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Lara Logan’s bombshell interview with Martín Rodil, a Venezuelan consultant to the US Drug Enforcement Agency’s Special Operations Division (SOD) and the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is a wild ride through the story of how the Venezuelan government became the kingpin of narco trafficking in Latin America, starting in 2005 and how it then proceeded to overthrow 72 countries around the world, without anybody knowing it. (Full video & transcript HERE).
The March 2020 US indictment of Nicolás Maduro and 18 members of Cartel de los Soles was the product of over 12 years of investigative work on the part of Martín Rodil and teams he worked with at the DEA, Treasury and the DOJ, gathering witnesses and financial records from banks in Switzerland, the UK, China and Russia.
Back then, Emil Bove was a federal prosecutor at the Southern District of New York working with the SOD and he built the indictment against Nicolás Maduro. He’s more well-known now, because he was President Trump’s lawyer and he’s become a federal judge in DC and he’s the acting #3 at the DOJ.
Martín laments that those indicted in 2020 couldn’t be brought to justice before the stolen November election and he adds that soon after President Biden entered the White House, the most important members of Cartel de los Soles, then sitting in a US prison, including the nephews of Nicolás Maduro were given full presidential pardons by President Biden.
Martín says they’d been captured in Haiti by the DEA, while trying to move a hundred kilos of cocaine into the US and that, “A guy named Álex Saab, Colombian-Lebanese guy, with links to Hezbollah, who was involved in the drug-trafficking and weapons-trafficking and money-laundering also got a presidential pardon, full pardon – probably, by the Autopen.”
Martín tells Lara that he began investigating the presence of the Iranian regime in Venezuela 26 years ago, focusing on the nature of the relationship between the two countries in the financial world. This revealed the connectivity between Hezbollah and the drug trade coming out of Colombia via Venezuela, which led to investigations of Hamas and then, to drug trafficking into US.
He says that in 2008, after he briefed US Congress on the Iranian Hezbollah threat in Latin America, the DEA recruited him to work at their Special Operations Division (SOD) in Chantilly, Virginia in Project Cassandra, which successfully tracked Hezbollah’s connections with drug cartels in Mexico, Colombia, and other parts of the South American continent.
He says that when Project Cassandra really started to get cooking, it was abruptly canceled by the Obama administration for “no reason”, although it was widely speculated that this was to protect Obama’s nuclear negotiations with Iran.
Regardless, the SOD continued their investigations of Venezuela’s Chavista Regime. Martín’s role was primarily focused on recruiting hundreds of witnesses against Nicolás Maduro and Hugo Chávez. They described to him how the Cartel de los Soles was created out of a political motivation.
Martín describes one witness who was very important in this investigation, who had been Chávez’ body man. “Not the bodyguard,” Martín says, “The body man, the person who was the shadow of Hugo Chávez for 13 years,” who he says he can’t name now or he and his family will be killed but, “One day, I will come back here and name those heroes, those anonymous heroes that actually helped the US Government to understand the nature of this of this criminal enterprise.”
This body man was the first witness who described to Martín the genesis of the Cartel de los Soles, under Cuba’s orders back in 2004. Fidel Castro met with Hugo Chávez and told him, “We need to help the FARC in Colombia to fight the United States.”
FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) were Communist guerrillas in Colombia who Martín says were set up in the 1960s by the Soviet Union and Cuba, who were funding similar narcoterrorist movements throughout Latin America, particularly in Honduras, Salvador, Guatemala and Venezuela. FARC were the only guerrillas from the Soviet Union era that survived after its collapse, due to the drug business. When the Soviet Union disappeared, FARC remained in control of cocaine production.
The US supported the Colombian government under President Álvaro Uribe Vélez to fight the FARC, which he militarily defeated with the help of the US 7th Group Special Forces and other programs under Plan Colombia.
Hugo Chávez’ body man told Martín, “I was in the meeting with Fidel, who came to Caracas and instructed Hugo Chávez, ‘You need to do this, because we need to defeat the Americans in Colombia. And the only way we can accomplish this is if we make the FARC financially stronger.’” To do that, they needed to help them to move the drugs through Venezuela.
Martín continues, “Venezuela and Colombia share probably 3,000 miles of border, unprotected border, and the drugs flow in and out. But until then, Venezuela was a petro state, not a narco state, because we produced oil. So, when that happened, Hugo Chávez gave instructions to his former head of military intelligence, Hugo Carvajal Barrios, who is now in a federal prison in the United States...in the same prison as Nicolás Maduro today.”
“People on the Venezuelan Payroll Are STILL Inside the US Government” - Hugo Carvajal is seen in at the far right of this photograph taken a couple of months ago at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, NY. Accused USHealthCare assassin, Luigi Mangione is seen second from left.
