The Daily - A Secret Dossier in Venezuela

Episode Date: May 3, 2019

After mass protests and international pressure failed to unseat President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, it became clear that it would take defections from within his own government to remove him from power. Now, secret documents suggest that some of Mr. Maduro’s people are starting to turn on him. Guest: Nicholas Casey, the Andes bureau chief for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Background reading: A secret dossier compiled by Venezuela’s intelligence agency and provided to The New York Times shows how Tareck El Aissami, a confidant of Mr. Maduro, became a wealthy man even as his country headed toward economic collapse. Listen to a series from “The Daily” about Leopoldo López, a prominent opposition politician who was put under house arrest after staging protests in 2014.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today. For weeks, after mass protests and international pressure failed to unseat Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, it became clear that it would take defections from within his own regime to remove him from power. Now, secret documents leaked to my colleague Nick Casey

suggest that people around Maduro are starting to turn on him. It's Friday, May 3rd. Nick, what happened at the beginning of this week in Venezuela? It's around sunrise, Tuesday morning, and Venezuelans wake up to this video, which has suddenly appeared. And it's Juan Guaidó. Guaidó's the leader of the National Assembly. They're very used to seeing him. He's been saying that he is the legitimate president of Venezuela for months

and that he's going to topple Nicolas Maduro. But he hasn't been able to do that so far. Except in this video, suddenly things look different. He's standing on a military base. He's got National Guardsmen standing behind him. And he's saying, the moment has come. This is it. Everybody is going to start to rebel right now.

These men behind me are on my side, and it's only a matter of time till the rest of the country is going to be as well. Come out to the streets, come out and join us. The moment is at hand. And then when you look behind him in the video, there's another man that everybody in Venezuela recognizes, but hasn't seen in a while.

It's Leopoldo Lopez, who is a political prisoner, the most famous political prisoner in the country, who's been sentenced to an almost 14-year jail sentence. But he's not in his house arrest. He's behind Juan Guaido. He's with these military men. And all of them are saying, the time has come.

This is the juncture. Get ready. He's been asking for the military to get on his side to push Maduro out for months at this point. But there are now military that are behind him. And it looks like they're on his side. His message now is we've got these guys here.

There's a few of you left. Get on our side. We're going to do all this today. day. And, you know, potentially, it sounds like by the end of the day, Maduro is not going to be in power. Nick, what does this scene signal to you? Well, it seems there's just suddenly a big blast of hope for the opposition that has been looking for some moment like this to say that they're going to get the upper hand in this months-long battle against Maduro. And this is also ricocheting out to Washington. We see this now as a potentially dispositive moment in the efforts of the Venezuelan people to regain defect from Maduro. And then also there's these rumors starting to circulate around D.C. that Maduro is ginning up a jet to get out of the country. Well, Lurie and Calvin, we are just now learning that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says he

believed early this morning that Nicolas Maduro was actually ready to flee Venezuela. He had a plane ready on the tarmac. Apparently he was headed to Havana, Cuba. But Mike Pompeo is telling us that he believes the Russians talked him out of it. been loyalists for a long time. And if you look closely at this video, you can't even see how many soldiers are actually standing behind him. There's no one from the top ranks of the military that's there. So it's clear it's going to be a long day, but it's not clear who's going to be the victor. So what actually happens? So people start to gather. They come out for Guaido's call. They come out to the military base where he's at, and someone opens the door, and people start to trickle in.

Leopoldo Lopez is standing next to a machine gun. Looks like he's ready to do battle. is standing next to a machine gun. Looks like he's ready to do battle. There are people in the streets now, large groups of people in Altamira, which is the main opposition neighborhood. They start to clash with the military that have been sent out.

