention for many years to that issue.

3:28Coleman Hughes:So it comes up on that podcast, and you've been on that podcast. You are someone who can speak with a very high level of authority, both from personal, familial experience, and as a human rights activist on the issue of Venezuela. There's no one I'd rather talk to at this moment than you. And for my audience members that may or may not be aware of your backstory, I know you've told it a million times, but it's just, it's incredibly interesting, you know, what the family lineage you come from, what happened to your family in Venezuela and so forth. Can you give a little bit, maybe a short version of that background for my audience.

4:10Coleman Hughes:Sure. It's my pleasure. I, um, I, I was born in Venezuela. My family arrived in the 1530s. And so, um, it's, I mean, obviously a lot of people, when they look at my name, they're like, how dare you speak about Venezuela? You are not, you are not originally from there or so on and so forth. It'll be hard to find a Yanomamo Indian, who is engaged in human rights work out of New York. That doesn't mean they don't exist, but there is this, because of this obsession that the United States has with group identity and things like that, it's just been a struggle to have a voice if you have a name that isn't Carlos Rodriguez.

4:54Half of my family is of Spanish origin and the other half is evidently Norwegian. And my Norwegian grandfather arrived in the 1930s in Venezuela. So on my mother's side, my family is related to Simón Bolívar, the founder of the independence movement and responsible for the war for independence that brought the liberation of Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, which was named in his honor, and the area that is now Panama, along with, I think I mentioned, Colombia. And same lineage, my fifth grandfather was the author of the Declaration of Independence of Venezuela and its first president. That said, you know, in my family, we always talk about how you don't mortgage your ancestors in trying to seek advantage.

5:48So I was always brought up that these are just accidents of history that I was born into this family. So I believe that people should stand on their own two feet. So I was born there, raised there. I went to the University of Pennsylvania, where I first encountered the concept of political correctness. And, you know, that led me to become the founding CEO of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which now is called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression. And I was there helming FIRE when Hugo Chavez became president of Venezuela in an election that he won with a very small amount of votes because the number of people that decided not to vote was stratospheric.

6:37So I think he won with around 16 % of the people who could vote. And he won a majority of that. And he then set about dismantling the democracy. And he did not run on the idea of establishing a dictatorship and turning it into a socialist dictatorship, ruining the country and seeing the theft of all the oil revenues or mismanagement of that over the next 25 years, him and his successor. He ran on corruption, on anti-corruption, and people were sick of the swamp. And I'd say that Corruption in Venezuela was probably around somewhere between 5 % and 10%, and people did not like it at all. Under his government and his successor, it's more like between 95 % and 99%.

7:34They really have done quite a job ruining the country. My mother, I was basically not engaged in human rights work other than writing op-eds here and there and warning people that Chavez was not what people were claiming and having a few articles written, I was doing other things. And meanwhile, you know, it was very ironic. I was protecting the rights of students at Harvard to speak and to have in their, you know, conservative newspaper or the magazine that they had for humor. And meanwhile, journalists were being shot in Venezuela and nobody seemed to care. And in 2004, my mother went to Venezuela.

8:17My mother lived in England, and she went to Venezuela to celebrate my grandmother's birthday. And that coincided with an election, a referendum on Chavez. And Chavez lost that referendum 80 % to 20%. But they switched the votes. So it became 80-20 in his favor, not against him. And this was a shocking betrayal. And Jimmy Carter, former President Carter, was there to oversee the election. And he left that morning because it was Mrs. Carter's birthday. And even though he was begged to please review these new electronic machines, a company that the government had created, the government had financed to do an electronic election.

9:02So my mother and several Others got together to deliver a letter to Jimmy Carter, not knowing that he had already left. And groups of armed men working for the government, part of the security forces, shot her. And they did not kill her, but I was in the emergency room thinking, what should I do? What can I do? And the first thing I did was I wrote an op-ed that ran in the Wall Street Journal about the subject. And that's when I really got my hands into the subject and realized how the existing major human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were just not paying attention.

9:48They didn't care. Perhaps it was ideological sympathies for a man who claimed to care about the poor and to be on the left. Perhaps it was something else. Perhaps it was just ineptitude or donors driving Human Rights Watch into doing something else. And so I got together with Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor who was in Auschwitz, and Václav Havel, the former president of the Czech Republic, Czechoslovakia, who brought communism down in that country. He's a very famous poet and a few other political prisoners and decided to create a new organization. And we had a budget of around two hundred and thirty thousand dollars the first year.

