The recipient of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize and Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado praised President Donald Trump for helping to cut off funding to what she called a “criminal narco-terrorist structure.”
“The strategy of President Trump towards this criminal narco-terrorist structure is absolutely correct,” she said Wednesday at the America Business Forum in Miami, “because Nicolás Maduro is not a legitimate head of state, he is the head of this narco-terrorist structure that has declared war on the Venezuelan people and the two democratic nations in the region.”
“These criminal structures sustain themselves under the money that comes from drug trafficking … and you need to cut those cash flows, and that’s precisely what President Trump is doing to protect millions of lives of American citizens, Latin American citizens and certainly Venezuelan citizens.”
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Maduro, who has ruled Venezuela since 2013, has been accused by the U.S. government and human rights groups of election fraud and ties to narco-trafficking networks.
Machado, a leading figure in Venezuela’s pro-democracy movement, has long voiced support for the Trump administration’s actions against Maduro’s regime and the country’s narco-trafficking network. She was barred from running in Venezuela’s presidential election earlier this year and has become a key figure in the country’s pro-democracy resistance.
Last month, Fox News reported that a U.S. strike killed 11 suspected Tren de Aragua narco-terrorists transporting drugs from Venezuela. Two weeks later, Trump ordered a nighttime U.S. strike on another suspected Tren de Aragua vessel in the Caribbean Sea — marking the 10th such strike targeting drug-trafficking boats since he returned to office.
Tren de Aragua is a violent Venezuelan criminal organization that has expanded operations into several Latin American countries and the U.S., according to law enforcement agencies.
“Maduro started this war, and President Trump is ending that war,” Machado said Wednesday. “This is a critical issue that all Americans, all people in the Americas have to understand – Venezuela has been turned into the main bridgehead of the adversaries of the United States and its criminal networks and enemies that support them. So now … our territory, our resources, our institutions have been captured by these actors, these criminal actors.”
“A transition to democracy will certainly dismantle this and turn Venezuela into the strongest security ally of the United States.”
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Fox News’ Sophia Compton and Michael Dorgan contributed to this report.
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