{"id":13175,"date":"2025-08-25T19:00:16","date_gmt":"2025-08-25T17:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kaizen-blog.org\/?p=13175"},"modified":"2025-08-25T19:08:46","modified_gmt":"2025-08-25T17:08:46","slug":"der-showdown-der-verzweifelten-wenn-ein-kartellstaat-auf-einen-narzissten-trifft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kaizen-blog.org\/en\/der-showdown-der-verzweifelten-wenn-ein-kartellstaat-auf-einen-narzissten-trifft\/","title":{"rendered":"The Showdown of the Desperate: When a Cartel State Meets a Narcissist"},"content":{"rendered":"

The USS Gravely, the USS Jason Dunham and the USS Sampson - three Aegis destroyers of the US Navy - plow through the Caribbean, accompanied by submarines and fighter jets. In Caracas, meanwhile, hundreds crowd in front of the Miraflores presidential palace to fill out forms for the Bolivarian militia. Women with shopping bags, old men with trembling hands, clerks in gray business suits - they all follow Maduro\u2019s call to arm themselves against the \u201cimperialist threat.\u201d It is a spectacle of madness on both sides of the Caribbean Sea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Donald Trump doubles the bounty on Nicol\u00e1s Maduro to 50 million dollars - a sum that sounds more like Wild West romance than 21st century diplomacy. Karoline Leavitt, spokeswoman for the White House, repeats like a mantra that the US will \u201cdo everything in its power\u201d to crush drug trafficking from Venezuela. But what Trump is staging here is not only morally questionable, but simply illegal. According to Article 2 of the UN Charter, the sovereignty of a state is inviolable. Military interventions are only permitted with a mandate from the UN Security Council or in the case of immediate self-defense. Venezuela does not threaten the US. Trump has no right to invade - no matter how often he calls Maduro a \u201ccartel leader.\u201d The irony is this: Trump, the man who himself was convicted 34 times for falsifying business records, who denied his election defeat and incited a mob to storm the Capitol, poses as a moral authority. A convicted criminal threatening a suspected drug lord with warships - it is the grotesque of a world order that has lost every compass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Maduro system: a state as a family business<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maduro\u2019s regime is not an invention of Washington but brutal reality. His wife Cilia Flores, who calls herself \u201cPrimera Combatiente,\u201d controls key positions of power as former president of parliament. Her nephews are in American prisons - sentenced to 18 years in prison for cocaine smuggling. Son Nicol\u00e1s Maduro Guerra, affectionately called \u201cNicolasito,\u201d has his hands in the state oil sector and in the gold mines of the Amazon. It is a family business disguised as a revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The \u201cCartel de los Soles\u201d - named after the sun insignia of the generals - is the real backbone of power. International investigators have documented how Venezuelan gold is laundered through shell companies in Dubai, Istanbul and Tehran. Cocaine is shipped by the ton via routes controlled by the military to Europe and North America. According to UN reports, the intelligence service SEBIN systematically tortures, and the FAES special forces executed at least 6,856 people extrajudicially between 2018 and 2019. This is no longer a failed state, it is a criminal syndicate with a UN seat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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But the population plays along. When Maduro calls for mobilization, they actually come. Not out of conviction, but out of calculation. Those who register may secure a CLAP food package, a job in the bloated state apparatus, or simply the guarantee of not being marked as a \u201ctraitor.\u201d At the Military History Museum, new recruits are shown an exhibition about the blockade of Venezuelan ports in the early 20th century, followed by parades of machine guns, grenade launchers, rocket-propelled grenades. The message is clear: We are at war, and those who do not join are the enemy. Maduro speaks of 4.5 million militiamen he wants to mobilize. The International Institute for Strategic Studies counted just 343,000 in 2020. But numbers do not matter. It is about the images: lines of volunteers, waving flags, a president invoking the \u201csacred oath to Ch\u00e1vez.\u201d It is theater, but theater with real weapons and real dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Trump\u2019s violation of international law as a stage set<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Trump is staging is no less grotesque. The \u201cResponsibility to Protect,\u201d to which some proponents of intervention refer, requires a UN mandate. The United States does not have that. Even the accusation of drug trafficking - however justified - gives no right under international law to military intervention. Prosecution of heads of state is the task of international courts, not unilateral gunboat policy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Trump knows this. His advisers know this. Nevertheless, they send destroyers, raise bounties, classify Venezuelan groups like Tren de Aragua as terrorist organizations. It is the same arrogance that led to the Iraq war in 2003 - a \u201cpreventive\u201d aggression that left hundreds of thousands dead and a destroyed country. Libya, Syria, Afghanistan - the list of American interventions that ended in chaos is long. And now Venezuela? The double standards are breathtaking. While Washington extends Chevron\u2019s license to extract oil in Venezuela - business must go on, after all - it threatens invasion at the same time. They exchange prisoners, negotiate behind closed doors, and in parallel send the Navy. It is the schizophrenia of a foreign policy that oscillates between business interests and great power fantasies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n