From a television studio, Venezuela’s feared interior minister would brandish a plastic club and call out the names of government critics — who knew what that usually meant. They could expect government agents to show up and take them away.
That’s exactly what happened last year to Juan Pablo Guanipa, a prominent opposition politician, after the interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, ripped into him on his weekly show. Mr. Guanipa was arrested, charged with terrorism and treason and sent to prison, where he remains.
For over a decade, Mr. Cabello’s show, “Con el Mazo Dando” (With the Club Striking) is one way, experts say, he has overseen Venezuela’s machinery of repression.
When the United States raided Venezuela this month and seized its president, Nicolás Maduro, the Trump administration called it a law enforcement operation, pointing to a new indictment accusing Mr. Maduro of narco-terrorism.
Another name prominently featured in the indictment? Mr. Cabello. And like Mr. Maduro, the U.S. government has placed a bounty for his capture.
Yet Mr. Cabello remains firmly in power, part of interim leader Delcy Rodríguez’s core circle, seen by her side in televised events.
But with Ms. Rodríguez needing to placate Mr. Trump, one of her biggest challenges could be Mr. Cabello, arguably the second most powerful figure in her government whose fate is now intertwined with the fate of the political movement that has ruled Venezuela for more than two decades.
Through allies he controls security services, pro-government militias known as colectivos that are deployed to stamp out dissent and has deep ties to Venezuela’s military. In late 2024, he helped install a cousin to run the country’s secret police, known as the SEBIN.
Mr. Cabello and the forces under him are some of the most fervently anti-imperialist members of a movement whose roots are anchored in resisting foreign intervention.
While publicly supporting Ms. Rodríguez, he has also continued condemning the U.S. raid, calling it in one speech a “barbaric, treacherous attack.”
Mr. Cabello, in a recent broadcast alongside police commandos, said the country had remained calm following the U.S. attack because of the state’s monopoly on weapons. “We are guarantors of the country’s tranquillity,” he said, a comment that some experts said suggested the strong hand Mr. Cabello wields.
“It’s a very revealing speech about the role he wants to play, and it’s also a threat about what could happen if people go after him,” said Verónica Zubillaga a Venezuelan sociologist at the University of Illinois Chicago who studies violence in Venezuela. “It’s a warning to be careful, because he can set off waves of extreme violence.”
Mr. Cabello is widely seen as representing the most opaque and hard-line wing of Chavismo, the political movement founded by Mr. Maduro’s predecessor and mentor, Hugo Chávez.
A former Venezuelan government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, said Mr. Cabello was something of a mystery, even within the upper echelons of his government, with no personal ties except with a small number of military officers.
Few Venezuelan officials have more to lose from any weakening of the government’s grip on power: the United States has indicted him for drug trafficking, accused him of running a transnational criminal network and offered a $25 million payment for information leading to his detention. The United Nations and human rights groups have cited him in some of Venezuela’s gravest abuses.
“He’s just as bad a guy as Maduro, if not more,” said Risa Grais-Targow, the Latin America director for Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy.
A spokesman for the Venezuelan government did not respond to a request for comment about Mr. Cabello.
For years, Ms. Rodríguez and Mr. Cabello have represented competing strains within Chavismo — she the outward-facing technocrat focused on sanctions relief, he the uncompromising militant. Today they have a shared stake in Chavismo’s survival: she needs him to maintain control of the country and he needs her to safeguard his position in a U.S.-friendly government.
Mr. Cabello, 62, was born in the eastern state of Monagas and, as a teenager, joined an extreme left-wing student group that foreshadowed Chavismo. He later trained as a military officer, graduating in 1987 from the Venezuelan Military Academy and then earning two degrees in engineering. He met Mr. Chávez at the military academy, where they played together on the baseball team.
He and Mr. Chávez were part of a group of military officers who mounted a failed coup against a democratically elected government in 1992. In the ensuing years Mr. Cabello was a top ally to Mr. Chávez as he built his political movement, helping organize grass-roots organizations and consolidating different factions to create a disciplined political machine.
During Mr. Chávez’s presidency, he became a fixture of power, serving separately as governor, head of the National Assembly, cabinet minister and vice president.
Zair Mundaray, a former Venezuelan prosecutor who spent 17 years in the Attorney General’s Office and investigated Mr. Cabello, said corruption followed him through every post he held.
“You could make an encyclopedia of all the crimes Diosdado Cabello has committed,” said Mr. Mundaray, who went into exile in 2017. “If there’s something to steal, he steals it.”
Chavismo, a blend of populism, nationalism and state control of key industries, like oil, was founded by Mr. Chávez, who was elected president in 1998.
Fueled by a prolonged oil boom in the 2000s, the government expanded social programs and reduced poverty, but a drop in oil prices set off an extraordinary economic collapse, a mass exodus and popular discontent. The government’s response was to crush dissent.
Mr. Cabello has long controlled the system that has sustained the government: arresting, torturing, and disappearing political opponents while hollowing out democratic institutions. Multiple former intelligence agents, detainees, and senior Venezuelan officials told U.N. investigators in a report that Mr. Cabello gave direct orders to the SEBIN intelligence service, including whom to arrest, release, and torture.
Mr. Cabello opposed the July 2024 elections, according to analysts, which Mr. Maduro agreed to hold in exchange for partial sanctions relief from the United States.
But though tallies collected by the opposition and verified by international observers showed that Mr. Maduro had lost decisively, he declared himself the winner. He would use Mr. Diosdado to help legitimize his authority.
A month after the election Mr. Maduro appointed Mr. Cabello as interior minister — a move widely interpreted as a rebuke to Ms. Rodríguez and her brother Jorge, the president of the National Assembly, who experts said had supported the election, and an acknowledgment that the Maduro government would rely on brute force to maintain power.
Mr. Cabello soon announced the implementation of “Operation Knock Knock,” the deployment of security forces to raid homes and arrest government opponents. In all, the government said it arrested more than 2,000 people for protesting election results, a policing campaign widely denounced by human rights groups.
From his new post, Mr. Cabello consolidated authority over the intelligence services, the national police, the national guard and the armed civilian groups known as colectivos.
While Mr. Cabello has toned down some of his rhetoric attacking the United States since Mr. Maduro’s capture, experts say he has long opposed any form of liberalization or opening up internationally.
“I think of him as being from the old school of dictatorship,” said David Smilde, a sociologist who studies violence in Venezuela at Tulane University and lived in the country part-time until last year. “You see your government as like a sweater. If you pull a thread, it all starts coming apart.”
Antonio Marval, a lawyer appointed as a Supreme Court justice several years ago by Venezuela’s legislature, which at the time was controlled by the opposition, recalled how his appointment quickly put him in Mr. Cabello’s cross hairs.
On July 17, 2017, Mr. Cabello warned on his show that the new justices named by the legislature, which included Mr. Marval, would be targeted.
“We all know that when a threat is made publicly on Con el Mazo Dando, with the national reach that its host had — and still has — it is accompanied by real actions,” Mr. Marval said. “The message was clear: to silence us, to break us, and to instill fear.”
He fled Venezuela shortly afterward, escaping by boat to Curaçao.
To some critics, Mr. Cabello embodies the ugliest characteristics of Venezuela’s Chavista revolution: a system built not on popular consent, but on fear, violence and corruption.
“If the U.S. wanted to make another point or wanted to do something very decisive,’’ Ms. Grais-Targow said, “I think he would be the most obvious target.”
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Genevieve Glatsky is a reporter for The Times, based in Bogotá, Colombia.
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