Exclusive-US talks with hardline Venezuelan minister Cabello began months before raid

By Erin Banco, Sarah Kinosian and Matt Spetalnick

NEW YORK/MIAMI/WASHINGTON, Jan 17 (Reuters) – Trump administration officials had been in discussions with Venezuela’s hardline interior minister Diosdado Cabello months before the U.S. operation to seize President Nicolas Maduro, and have been in communication with him since then, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

The officials warned Cabello, 62, against using the security services or militant ruling-party supporters he oversees to target the country’s opposition, four sources said. That security apparatus, which includes the intelligence services, police and the armed forces, remains largely intact after the January 3 U.S. raid that captured Maduro.

Cabello is named in the same U.S. drug-trafficking indictment that the Trump administration used as justification to arrest Maduro, but was not taken as part of the operation.

The communication with Cabello, which has also touched on sanctions the U.S. has imposed on him and the indictment he faces, dates back to the early days of the current Trump administration and continued in the weeks just prior to the U.S. ouster of Maduro, two sources familiar with the discussions said. The administration has also been in touch with Cabello since Maduro’s ouster, four of the people said.

The communications, which have not been previously reported, are critical to the Trump administration’s efforts to control the situation inside Venezuela. If Cabello decides to unleash the forces that he controls, it could foment the kind of chaos that U.S. President Donald Trump wants to avoid and threaten interim President Delcy Rodriguez’s grip on power, according to a source briefed on U.S. concerns.

It is not clear if the Trump administration’s discussions with Cabello extended to questions about the future governance of Venezuela. Also unclear is whether Cabello has heeded the U.S. warnings. He has publicly pledged unity with Rodriguez, whom Trump has so far praised.

While Rodriguez has been seen by the U.S. as the linchpin for Trump’s strategy for post-Maduro Venezuela, Cabello is widely believed to have the power to keep those plans on track or upend them.

The Venezuelan minister has been in contact with the Trump administration both directly and via intermediaries, one person familiar with the conversations said.

All of the sources were granted anonymity to speak freely about sensitive internal government communications with Cabello.

Following the publication of this story, Venezuela’s government said in a statement: “We categorically deny the malicious information published on social media about alleged secret conspiratorial conversations aimed at dividing the country’s political high command and seeking to undermine the prestige and revolutionary integrity of Diosdado Cabello.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

CABELLO HAS BEEN MADURO LOYALIST

Long seen as Venezuela’s second-most powerful figure, Cabello was a close aide of late former President Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s mentor, and went on to become a long-time Maduro loyalist, feared as his main enforcer of repression. Rodriguez and Cabello have both operated at the heart of the government, legislature and ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela for years, but have never been considered close allies of each other.

A former military officer, Cabello has exerted influence over the country’s military and civilian counterintelligence agencies, which conduct widespread domestic espionage. He has also been closely associated with pro-government militias, notably the colectivos, groups of motorcycle-riding armed civilians who have been deployed to attack protesters.

Cabello is one of a handful of Maduro loyalists Washington has relied on as temporary rulers to maintain stability while it accesses the OPEC nation’s oil reserves during an unspecified transition period.

But U.S. officials are concerned that Cabello – given his record of repression and history of rivalry with Rodriguez – could play the spoiler, according to a source briefed on the administration’s thinking.

Rodriguez has been working to consolidate her own power, installing loyalists in key positions to protect herself from internal threats while meeting U.S. demands to boost oil production, Reuters interviews with sources in Venezuela have shown.

Elliott Abrams, who served as Trump’s special representative on Venezuela in his first term, said many Venezuelans would expect Cabello to be removed at some point if a democratic transition is to advance.

“If and when he goes, Venezuelans will know that the regime has really begun to change,” said Abrams, now at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank.

US SANCTIONS AND INDICTMENT

Cabello has long been under U.S. sanctions for alleged drug trafficking.

In 2020, the U.S. issued a $10 million bounty for Cabello and indicted him as a key figure in the “Cartel de los Soles,” a group the U.S. has said is a Venezuelan drug-trafficking network led by members of the country’s government.

The U.S. has since raised the award to $25 million. Cabello has publicly denied any links to drug trafficking.

In the hours after Maduro’s ouster, some analysts and politicians in Washington questioned why the U.S. didn’t also grab Cabello – listed second in the Department of Justice indictment of Maduro.

“I know that just Diosdado is probably worse than Maduro and worse than Delcy,” Republican U.S. Representative Maria Elvira Salazar said in an interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” program on January 11.

In the days following, Cabello denounced U.S. intervention in the country, saying in a speech that “Venezuela will not surrender.”

But media reports of residents being searched at checkpoints – sometimes by uniformed members of the security forces and sometimes by people in plain clothes – have become less frequent in recent days.

And both Trump and the Venezuelan government have said many detainees who are considered by the opposition and rights groups to be political prisoners will be released.

The government has said Cabello, in his role as interior minister, is overseeing that effort. Rights groups say the liberations are proceeding extremely slowly and hundreds remain unjustly detained.

(Reporting by Erin Banco in New York, Sarah Kinosian in Miami and Matt Spetalnick in Washington; Editing by Don Durfee, Rosalba O’Brien and Paul Simao)