10:32And it's now been 20 years and we now are much larger. And our focus is exclusively on dictatorships. Not Venezuela is not our focus. Our focus is all of them. uh north korea china uh russia cuba nicaragua um algeria eritrea angola so we we do we we bring um attention where uh it's not very sexy and where the voices are being ignored and that's the human rights foundation and now um 20 years on uh we see the beginning of the end of the venezuelan dictatorship of Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro.

11:16Coleman Hughes:Yeah. So I remember learning in Amy Chua's book, I think it was World on Fire she wrote 20 years ago. She had a chapter on Venezuela, and she wrote that part of Hugo Chavez's appeal was that he claimed to represent darker-skinned Venezuelans who had felt discriminated against on a racial or you might say colorist basis with respect to light-skinned Venezuelans. Is that true? And if so, that's an aspect of the story that I never hear talked about. So when she wrote that book, she came to the University of Pennsylvania to speak about it. And I remember that I went with several friends and we handed out flyers before she spoke saying that this is absolutely untrue.

12:09This is a complete misreading of what's happening. She was very upset by it. I met her several years later and owned up to it. And we had a long conversation about it. The reality is Venezuela was, we have a saying in Venezuela. Todos, todos, en nuestros ancestros tienen una persona que o toca tambor o tira flechas. So the translation of that is all of us, every single one of us, Venezuelans have in their past an ancestor that either played the drums or threw arrows. And what do I mean by that? We're all mixed race to some extent or another. Venezuela didn't have slavery ended in Venezuela with the independence movement.

12:59Simon Bolivar wrote the liberation of the slaves. We didn't have this issue. This is an imported intellectual position, imported from the United States, imported from Europe. And Chávez took advantage of it to divide a population that never saw itself as, oh, the light-skinned versus the dark-skinned. That's absolute poppycock. You can look at, you know, the presidents, the Congress, people across the board in government, in the private sector. There's all sorts of people. So the pluralism of Venezuela is this concept has been imposed to try and divide people to say, oh. And by the way, this may not be the case in other Latin American countries where the indigenous population is massive.

13:52But Venezuela, like Brazil, is a country with all sorts. It's a huge mix. Mestizos, mulattos, you name it, is there. And it's unique, along with Brazil and Latin America, and being much more racially diverse. And so we never had this issue.

14:08Coleman Hughes:Okay, so obviously we're speaking because of Operation Absolute Resolve. The American military quite impressively extracted and arrested. Nicolas Maduro brought him to New York City where he and his wife pled not guilty to various charges. Are you optimistic about the prospects here? Because here's what the conversation is in America right now. And by the way, I sort of disagree with this way of framing the conversation, but this is how Americans are thinking about it. We're thinking this concept of regime change has become such a controversial and heated issue, right? In the American mind, we did regime change in Iraq, and we did regime change in Afghanistan, and they were unmitigated disasters.

15:02Coleman Hughes:And haven't we learned by now that regime change is always and everywhere a terrible idea? and now once again for whatever reason you know we're doing regime change in Venezuela even though Trump was elected sort of on a promise to end regime change wars that's where the conversation is how do you at coming at it from the perspective of a human rights advocate and a Venezuelan How do you see that way of framing the conversation? All right. So after the absolute disaster that Iraq and Afghanistan were from a perspective, from a financial perspective for the United States, where trillions of dollars were misspent, and I completely understand that the United States wants to look inward and solve its own problems.

15:55This is basic. But let me answer it with two components to this. The first is, Venezuela already had regime change. In 2024, Venezuelans had an election, and Maduro lost the election, and lost the election by a monumental amount of votes. His opponent got 67 % of the votes cast. And he was more than twice what Maduro got. And if you add the amount of people that voted with their feet, that left Venezuela because of the conditions under Nicolás Maduro and Hugo Chávez, we're talking about almost 9 million people. If you add the votes of those who left, we're talking about, as votes against the government, obviously, then we're talking about between 85 and 90 something percent of the people rejecting this government.