The Venezuelan military began assisting FARC to move drugs through their territory and they started realizing how much money they could make. Martín says that, instead of letting the original Colombian narcos stay in control, they took over to become the distribution hub of cocaine in the world.
Martín says the Venezuelan government started distributing cocaine from Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru. Years later, he says the Cartel began to ship fentanyl precursors from China, along with cocaine to Mexico, to be sold in the US.
He notes that every major producer of cocaine in South America had Communist leaders: Gustavo Petro, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa. This was all of a piece.
He says:
“It’s a marriage between criminal enterprise and ideology – Leftist ideology – and one ultimate goal: to ‘Poison the streets of the United States, poison the American kids.’ So you will help the FARC to fight the United States Army, the Seventh Group, helping Colombia to fight with them. At the same time, we’re going to make sure we flood Mexico with cocaine, so the Mexican cartels can distribute it inside the United States.
“’We can never defeat the United States by conventional warfare, but we can do hybrid warfare.’ And the hybrid warfare was ‘Let’s bring cocaine’...that’s how Cartel de los Soles was born, around 2005. The Army of Venezuela and the name ‘Cartel de los Soles’ comes because the generals in Venezuela do not have a stars [on their epaulets]. They have suns.”
At this point, the US was invading Iraq and Afghanistan and the oil price was up to $140-$150 per barrel and Venezuela was being flooded with cash from oil sales and from cocaine. The Venezuelan state mafia was accumulating wealth that no other mafia had ever seen.
While at OFAC, Martín worked with the Assistant Secretary of Treasury for Financial Crimes and Terrorism, Marshall Billingslea and he began to understand Venezuela’s crimes more from the perspective of the weaponization of the money to corrupt governments around the world. He saw how the Cartel put allies in certain positions, in order to facilitate the logistics of the cocaine and the attack against the United States.
Martín says this massive criminal enterprise, worth between $2.3-$3.5 trillion exploded during President Obama’s administration, which was not supportive of the work of the DEA and which actually had several policies that were favorable to the Chavista Regime:
1) Members of the Cartel de los Soles were enlisted to facilitate Obama’s reconciliation with Fidel Castro, for the Cuban Thaw. Venezuelan cartel members literally organized Obama’s trip to Havana.
2) The Obama administration initiated the Colombian peace process with FARC, whereby the US Treasury lifted the sanctions on FARC, allowing them access to billions of dollars that had been frozen, that they then used to fund the current Communist president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro.
3) The Iran nuclear deal lifted the sanctions on elements of the Iranian government, allowing Hezbollah to roam freely throughout Latin America and that facilitated Venezuela’s receipt of Iranian weapons, including drones. The Chavista Regime provided passports to members of Hamas, Hezbollah and the IRGC. Iranian terrorists were crossing the US border using Venezuelan passports and they were flying to Mexico to meet with narco cartels.
All of this was very galling to Martín, who goes on to highlight how the Cartel has corrupted every government that they could, saying, “For example, in the Caribbean, how much is the cost of a political campaign of the Prime Minister of Martinique or Barbados? $30 million. That’s one boat that we are seeing on the news being blown up. That’s it. That’s what it costs for one candidate that will play the game with you and you keep his party for the next 20 years.”
Then, of course, there’s the Smartmatic software, which was a mere pittance for the Cartel to develop with their unlimited financial resources. Martín says, “So the cartels were not only poisoning the United States people, they were hijacking the election process, the democracy...For many years in the US, the American People have been voting on software built by a cartel of drugs!”
Martín explains that the DEA looks for kilos of drugs and they let the other agencies handle other crimes. So, it was challenging for him to make them understand that, “There was a bigger problem than the cocaine, itself,” that had to do with this sophisticated criminal entity involving Cuba, China, Russia, and Iran and that the Cartel had acquired a company in Colorado named Sequoia, who owned the 20% of the election market of the United States and had installed their own narco software into those machines.
He says that what had started out as a drug-trafficking problem became a “supernova of criminality”, when they discovered the human trafficking. This was how they found out about Tren de Aragua and how it had been created by the Regime to go after the Venezuelan opposition. The Regime realized TdA were so good at killing dissidents, that they didn’t need to involve the police and that by using criminal gangs to kill and torture their political opponents, it could be made to look like “street crime” and they could avoid incurring the opprobrium of being labeled a “police state killing the poor people from the opposition.”
Martín says:
“We now have a nation-state converted into a criminal organization, that went from being a petro-state into a narco-state, who allied with every enemy of the United States in the world and that has been waging hybrid warfare against the United States...with diplomatic immunity and with incredible penetration of the US financial system, because they own CITGO inside the US, so, they have access to the financial system. They have access to the business community. They have a legitimate business installed in the country...
