By John J. Metzler, May 18, 2025In what was akin to a celebration of global dictators and political rogues, Venezuela’s Marxist dictator Nicholas Maduro visited Moscow to join Vladimir Putin in celebrating Russia’s May 9th Victory Day Parade, the 80th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s triumph over Nazi Germany.
Putin’s pantheon included Communist China’s leader Xi Jinping, and predictable sycophants such as Serbia’s President Aleksandar Vucic, the Palestinian President, Vietnam’s leader, and socialist rogues such as Brazil’s President Lula da Silva, among others.
Victory Day remains a historically sacred day for Russia and a symbolic high point in Putin’s cult of personality, pseudo-patriotism and propaganda. Massive military parades with troops, tanks and aircraft flyovers have long evoked the former Soviets and now of course Putin’s Russia.
As an extra touch Chinese People’s Liberation Army Troops goose-stepped in Red Square, to honor the Moscow/Beijing Alliance.
Russia’s Victory Day follows Western Europe’s Victory in Europe Day (VE Day), celebrated by the U.S., France, and the United Kingdom as the surrender of Nazi Germany.
But when Maduro returned to his capital Caracas, he was soon shocked by the escape of five key political opposition figures who were slipped out of the country by the United States!
The five who were sheltering in the Argentine embassy in Caracas for over a year, were spirited out after Donald Trump gave the nod to a special extraction operation. The five including Magalli Meda, Claudia Macero, and Humberto Villalobos, had been working for the presidential campaign of opposition leader Maria Corina Machado last year when regime thugs tried to arrest them. They are now safely in Miami, Florida.
Venezuela's opposition leader María Corina Machado remains in hiding in her country. On a exclusive interview on Sunday Morning Futures on FOX News, Maria Machado thanked President Trump and his "great Team for such a complex and precise operation” to free the opposition prisoners in Caracas. She stressed Maduro still holds 900 political prisoners.
The UN Human Rights office in Geneva decried the “continuing crackdown on government critics in Venezuela” which is “fueling a climate of fear.”
Last July Nicolas Maduro was “reelected” to his third term as president but the opposition and many countries, including the U.S. and international observers, reject the result as rigged and fraudulent and recognize the now-exiled opposition candidate Edmundo González as the legitimate president-elect.
Venezuela, an oil rich and once reasonably prosperous South American country, has over the past twenty-five years sunk into a socialist quagmire.
First the charismatic Hugo Chavez and then autocrat Maduro have turned Venezuela, despite its oil wealth, into a regime of mismanagement, corruption and authoritarian political control. The once democratic country has become dependent on China for economic support and Cuba for political inspiration.
Naturally much of the Venezuelan story is lubricated in oil, in this case by petroleum politics with the American company Chevron, a major investor. Nonetheless, late in the Biden Administration oil export sanctions were eased.
Now Donald Trump has said, “The United States will not tolerate any third-countries or their oil companies producing, extracting, or exporting oil and oil-related products with the Maduro regime in Venezuela. This is a regime that has consistently stolen elections, pillaged from its people, and colluded with our enemies. Any country that allows its companies to produce, extract, or export from Venezuela will be subject to new tariffs, and any companies will be subject to sanctions.”
China and India are major purchasers of Venezuelan petroleum.
Given the political turbulence over the past two decades, there’s massive migration/exodus of Venezuelans including the former bedrock middle class. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) over 7.9 million Venezuelans have fled their country as migrants and refugees; 1.3 million are seeking asylum mostly in Latin American countries, Colombia, Brazil, Peru and Argentina have taken the lion’s share of the migrants on at least a temporary basis.
Now in the USA there’s over one million Venezuelans; mostly settled in Florida. But among legal migrants there’s a dangerous undertow of Venezuelan gangs, such as the notorious Tren de Aragua organization. In the case of the gangs, the U.S. has been facing self-inflicted chaos in American “sanctuary” cities including New York.
Maria Machado’s appeal is clear, to re-emerge “as a reliable partner of the U.S.” to bring stability to the Latin American region, and “to turn Venezuela from the criminal hub to the energy hub.”
She calls it a “Win-Win” for the United States and a free Venezuela.
John J. Metzler is a United Nations correspondent covering diplomatic and defense issues. He is the author of Divided Dynamism the Diplomacy of Separated Nations: Germany, Korea, China (2014). [See pre-2011 Archives]
