In an extraordinary move, Washington has accused Venezuela's vice president Tareck El Aissami of being a leading drugs trafficker and frozen accounts and seized assets belonging to him including a private aircraft and properties in the US. Aissami, who had been a governor of Aragua state, was only appointed last month by far-left president Nicolas Maduro. According to the Trump administration, he plays a key role in sending tons of narcotics to Mexican drugs cartels. A Venezuelan businessman, Lopez Bello, is also now subject to US sanctions because Washington says that he acted as Aissami's frontman. If the US allegations are correct, then the action that has been taken against these men is entirely right. But there are grounds for suspecting that the Americans are not simply acting to frustrate a drugs lord. For a start, there is the long-standing antipathy that Washington has felt toward the revolutionary regime of the late Hugo Chavez, who confiscated US property in his anti-capitalist drive, which favored Venezuela's desperately poor over the rich and largely indifferent elite who had previously run the country. Therefore, accusing the vice president of being involved in drug running is an easy way of smearing the Maduro administration. Moreover, if the allegations are true, then it is extraordinary that the Venezuelan president has chosen such a controversial deputy, not least because Maduro has publicly tipped Aissami to be his successor. However, the Americans may have another reason to dislike Aissami. The new vice president, though born in Venezuela comes from an Arab family of Lebanese-Syrian Druze. His father is alleged to have had political connections with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussain and supposedly ran an office of the Baath party in Venezuela. The Saddam link alone would be guaranteed to put Aissami in Washington's bad books. Isolated by the United States, the late Chavez and now Maduro kept open channels to Vladimir Putin's Russia. There had been speculation that Trump's own apparently warm relations with Putin might ease US antipathy toward Venezuela. Instead, with Trump's clear backing, Washington has gone for the Venezuelan government's jugular. As his country's economy spirals downwards and inflation balloons, Maduro's reputation, not least among the poor who were once his bedrock supporters, is becoming increasingly tarnished. Even if Aissami is innocent of the crimes Washington alleges, the fact that in Venezuela itself the rumors of his criminality and ruthless behavior toward rivals had long been out there, suggests that the president is guilty of bad judgment. If, however, the Americans are right and the new Venezuelan vice president is indeed a drugs baron, then serious questions have to be asked of Maduro. Doctrinaire socialist policies may have proved disastrous, but at least with Chavez they had the apparent virtue of trying to redress substantial economic imbalances within society. Though lacking his predecessor's charisma, Maduro has stuck doggedly to his doctrinaire guns. US isolation and doubtless other covert interference have served to underline the incoherence of financial redistribution policies while substituting inefficient state control of once prosperous privately-owned assets. If Maduro was fully aware of his new vice president's criminality, then he has implicated himself in the deadly international drugs trade, if only by association. He needs to take rapid action either to demonstrate the US accusations are nonsense or to immediately fire a clearly unacceptable deputy.
