By Joe Emersberger – May 18, 2026
Nicolas Maduro’s government mobilized people in Venezuela and around the world to support Alex Saab. He was a special envoy (a diplomat) for Maduro who helped Venezuela avoid murderous U.S. sanctions. Despite being subjected to torture in Cape Verde (where he was illegally detained) then extradited to the U.S. where he was subjected to its notoriously sadistic prison system, Saab did not betray Maduro. Indeed Saab was made a minister in Maduro’s government after he returned to Venezuela through a prisoner exchange that was negotiated with Biden.
Surrender not retreatDelcy Rodriquez, became the acting president after Maduro was kidnapped by Trump in an attack on Caracas that massacred over a hundred people. Though dismayed by her policy of swallowing humiliation by Washington, I was convinced by comrades to see this a strategic retreat, to see it as Delcy waiting things out, avoiding the installation of U.S.-backed fascism under a genocidal lunatic like Maria Corina Machado, and avoiding a costly war against the US or its Venezuelan proxies.
I don’t regret being convinced of that. I don’t believe, as some people say, that it was obvious from the outset that Delcy was doing a surrender rather than a strategic retreat. Almost all governments in the world are small and weak compared to the U.S., so even the most anti-imperial ones endure humiliation at Washington’s hands to some extent. Chavez and Maduro certainly did with their tolerance of U.S. -backed subversives in Venezuela, and that was understandable. It was not necessarily wise, mind you, but it was understandable. Cuba has endured a U.S. torture camp on its own soil in Guantanamo. Even countries as strong as Russia and China have let the U.S. get away with things.
But shipping Alex Saab to the U.S. is as inexcusable as turning somebody over to Nazi Germany in the 1940s. It reveals that all morality and honour have been cast aside, and that the only consideration is appeasing Washington. Remarks made by Delcy and Diosdado Cabello defending their hand over of Saab to the U.S. have been risible.
An indirect betrayal of MaduroSaab will now be tortured in the U.S. to help Trump prosecute Maduro. Saab will endure this hardship in a more desperate situation than the first time he was in the clutches of the U.S. Now he knows that the Venezuelan government he served has betrayed him while his former ally, Maduro, is also in jail. Maybe that will make Saab desperate enough to say what his U.S. captors want to hear. Maybe it won’t, in which case Saab will even further expose the depravity of Delcy handing him over.
It doesn’t wash anymore to say that defending Delcy counters defeatism. It’s the opposite. People who defend her now have to argue that nothing but surrender is possible. To be consistent, they’d have to depict all US vassals as blameless victims with no agency of their own.
Chavismo without anti-imperialism is not ChavismoThere is no excuse for any “Chavista” who stays silent or supports what Delcy has just done to Alex Saab. I put “Chavista” in quotes because Chavismo under the governments of Chavez and Maduro was fiercely anti-imperialist. Chavismo that is collaborationist with the U.S. is no longer Chavismo.
Was Delcy always this bad? Was Cabello? Were they dissembling all these years? I don’t think so. Rank opportunists and frauds tend to reveal themselves much earlier on. But relentless pressure from a superpower can eventually make people give up, rationalize betrayal as realism, and anti-imperial struggle as pointless.
Once you make a decision to avoid all confrontation with the genocidal U.S. dictatorship you will embrace complete moral collapse.
(Substack)
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