16:53So it's a government that has usurped power. He is not the legitimately elected president of Venezuela. He banned the woman who won a 93 percent of the vote in a primary. That's a staggering number of votes in an open primary. Banned her from running because he knew she was going to win. And so she picked a stand-in. She didn't go to another politician. She picked a stand-in, this professor. And so the government took this professor, a woman, a grandmother, and said, no, no, she's banned too. She can't run either. So then she went down the list and picked an old diplomat, Edmundo Gonzalez. And eventually, I think the government realized this woman's just going to keep picking stand-ins until we've basically disqualified everyone from running.

17:45So they allowed the election to go forward, thinking that they could carry out the same electronic fraud that they've been able to carry out in the past. And without going into details, the electronic fraud was stopped. And at every polling booth, there were Maria Corina Machado, the leader of the opposition, put together this enormous machine of volunteers using a Google app as a kind of, you know, to be able to record the votes at every polling station, tens of thousands of polling stations. And they were able to tally on their own, you know, what the votes were coming out at as. And when the votes happened, the the at every polling station, they close the polling station and they count the number of votes, you know, compare the ballots with what's on the electronic side of things.

18:41And then they create a bill of record. And the bill of record has a QR code. So anyone can photograph the QR code and find exactly in voting center by voting center, what the totals are. And that's how they were able to prove that they won. And it wasn't just the opposition saying that they won. The United States government independently corroborated, And the CIA told Joe Biden that, yes, indeed, Maduro lost the election. So one side of the regime change discussion is that. The other side is this isn't exactly regime change. This is a law enforcement operation, the legality of which, you know, the courts in the U.S.

19:26and elsewhere can talk about. But Venezuela is not a country that has, like Mexico, a drug cartel that may or may not influence the government, pay off people in government. No, no, no. Venezuelan government, it's a cartel that has a government. It's a massive criminal network in charge of a government. So the United States is looking at this and going like, well, this is affecting us. This is a threat to us. This is coming to the United States, whether it's fentanyl, cocaine, or what the criminal networks actually do. So I think that it's important to look at these things from those two angles.

20:11Coleman Hughes:Yeah, I think the way I'm thinking of it is that you can separate the rationale for U.S. involvement into three categories. One is oil, one is drugs, and one is, you call it terrorism or sponsorship of terrorist entities. And Trump is talking largely about oil. He thinks like a businessman. He wants to frame every issue in terms of what it's doing for, you know, he says our country's being ripped off and I'm going to help, you know, I'm going to help us the way a businessman would help us. help of business, right? I'm going to make oil cheap again for Americans. Venezuela has the largest proven reserves.

20:54Coleman Hughes:We're going to get U.S. companies back in there and so forth. And I'm no expert on the oil industry, obviously, but I've heard that there are many challenges to that and that U.S. oil companies are only partly optimistic, if at all, about that prospect. But then you have the other aspects here. One, obviously, is drugs. And in that domain, you know, the case seems to me weaker from the American interest perspective, because Venezuela has never been talked about really as the main source of fentanyl, which is the drug Americans most care about, and I think are right to care about most, not to say cocaine is not a problem, but it's a much smaller order of problem.

21:39Coleman Hughes:And then there's the little talked about facts that Venezuela has become very close with China. They've invited Hezbollah into the country, given Hezbollah operatives' passports. And I've heard through the grapevine that part of the reason for the timing of this intervention was because Venezuela and China were about to make a pretty big weapons deal, weapons and oil. And so Trump wanted to thwart that. And then I should mention the fourth reason is humanitarian. Venezuela has been probably the worst humanitarian disaster in this hemisphere over the past 20 years. No, ever. Ever. Ever in what sense?

22:32Coleman Hughes:Oh, in the hemisphere. So imagine the population of New York City right now. Are you in New York City? Yes. Okay. Now look out the window and imagine that every single person has left. Yeah. Or do London. Same number of people. The cities of London and New York are the numbers of people that left Venezuela. There's, you know, in Syria, you had 5 million people left. A war, a massive civil war. The Ukraine, you have millions of people leaving after the Russians invaded. No one invaded Venezuela. There was no war in Venezuela except the war of the dictatorship against the population. And you have almost 9 million people leaving.

23:24That is a dramatic symbol of what that socialism, dictatorial socialism, can do. Now let me answer the part about drugs. So how do people usually measure the drug problem that a country represents? Usually you measure the drug problem based on counter-narcotics. And what do I mean by that? You know, the government of Mexico has just seized a ton of cocaine from the Sinaloa cartel. The cartel is doing this. The cartel just murdered, you know, several dozen students and buried them in shallow graves. In Colombia, you see the cartels engaging in activity. You don't have that counter-narcotics discussion in Venezuela.