There's this scene that starts circulating on social media of an armored vehicle that's running over the protesters. Suddenly waves of people are coming into the hospitals with these injuries from rubber bullets, from getting hit by the vehicles that are being sent after them. Caracas turns into pandemonium for a number of hours. While this question of who is going to take the countries is getting decided. As this happens, the people who were mentioned to me as the defectors

start to get onto Twitter and say they're on Maduro's side. So it looks like things aren't going well for Guaido. And then... Later in the afternoon, news comes out that Leopoldo López, that had gotten out of his house arrest, is now hiding in an embassy. That doesn't look good. And by evening, by nightfall, it looks like there's just been another battle

in this long war that Maduro again has won. He's clearly the president. He's clearly in charge of the state. And Guaido is back to where he was to begin with, which is the leader of the opposition that's saying he's the president, but isn't. So by the end of the day, the forces around Guaido have been clearly defeated

and his close ally, Leo Lopez, is literally in hiding. It's one giant revolution that starts back to where it began. One big circle. So it feels like this has been the story of the past few months, that the opposition movement

that Juan Guaido is leading gains momentum. It seems like the military might flip against Maduro and he might be ousted. And yet the military ends up staying with him and he remains in power

and the opposition's momentum kind of fizzles. Yeah, the cycle has repeated itself so many times. The opposition keeps trying to get the Venezuelan deep state, which is all of these people from the security establishment to the armed forces, the ones that are really holding up Maduro at this point.

And they never seem to be able to get that. What you see in Venezuela is that it's having to use the deep state to run the state because it's no longer a democracy. And at the end of the day, yeah, it looks like this was just another one of these failed attempts from the opposition to try to be able to get the deep state on their side. They haven't been able to get the military to join them fully. They haven't been able to get the secret police to get on their side. They haven't been able to get these people that are actually the ones in control of the country

to join the opposition. At least it doesn't appear that they have. But on my desk that day is a dossier. And it tells maybe a different story of kinds of fractures that you can't see that are playing out within Mr. Maduro's government. And what is this dossier? that you can't see that are playing out within Mr. Maduro's government. And what is this dossier?

It's a stack of documents that tells a history of a man named Tarek El Aissami, who's one of the most central people to the government right now after Mr. Maduro. He's one of his chief confidants. He's a person that you see almost every time that Maduro is going out onto a stage. He used to be the vice president. He's one of the most powerful men in the country. And what does this stack of documents tell you about him? It says that somebody in the intelligence agency was trying to investigate this man.

And they had a lot of suspicions, not just of him, but also of his family, having been involved in everything from bringing in militants into the country from the Middle East to trafficking drugs within his own country. Wow. So, for example, halfway into this dossier, you start to come across documents from the attorney general's office talking about what looks like a major drug bust that took place on the border of Brazil and Venezuela. The agents came to these empty warehouses or warehouses they thought were empty, and they suddenly came across 140 tons of urea, which is one of the components that you use to make cocaine. Turned out these actually belong to one of the biggest drug traffickers in the country. But the man who came out in these documents as the legal representative of that drug trafficker was Tariq El Aissami's cousin. As the case works its way up through the courts, Tariq El Aissami's star is starting to rise in leftist politics. And what

you see in the dossier is that ultimately the cocaine ingredients are returned back to the drug trafficker. And the implication is this had something to do with Tarek El Aissami. Hmm. But why is this significant right now in the context of all of this political turmoil going on in Venezuela? This gets to the core, I think,

at what makes Venezuelans angriest the most. It's not just that you don't have food in Caracas, you don't have medicine or water or electricity. It's the fact that the government may be the source of your woes because of the level of corruption and how much they've pillaged from the state. While you're starving, someone else is a billionaire, and they may have made that money off of drug trafficking. There used to be a term still used called boligarchs, which refers to the people that had benefited from the Bolivarian revolution, the left-wing revolution that took place in Venezuela, and had been able to make off with millions from the state. This is the center of what this movement is about.

This is why people want Maduro out, is because many of them are looking for someone who they can trust. And what these documents are saying is Tarek El Aissami isn't one of them. And the other reason why this is important is because of how we got this information. This is information which came from Maduro's own security establishment. So it not only shows that they were suspicious of the people who were running the government, just like the people in the streets, but they also wanted others to know about this. The fact that they were willing to give these papers to reporters from the New York Times shows that that united front that Maduro wants to show isn't really there.

There's something a lot more complicated going on under the surface right now. So Nick, you're saying that the fact that you're able to tell this story, to see this dossier, is significant unto itself because it means that there are people in Maduro's government, specifically, it sounds like in his intelligence apparatus, who aren't as united or loyal to Maduro as he would have us believe. These documents came from someone who has held very high rank in Venezuela's intelligence community.

