Development: On 2 August Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro appointed General Néstor Reverol as his new interior minister, just a day after Reverol was indicted by US authorities on drug trafficking charges.
Significance: Maduro slammed the charges as a renewed attack on Venezuela by “the US empire” and praised Reverol. The appointment may add to the suspicion that the Venezuelan military is now effectively running the government; in July Maduro made the cabinet and all government ministries answerable to the head of the military (and defence minister), General Vladimir Padrino López, in the general’s new role at the helm of a ‘national supply command’.
- In early July, Reverol was removed from his post as head of the national guard (GNB) without explanation but was thanked by the president for “hard work, morals and honesty”. The US justice charges against Reverol relate to his time as general director of Venezuela’s anti-drugs agency (ONA). He, along with Edylberto José Molina Molina, the former deputy director of the ONA and currently Venezuela’s military attaché in Germany, are accused of taking part in “an international cocaine distribution conspiracy” from January 2008 to December 2010. The charges allege that in their official capacities at the ONA, Reverol and Molina received payments from drug traffickers in exchange for assistance in transporting cocaine bound for the US.
- Reverol previously served as interior minister under Maduro’s late predecessor Hugo Chávez (1999-2013). “As interior minister, he broke the world record for capturing traffickers; that is why they want to make him pay - the DEA [US Drug Enforcement Administration] and all the US drug mafias”, Maduro declared yesterday. “That's why I have named this brave, combative, experienced man...I offer all my personal support...to him and his family, after he has been attacked by the US empire”.
Looking Ahead: Unexpectedly, Maduro yesterday also removed the vice-president for economy & industry, Miguel Pérez Abad. “I told him to rest for five or six days. I have given him a new mission - we will announce it soon”, the president stated. The move will alarm the local private business sector, as Pérez, a former head of a local small business association, Fedeindustria, was seen as amenable to some of the reforms needed to get the domestic economy out of its deep rut, including currency reform. Pérez was appointed to the post in February, replacing a radical Marxist economist Luis Salas, who, controversially, denied the existence of inflation in Venezuela.
