Maduro’s executioner faces a difficult transition and there is a price on his head

They could expect government agents to show up and take them away.

That’s exactly what happened last year to Juan Pablo Guanipaa prominent opposition politician, after the Minister of the Interior, Diosdado Hairwill attack him harshly on his weekly program.

Guanipa was arrested, accused of terrorism and treason and sent to prison, where he remains.

For more than a decade, Cabello’s show, “Con el Mazo Dando,” is one of the ways, experts say, he has overseen the repression machinery from Venezuela.

When the United States raided Venezuela this month and captured its president, Nicolas Maduro the Trump administration called it a police operation, pointing to a new indictment accusing Maduro of narcoterrorism.

Another prominent name in the accusation?

And like Maduro, the US government has offered a reward for his capture.

However, Cabello remains firmly in power, she is part of the interim leader’s central circle. Delcy Rodriguez and is seen at his side in televised events.

But since Rodríguez needs to appease the president Donald Trumpone of his biggest challenges could be Cabello, arguably the second most powerful figure in his government, whose fate is now intertwined with the fate of the political movement that has ruled Venezuela for more than two decades.

Through allies, it controls the security services, pro-government militias known as collectives, deployed to suppress dissent, and has close ties to the Venezuelan military.

In late 2024, he helped install a cousin to head the country’s secret police, known as SEBIN.

Cabello and the forces under his command are some of the most fervently anti-imperialist members of a movement whose roots are anchored in resistance to foreign intervention.

While he has publicly supported Rodríguez, he has also continued to condemn the US incursion, calling it in a speech “barbaric and treacherous attack.”

Cabello, in a recent broadcast with police commandos, stated that the country had remained calm after the US attack thanks to the state monopoly on weapons.

“We are guarantors of the country’s tranquility,” he said, a comment that, according to some experts, suggests Cabello’s heavy hand.

“It’s a very revealing speech about the role he wants to play, and also a threat about what could happen if he is pursued,” said Verónica Zubillaga, a Venezuelan sociologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago who studies violence in Venezuela.

“It is a warning to be careful, because it can unleash waves of extreme violence.”

Cabello is widely considered to represent the most opaque and hardline wing of Chavismo, the political movement founded by Maduro’s predecessor and mentor, Hugo Chavez.

A former Venezuelan government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, said Cabello was a mystery even within the upper levels of his government, with no personal ties except to a small number of military officers.

Few Venezuelan officials have more to lose from a weakening of government control:

The United States has charged him with drug trafficking, accused him of directing a transnational criminal network and has offered him a payment of 25 million dollars for information leading to his arrest. The United Nations and human rights organizations have cited him in some of Venezuela’s most serious abuses.

“He’s as bad a guy as Maduro, if not worse,” said Risa Grais-Targow, Latin America director at Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy.

A Venezuelan government spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about Cabello.

For years, Rodríguez and Cabello have represented opposing currents within Chavismo: she, the outspoken technocrat focused on sanctions relief; he, the inflexible militant.

Today they share an interest in the survival of Chavismo:

She needs him to maintain control of the country and he needs her to safeguard his position in a government sympathetic to the United States.

Cabello, 62, was born in the eastern state of Monagas and, as a teenager, joined a far-left student group that prefigured Chavismo.

Later, he trained as a military officer, graduating in 1987 from the Venezuelan Military Academy and obtaining two degrees in engineering.

He met Chávez at the military academy, where they played together on the baseball team.

He and Chávez were part of a group of military officers who mounted a failed coup against a democratically elected government in 1992.

In the years that followed, Cabello was an important ally of Chávez as he built his political movement, helping to organize grassroots organizations and consolidating different factions to create a disciplined political machine.

During Chávez’s presidency, he became a fixture of power, serving separately as governor, head of the National Assembly, cabinet minister, and vice president.

Zair Mundaray, a former Venezuelan prosecutor who spent 17 years in the Attorney General’s Office and investigated Cabello, said corruption followed him in every position he held.

“You could make an encyclopedia of all the crimes that Diosdado Cabello has committed,” said Mundaray, who went into exile in 2017.

“If there is something to steal, steal it.”

Chavismo, a mix of populism, nationalism and state control of key industries, such as oil, was founded by Chávez, who was elected president in 1998.

Buoyed by a prolonged oil boom in the 2000s, the government expanded social programs and reduced poverty, but falling oil prices triggered an extraordinary economic collapse, a mass exodus and popular discontent. The government’s response was to repress dissent.

Cabello has long controlled the system that has sustained the government: arresting, torturing and disappearing political opponents, while undermining democratic institutions.

Multiple former intelligence agents, detainees and senior Venezuelan officials told UN investigators in a report that Cabello gave direct orders to the SEBIN intelligence service, including who to arrest, release and torture.

Cabello opposed, according to analysts, the July 2024 elections, which Maduro agreed to hold in exchange for partial relief from US sanctions.

Although counts compiled by the opposition and verified by international observers indicated a decisive defeat for Maduro, he declared himself the winner. He would use Cabello to legitimize his authority.

A month after the election, Maduro appointed Cabello as interior minister, a decision widely interpreted as a rebuke to Rodríguez and his brother Jorge, the president of the National Assembly, who experts said had supported the elections, and an acknowledgment that Maduro’s government would resort to brute force to maintain power.

Cabello soon announced the implementation of the “Operation Knock Knock”the deployment of security forces to raid homes and arrest government opponents.

In total, the government claimed to have arrested more than 2,000 people for protesting the election results, a police campaign widely denounced by human rights organizations.

From his new position, Cabello consolidated authority over the intelligence services, the national police, the national guard and armed civilian groups known as collectives.

Although Cabello has softened some of his rhetoric attacking the United States since Maduro’s capture, experts say he has long opposed any form of international liberalization or opening.

“I consider him an old-school dictator,” said David Smilde, a sociologist who studies violence in Venezuela at Tulane University and lived in the country part-time until last year.

“You see your government as a sweater. If you pull a thread, everything falls apart.”

Antonio Marval, a lawyer appointed to the Supreme Court of Justice several years ago by Venezuela’s legislature, which at the time was controlled by the opposition, recalled how his appointment quickly put him in Cabello’s crosshairs.

On July 17, 2017, Cabello warned on his program that the new magistrates appointed by the legislature, including Marval, would be the target of attacks.

“We all know that when a public threat is launched in “Con el Mazo Dando”, with the national reach that its presenter had and still has, it is accompanied by concrete actions,” said Marval.

“The message was clear: silence us, bend us and instill fear.”

Shortly afterward he fled Venezuela and escaped by boat to Curacao.

For some critics, Cabello embodies the most unpleasant features of Venezuela’s Chavista revolution: a system built not on popular consent but on fear, violence and corruption.

“If the United States wanted to do something more or very decisive,” Grais-Targow said, “I think he would be the most obvious target.”