24:14The reason you don't have it is because the government is the cartel. So you don't have anyone seizing drugs and telling everyone that they're making fentanyl or that they've got plants that create the products that are then shipped to Mexico with which to make the fentanyl. And so you've got industrial-sized production of drugs in Venezuela that are unaccounted in terms of nobody is able to talk about it because it's controlled by the military and by the government. And anyone who's looking at exports into Europe of cocaine, for instance, notices that the price of cocaine has dropped significantly and the purity of cocaine has increased.

25:03It's a huge problem to if you've got a production facility in the jungle in Colombia and you're one of the terrorist, narco terrorist organizations like the ELN or like the FARC, you've got some problems in putting together your labs. That's not the case in Venezuela. In Venezuela, it's literally like you will drive by it and think it's a factory. And yet, in fact, what they're doing in there is that the government just the government of the United States before they took Maduro. They had just struck a fentanyl chemical production plant. So the truth about Venezuelan narcotics and the cartel, that's going to be known.

25:43And it's going to be known, I presume, in the next three to six months. A lot of people were saying, oh, this is not true. There's no cartel in Venezuela. It's like these people are embarrassing themselves and history will prove them wrong. Um, I, um, I think that, uh, it's, it's only a matter of time before that happens. Um, but I don't know if you had four things, the oil, let's talk about the oil. The oil has not served the interests of the Venezuelan people. Um, whether one looks at when sanctions were eased up under, uh, Joe Biden's administration, um, and the lobby for easing up those sanctions was a mixture of corrupt Americans and corrupt Venezuelans saying that, oh, the Venezuelan people don't want this and they're the ones suffering from this.

26:32That's not true. The reducing sanctions and the oil revenues did not build a single school, a single hospital. It did not go to infrastructure. The country's broken. It's completely ruined. They've siphoned off up to$2 trillion. More than a trillion has been stolen. And that money has gone to pay for a lot of things abroad. And the foreign influence of Venezuela abroad, I think, is more than anyone really has a sense of. And the way to address that and why it's important for regional stability is this. So up until Chavez took power, the far left, it just did not win elections very often in Latin America.

27:24Then suddenly Chavez comes to power and there seems to be this wave of populists winning elections, this wave of left-wing populists winning elections in Ecuador, in Peru, in Nicaragua, in Honduras. How did this happen? oh, if you read the New York Times, it's, oh, it's a wave. It's a wave. No, it's not a wave. It's the Venezuelan oil company. The way that the Marxists and the hard left would raise money for elections was usually through crime. It was kidnappings, major kidnappings, which there doesn't seem to be a lot of major kidnappings in Latin America, you know, the sorts of million dollar ransoms.

28:12At the same time, they would raise money from drug cartels. And the third was, and that's in and of itself a problem because you've got to get the money, you've got to ensure that it's not noticed by the government in power and so on. And the third is bank robberies and usually assaults on armored cars. Suddenly you have an oil company, an oil company that is flush with money. That's how they financed elections. In some cases, it was the populist. And in other cases, it was the center left in Argentina, in Chile, for instance. And there are there's records of this. There was in the case of Kirshner, the person who was in power before Javier Millet.

28:56She was a recipient of about 30 million dollars in cash that arrived in suitcases into Argentina. And in one of these instances, the private plane that arrived, a Venezuelan oil company private plane, someone in, and anyone who wants to look into this, they can just Google Kirshner suitcase scandal, a cash suitcase scandal, Venezuela. And there's tons of this information. And this guy was getting off the private plane and someone in customs says, what do you have in the suitcase? And he says, oh, I have books. And she says, open it. And there's a 800 and something thousand dollars. He was then detained.

29:40He ended up going to the presidential palace. He was questioned. And what comes out is he and many others took more than 30 suitcases to the Kirshner government. And that money, I'm sure they kept some of it. she and her husband were very corrupt and that's all come out, but they used a lot of it for elections. So taking away the Venezuelan wallet from foreign interference is a huge thing. Right now, the left-wing government in Spain is in a massive scandal because Delcy Rodriguez, the current interim president of Venezuela, arrived in Spain with more than 20 suitcases that left her airplane. She wasn't allowed to land in Spain because of sanctions.