Castro charges tighten Trump’s noose on anti-American corruption

For more than two decades, the socialist regime in Venezuela survived not just on oil and repression, but on a quiet international scaffolding.

The structure included foreign politicians who lent Nicolás Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez legitimacy, foreign businessmen who laundered their money and foreign governments that looked the other way.

In the past few days, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department dealt a series of blows to that house of cards.

On Wednesday, a federal grand jury in Miami indicted Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old Cuban tyrant brother of the long-deceased Fidel Castro, on charges tied to the 1996 killing of four men, including three US citizens, over international waters.

The Castro indictment, like Maduro’s earlier this year, should serve as a warning to Cuba’s leaders: Change your ways peacefully, or it will be done by force.

Yet Wednesday’s indictment isn’t the main means of uprooting the anti-American socialists’ long-running criminal scheme.

The tip of the iceberg is actually in Spain.

On Tuesday, Spain’s National Court formally charged former Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero with money laundering, influence peddling, criminal organization and document forgery.

Investigators allege that Zapatero funneled $62 million worth of pandemic bailouts to a small Venezuelan airline called Plus Ultra — proceeds that ended up in the hands of Maduro’s cronies, including interim dictator Delcy Rodriguez.

The Zapatero indictment came just three days after Venezuela’s interim regime extradited Alex Saab, Nicolás Maduro’s longtime financier, back to the United States.

The federal court in Miami has now charged Saab with conspiracy to launder money through US banks.

Three indictments on two continents in four days, all aimed at the foreign architecture of two of the hemisphere’s worst regimes, is not a series of coincidences.

Swiss and French prosecutors are running parallel laundering probes that feed the Spanish file.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe was in Havana just last week, warning the Castro regime that it “can no longer be a safe haven for adversaries in the Western Hemisphere,” while a US fuel blockade squeezes Cuba into negotiation.

And the Justice Department has announced that it collaborated with Spanish police in the Zapatero probe.

This is a strategy.

Trump is using justice — some of it long delayed — as an instrument of foreign policy to advance freedom and American interests abroad.

For years, the targets of US sanctions on Venezuela and Cuba have treated those restrictions as mere inconveniences.

Bad actors have routed around them through shell companies in Panama, gold flights to Turkey and friendly bankers in Madrid and Geneva.

Now, the president is sending a message to the world: Obey our sanctions or pay a price.

These indictments aren’t only just, they’re a US foreign policy game-changer.

They’re showing those who collaborate with America’s enemies that they will face indictment, extradition and prison if they violate Washington’s sanctions.

And they bring up an intriguing question: Who in Caracas is cooperating with these judicial moves?

Rodríguez, who became Venezuela’s interim dictator after Maduro’s capture, signed off on Saab’s transfer.

Saab, nominally Venezuelan and a former member of Maduro’s Cabinet, is barred from extradition by Venezuela’s constitution.

That makes Rodriguez’s move extraordinary, and shows that everyone and everything is on the table.

It remains to be seen whether Rodriguez is genuinely cooperating with US prosecutors’ efforts to dismantle the broader Venezuelan money-laundering architecture, or merely sacrificing yesterday’s allies to save herself.

But as the Justice Department continues to unwind Venezuela’s network of sanctions-dodging conspirators, the information they provide will give Trump ever-increasing leverage — and perhaps will convince Rodriguez to accept a transition to democracy, in exchange for a comfortable retirement in the Middle East rather than a cold Brooklyn jail cell.

The United States now has an opportunity to recover Maduro’s ill-gotten riches.

The Treasury Department estimates the chavista network looted tens of billions of dollars, much of it sitting in real estate, securities and shell companies in Miami, Madrid, Geneva, Istanbul and Doha.

Recovering even a fraction would fund Venezuelan reconstruction and compensate the regime’s victims.

And prosecuting the foreign professionals who made the looting possible — bankers, lawyers, lobbyists and yes, former prime ministers — would set a precedent that outlasts any single administration.

It would establish that helping a dictator hide his money is in fact a crime, and that the statute of limitations is longer than a political career.

Zapatero’s indictment will not be the last, nor should it be.

The cronies are beginning to fall, and a great many of them are still standing.

Trump is showing that no criminal, no matter how old, how rich or how powerful, is beyond America’s reach.

Justice is coming — and with it, freedom, too.

Daniel Di Martino is a Manhattan Institute fellow.