U.S. drug probe won’t topple Venezuela regime

(PHOTO: REUTERS/MARCO BELLO)

There has been a lot of excitement among critics of Venezuela’s authoritarian populist government about new reports confirming that U.S. authorities are investigating Venezuela’s No. 2 official on drug trafficking charges, but — unfortunately — the news will have very little political impact in that country.

The May 18 report in The Wall Street Journal, which is based on more than a dozen sources and confirmed previous articles by Spain’s daily ABC that U.S. federal prosecutors are building a drug trafficking case against the president of Venezuela’s Congress, Diosdado Cabello, and other top government officials, will not further discredit the Venezuelan government at home, several well-known Venezuelan pollsters told me.

“Whether it’s true or not, this story has been heard many times in Venezuela, ” says Luis Vicente Leon, head of the Caracas-based Datanalisis polling firm. “It may have an impact among the elites, but the people on the street can’t tell the difference between The Wall Street Journal and some obscure website where they may have read this in the past.”

Leon added that “it won’t have a political impact at the mass level.” Conversely, it won’t help President Nicolás Maduro’s government either, as one could have assumed in light of the slight uptick in Maduro’s popularity after President Barack Obama’s March 9 executive decree denying U.S. visas and freezing U.S. assets of seven Venezuelan government figures suspected of corruption and human rights abuses.

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