Venezuela-Iran connection led to Maduro arrest

By Eli Garcia —

Why did Trump bully Venezuela? There are plenty of dictators and drug-exporters around the world to beat up. What makes Nicolas Maduro his first choice to put in line?

Venezuela’s oil reserves, the largest in the world, is only one piece of the pie. In the long term, he’s driving down gas prices (and no doubt, he’s enriching his cronies).

Another piece of the pie is China, which is oil-starved and has given $60B in loans to Venezuela to reserve 20 years of oil. China is poised to attack Taiwan, which it claims as its own, right now. But guess what? They need oil to do it. They receive 80% of their oil from Venezuela. It’s no wonder China condemned the Maduro arrest.

The final piece to the pie is Iran. Both isolated nations got cozy and hatched plans to beat their sanctions. Iran’s oil is thin, and Venezuela’s is thick — an interchange could fix their corresponding problems.

But the rogue regimes didn’t stick only with oil — which is hard for them to sell on the black market (despite the shadow fleets with GPS turned off taking oil to Russia and China). They decided to mutually diversify — into drugs.

Venezuela couldn’t distribute in Africa and the Middle East, so it reach out to Iran’s proxy Hezbollah, the great cartel of the region. For its part, drought-strapped Iran had trouble growing drug crops as they plowed all their money into their terror machine instead of farming and industry.

Trump’s actions against Venezuela isolate Iran, the great destabilizer of the Middle East, from a key supporter of the regime. Who knows but maybe now Venezuela won’t be paying the billions of dollars it currently owes the IRGC in their business arrangement?

The arrest of Maduro and the fall of the Iranian regime are “deeply correlated,” says Meira Cowland Kolatch of JNS news.

Peace in the Middle East feels all the closer.

Sources: JNS, others.