“[It] is unacceptable that the US National Security apparatus did not confront it. And it’s only being confronted by President Donald J. Trump. God bless him!”
Lara asks him, “What’s the role of the Chinese in all of this?” and he replies, “The Chinese are the worst of all the [Venezuela] supporters. Almost as bad as the Cubans, because the Chinese are very sophisticated, in pretending they are not involved. But they are the ones who were actually managing and controlling Maduro.”
His investigation found that the Smartmatic voting machines were were made in China and shipped to Taiwan and relabeled as “Made in Taiwan”, so they could enter the US market. He says Chinese spyware-laden hardware and Venezuelan software have been choosing who sits at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue ever since.
Lara Logan brings up the very important topic that none of this would have been possible without traitors from within the US. At first, Martín skirts the issue by saying that most of the traitors are blackmailed, either by money or by the political help they get from the machines. Then, he says that a small amount of Americans have chosen to betray their country, which he says is very difficult for him, because he was born in a country that was destroyed by Communism.
Despite the mainstream media trying to focus on clueless Americans who were against the capture of Maduro, it couldn’t stop the tide of videos, photographs and commentary from elated Venezuelans all over the world. Martín adds that it is not only the Venezuelans who are celebrating but Colombians, Brazilians, Chileans, Argentineans and people all over Latin America who have suffered the consequence of this cancer spreading all over the region and who are grateful to the US and to President Trump for doing this.
Martín is annoyed by claims that the capture of Maduro was “all about the oil”, saying:
“The US has paid for every drop of oil ever taken from Venezuela. The US is the only country in the world that has taken Venezuelan oil, paying for it. Just to give you an example, Cuba for 26 years got from Venezuela 100k, 150k barrels of oil per day – per day – for free!
“Cuba did not go to Venezuela, looking for the ‘Recipe for the arepas‘, neither the Chinese! They were there for the oil!
“The oil industry in Venezuela was built by the American oil industry. Venezuela stopped being a rural country and became a very strong economy in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s because the generosity of the American oil industry to provide the expertise to the locals on how to build their own oil industry. So when I hear people saying, “Oh, the American government just wants to go for the oil,” let me tell you, I’m so happy to hear that! Because that’s the only people in the world who actually pay for the Venezuelan oil!”
Although Martín does intimate that 3rd-generation CIA asset, Barack Obama enabled the worst narco-Communist-terror-pariah regimes of the world and that the Biden/Autopen/Obama’s-3rd-administration quickly released and gave full presidential pardons to what he called the “most important” Venezuelan cartel members, all mention of the CIA is noticeably absent from Martín’s account.
This is curious, given that his associate, Patrick Byrne announced last August that the CIA was behind the theft of the 2020 election, telling Alex Jones, “The CIA was behind this with China. The top of the CIA. Mike Pompeo and his CIA was involved in the 2020 hack.”
“Mike Pompeo and His CIA” Were Behind the 2020 Election Theft with China - Pub. Aug 12, 2025
Observing the CIA-controlled mainstream media coverage in response to the US capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and of Iran’s murderous crackdown on their protestors, it’s apparent that the Establishment/Deep State is on the side of these pariah regimes and not on the side of their supposed American audience.
It’s apparent the Establishment/Deep State wants Iranians living under Islamist tyranny and funneling their oil wealth into Hezbollah terrorism worldwide.
It’s apparent the Establishment/Deep State wants Venezuelans to remain in a failed state, ruled by drug lords, with the proceeds from their vast natural resources continuing to be stolen from them and flowing into Iran to finance Hezbollah.
It’s apparent the Establishment/Deep State wants South America to continue growing into a hotbed of Maoism, Hezbollah and narcoterrorism for the purpose of one day overthrowing the US because – let’s not forget – that’s what the Border Invasion of 20+ million criminal aliens from the Biden administration is all about.
It became crystal clear with Biden’s border invasion that the Chavistas’ goal to overthrow the US and to impose global Communism is the exact same goal of the United Nations, the Vatican and all the religious NGOs, who partnered with the narco cartels to import millions of Third World denizens into the US, to destroy the tax-paying American Middle Class.
Corporations and high net worth individuals are known to domicile their business entities in secrecy jurisdictions to circumvent regulations and taxation. Such tax havens are also exploited by the drug cartels and the banks. The cartels take laundered funds to buy hard assets while the banks gain much-needed liquidity and large fees, to the point where Russia’s top drug enforcement official, Viktor Ivanov observed, “Narco money is the foundation of the modern financial system.”
Reflecting on the mainstream media’s evident support for pariah states like the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela and the Islamic Republic of Iran, one wonders if these rogue states are as vital to the functioning of the Establishment/Deep State as these private banking tax havens, like Switzerland, Delaware, the Cayman Islands, etc?