And the fact that they're published in the Times shows that there is something going on with the spies in the country. I can tell you this person was a true believer in the government for years, but doesn't believe it anymore and has some real doubts about who is running the country right now. And I think the goal in handing over documents like this was trying to show the rest of the world that the people running Venezuela couldn't be trusted. I think it was that simple. If you're a spy, you have access to all kinds of information, and your power is when you give that information out when it's released. Turning something secret into something public is a huge thing when it comes to espionage. And this is what was happening. This is the kind of stuff that once compiled

shouldn't see the light of day if you're in the intelligence community. This is stuff which are basically state secrets. And to put these out in a manner that they're going to get published for the world to see, it's making a big statement about who you want to see in charge of Venezuela. So Nick, you have always made clear to us that what really matters is what happens to the military. If there are mass defections from the military, that would almost assuredly mean the end of the Maduro regime.

What about the intelligence community? What happens if they start to defect? Each are constituents which are key to keeping Maduro in power. Both are looking at the other to see which is going to take the first move. And I think these play off ofled, maybe actually it's kind of working because you're seeing this deep state actually begin to break away from Maduro in a pretty meaningful way. Yeah, the thing that you've got to remember is that the protesters are outside right now. They got quashed, but they're not inside the presidential palace. If something is starting to break inside, that's a much more scary situation for Maduro. Those are the people that Maduro is seeing when

he's at these cabinet meetings. And if he's just gone through this day on Tuesday where the US said that there were top officials about to betray him, and then by the end of the week, he's seeing all of these pages of information that had been assembled by his intelligence agency getting published in the New York Times. If he's looking around these cabinet meetings and he doesn't know if he can fully trust these people, it makes you think that you don't know what the next step is. And how am I going to keep myself in power? in power. So Guaido's call is actually being answered by the most dangerous people imaginable to Nicolas Maduro, which are powerful individuals within his government. Exactly. Remember the reason why J. Edgar Hoover was so feared in the U.S. was because he had information on presidents. These presidents, more than anyone, fear the people running their

intelligence agencies. Those people can be used to squash their opponents, but they can also turn on them too. And I think that's one of the fears that the government has. And so this dossier is no doubt a kind of message to Maduro that the intelligence community could very well have the same kind of information about him. very well have the same kind of information about him. So I've seen the file on Tarek El Aysami, Maduro's confidant. But if there's a file that's there on Maduro, that's something that Venezuelans would really want to see. And that file would be a lot more damaging. Nick, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Yeah, thanks, Michael. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. What is deadly serious about it is the Attorney General of the United States of America

was not telling the truth to the Congress of the United States. That's a crime. On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused Attorney General William Barr of lying to Congress when he testified that he was unaware of concerns from Special Counsel Robert Mueller about how Barr had summarized Mueller's conclusions of the Russia investigation. That claim now appears to be contradicted by a letter sent to Barr by Mueller that laid out Mueller's concerns about Barr's summary. Madam Speaker, did the Attorney General commit a crime?

He lied to Congress. He lied to Congress. If anybody else did that, it would be considered a crime. Nobody is above the law, not the President of the United States and not the Attorney General. Barr further antagonized congressional Democrats on Thursday by refusing to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, prompting that committee's chairman, Representative Jerry Nadler, to threaten to hold Barr in contempt of Congress. What we saw today is besides the attitude of contempt the administration has for Congress, what we saw today is besides the attitude of contempt the administration has for Congress, what we saw was fear. Fear of effective cross-examination, period.

And. But they say I've been banned for being dangerous and anti-Semitic from Facebook, then I will quote me, purged. Purged! Facebook said it had permanently banned several far-right individuals and organizations from all its platforms, including Alex Jones, the founder of Infowars,

and Louis Farrakhan, the black nationalist minister who has repeatedly made anti-Semitic remarks. Facebook said that those banned had violated its policies against hate speech in their conduct on Facebook or outside of it, and that it would remove all accounts, fan pages, and groups affiliated with them. The decision is a sign that after years of criticism that it allowed bigotry to fester on its platforms, that Facebook will more aggressively crack down on it across its various platforms,

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That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.