Donald Trump's supposed takeover of Venezuela has more in common with the mafia than any actual diplomacy, former US ambassador John Feeley told the New York Times, claiming that the administration is not looking to run a country, but rather to "get an envelope."
Following the US military attack on Venezuela and the arrest of President Nicolás Maduro over the weekend, Trump claimed that forces within his administration would be in control of the South American nation until a proper transition to a new government is underway. These claims ran counter to the reality in Venezuela, where Vice President Delcy Rodriguez was named acting president and said, "Never again will we be slaves, never again will we be a colony of any empire.”
On Tuesday, Times opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg published a piece arguing that full-on regime change or taking direct control of Venezuela are not the real goals of Trump's incursion into Venezuela. Leaving Maduro's regime largely in place without him "makes sense," Goldberg suggested, "given that his goal is extortion, not political transformation."
This idea was crystallized by a statement given to the Times by Feeley, arguing that the real comparison to be made to the situation in Venezuela is mob takeovers, in which a new family takes control of another and takes a portion of its profits. Feeley previously served as the US ambassador to Panama and has extensive diplomatic experience with Latin America.
“When Donald Trump says, ‘We’re going to run the place,’ I want you to think of the Gambino family taking over the Colombo family’s business out in Queens,” Feeley said. “They don’t actually go out and run it. They just get an envelope.”
"Trump wants a few things in that envelope," Goldberg wrote. "Chiefly access to Venezuela’s oil reserves, the largest in the world; less migration from Venezuela; and the country’s acceptance of more deportees from America. At least in the short term, he may well get them."
While Rodriguez struck a defiant tone upon taking office as acting president, other experts Goldberg spoke to said those words were strictly "for domestic consumption." In a later post to social media, she seemed much more open to cooperation with the US, writing, "We extend an invitation to the U.S. government to work together on a cooperative agenda, oriented toward shared development."
Javier Corrales, a professor at Amherst, called the Trump administration's approach "very odd, historically."
“To see that you get rid of the leader, but the regime stays in place," Corrales explained.
