A day after the United States deposed Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, one of his cabinet members who received military training in Georgia blasted the move as a “cowardly kidnapping” and demanded Maduro’s immediate release.
Flanked by fellow armed Venezuelan soldiers in uniform, Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López said in a televised address that U.S. forces “murdered in cold blood a large part” of Maduro’s security team. Venezuelan troops, he added, would use all of their “available capabilities for military defense, the maintenance of internal order, and the preservation of peace.”
Padrino López is well known by U.S. authorities. As a captain in 1995, he studied psychological operations for two months at a special U.S. military school at Fort Benning for Latin American troops, according to records obtained by School of the Americas Watch, an advocacy group that called for the school’s closure.
And in 2019, a federal grand jury in Washington charged Padrino López with conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute cocaine on an aircraft registered in the United States. The U.S. State Department has offered up to $15 million for information leading to his arrest and conviction.
The Venezuelan government, contacted through its United Nations delegation, did not respond to requests for comment.
Venezuela had a close relationship with the U.S. military for decades before distancing itself in 2004. The School of the Americas Watch’s records, for example, show more than 3,500 instances of Venezuelan officials studying at American military schools between the 1940s and 2004, including the school at Georgia’s Fort Benning and an institute that replaced it following a storm of controversy. The Venezuelans were taught a variety of subjects, including infantry tactics, advanced combat weapons and military policing.
The Trump administration — which does not recognize Maduro as president and Padrino López as a government minister — has accused Maduro’s regime of corruption and gross mismanagement, saying millions of Venezuelans have fled their homeland to escape hyperinflation and widespread poverty.
Yet much of Maduro’s administration remains in place after the surprise U.S. military raid. Padrino López still wields power alongside Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who was sworn in this month as interim leader. And Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello Rondón, who faces firearms- and cocaine-related charges in the United States, continues to oversee the nation’s security services and prisons.
Brian Naranjo, a retired senior U.S. diplomat who was stationed in Venezuela, described the arrest of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, as a “biopsy.”
“We stuck the long needle into the tumor of Venezuela, and we pulled out two cells: Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores,” Naranjo said. “The tumor is still there. And I don’t know how this plays out.”
Defense minister named after Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Padrino López, 62, is a four-star general who is named after Russian Communist leader Vladimir Lenin, The Wall Street Journal reported this month. After Hugo Chávez became president in 1999, Padrino López began installing loyalists in the military and purging it of dissenters, according to the Journal, which also reported he had spent time at the School of the Americas.
Maduro became president following Chavez’s death in 2013. The following year, Maduro appointed Padrino López as Venezuela’s defense minister and also put him in charge of distributing free food aid to loyalists.
“Padrino López has really become a linchpin in what is now the Venezuelan state apparatus,” said Alejandro Velasco, a Venezuela-born New York University history professor who wrote “Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela.”
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration began investigating Padrino López the year he became defense minister, focusing on allegations that he was facilitating the shipment of cocaine on planes from Venezuela to Central America. He is accused of charging organizations a protection fee to allow the planes’ safe passage out of Venezuela and then funding political campaigns in his homeland with the proceeds, according to the U.S. State Department.
Meanwhile, his family built a web of companies and real estate in Venezuela and the U.S. worth millions of dollars, according to an article published in 2020 by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project in Amsterdam. That web, the report alleged, includes a travel firm in Sunrise, Florida, that helps people obtain Venezuelan passports.
Though he received military training in the United States and has allegedly invested heavily here, Padrino López has sharply criticized the country. As the U.S. military built an armada off Venezuela’s shores ahead of Maduro’s arrest, The Telegraph newspaper in London reported, Padrino López called the United States “one of the most genocidal empires in human history.”
Credit: Rob Carr / AP
Credit: Rob Carr / AP
‘Not a human rights academy’
Started in 1946 in Panama and originally named the Latin American Center, the School of the Americas came under intense criticism after many of its graduates were accused of human rights abuses. Among them were 19 Salvadoran soldiers linked to the 1989 assassination of six Jesuit priests; Panamanian dictator Manuel Antonio Noriega, who was deposed and imprisoned in the United States on a drug conviction; and six Peruvian officers connected to the killings of students and a professor, The New York Times and The Washington Post reported.
The School of the Americas, which moved to Fort Benning near Columbus, Georgia, in 1984, drew scrutiny again in 1996 when the U.S. Defense Department declassified a report. That report disclosed the school trained Latin American military officials with a manual that said officials seeking to recruit and control informants could use “fear, payment of bounties for enemy dead, beatings, false imprisonment, executions and the use of truth serum.”
In 2000, Congress shut down the school and established a new one in its place at Fort Benning, calling it the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation. The legislation creating the institute says its curriculum shall be reviewed by a Board of Visitors and include mandatory instruction on “human rights, the rule of law, due process, civilian control of the military and the role of the military in a democratic society.”
Since it opened in 2001, according to the institute, it has trained and educated more than 24,000 military, law enforcement and civilian students from 36 countries.
Though it is different from the School of the Americas, the institute has drawn similar opposition. Roy Bourgeois, the founder of School of the Americas Watch, traveled with others to South America to help convince Venezuela to pull out of the institute. And in 2004, Venezuela announced it would do just that.
“Without any doubt, there is no reason that we should have the military from Latin American countries at Fort Benning,” said Bourgeois, a former Catholic priest who lives just outside of Fort Benning. “This is not a human rights academy.”
The institute said it did not have any records from the School of the Americas, including any concerning Padrino López. It released a statement in response to a list of questions emailed by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, saying it is focused on developing “ethical leaders to strengthen democratic partnerships in the Western Hemisphere.”
The institute’s programs “emphasize democratic values, rule of law, human rights, and professional military ethics — required courses which all U.S. and foreign personnel attending WHINSEC in any capacity must pass to graduate,” the institute said. “The institute remains committed to providing values‑based education to U.S. and partner‑nation students in accordance with U.S. law and policy.”
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