Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry says he would like to see ousted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro executed — or, locked up in a section of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola, that Landry recently established and renamed in honor of himself.
In a brief column for the conservative online outlet Breitbart, Landry directly tied Maduro to opioid deaths in the United States — particularly from fentanyl.
“Since 2015, over 800,000 Americans have died from opioid overdoses. The vast majority of those cases are from fentanyl, a drug that makes its way into the United States through various drug cartels,” Landry wrote. “One of the largest in the world was the illegitimate government of Venezuela, run by indicted criminal Nicolás Maduro.”
Last July, Secretary of State Marco Rubio designated the group — the so-called Cartel De los Soles — as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, which triggers severe travel and financial sanctions.
But documents prepared by federal law enforcement for the bipartisan Congressional Research Service show the majority of illicit fentanyl shipments into the U.S. come from China and Mexico, not from Venezuela, or even through the Caribbean at large.
Following Maduro’s capture, the U.S. Justice Department has since distanced itself from its allegation that the Venezuelan president was head of the alleged cartel, a concept that actually originated among Venezuelan media in the 1990s as a catch-all term for officials corrupted by drug money.
Maduro, a protege of former president and revolutionary socialist leader Hugo Chavez, had been in power in Venezuela since 2013. But much of his reign has been defined by dramatic economic struggles, spurned in part by U.S. sanctions and worsening tensions with Washington, mass out-migration and an increasingly rigid security state.
Years-long tensions between Caracas and Washington flared following a widely-disputed 2024 presidential election in Venezuela, in which Maduro claimed victory despite claims of fraud and intimidation.
His regime came to an abrupt end last week when U.S. special forces captured him and his wife in their home outside Caracas, part of a larger military operation targeting the capital region.
Much of the conversation on the transition of power since his capture, led by President Trump and Rubio, has centered on Venezuela’s vast oil reserves and the investment opportunity for the United States’ leading energy firms.
