Thank you very much for the question, distinguished member of the subcommittee.
I would say that Maduro's regime has four strong allies at this moment. It could be more, but the four are the main pillars to keep it in power. One is Cuba, which has been there from day one. For 25 years, we have had thousands of Cubans in Venezuela who have served as intel and counter-intel agents. There are bilateral agreements between Cuba and Venezuela.
Something very powerful is that the fact-finding mission of the United Nations released a report—if I'm not wrong, it was a year or two ago—which said that, according to victims, Cuban agents advise and participate in tortures in Venezuela.
The presence of Cuban agents has been felt after July 28 with this knock-knock operation—in Spanish, “Operación Tun Tun”—which is basically having agents of the security forces knocking on your door and looking for you. Some of the people who have been illegally detained are victims of neighbours who have told that those people have participated in the democratic movement. It's the same methodology that Fidel Castro invented in Cuba with the comité de defensa de la revolución, the CDR, a revolutionary defence committee. Hundreds of Venezuelans have been illegally detained since July 28 through that methodology.
I have to add that Diosdado Cabello, who is individually sanctioned, not only in the U.S. but also in Canada and the European Union, for drug trafficking and using money from drug trafficking to finance terrorist activities with the ELN and the FARC dissidents, has been appointed as the so-called “minister of justice and peace”.
That is why the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has stated that in Venezuela, there is a state of terrorism, and that is why the fact-finding mission of the United Nations has said that Venezuelans are living in unprecedented levels of repression.
Beyond Cuba, it's also Russia. When Chávez was alive, he invested at least $12 billion in buying military equipment from Russia. It is said that apparently members of the Wagner Group are in Venezuela, specifically in the southeast of Venezuela, with the role of taking care of gold mines, oil refineries and gas fields.
Iran is also helping the regime, or helped the regime in the past, to evade sanctions. The regime started to buy fuel from Iran—again, ironically, when we have the largest oil reserve in the world. Also, there are—and this is very frightening—bilateral agreements with Iran on security, intelligence and counter-intelligence. There is a program run by the Revolutionary Guard of Iran that does capacity building with security agents of Venezuela.
Then there is China—this is the fourth one—which has provided technology for social control. The two Venezuelan colleagues who have been invited, who have done very good work on digital authoritarianism and misinformation, could explain the role of China in social media in Venezuela, where China has provided technology for social control, for example the technology to create a parallel ID for social control.
At the same time, China, through a company named Norinco, has provided equipment for repression. I was a direct victim in 2017, when I was still in Venezuela as a mayor, when I was repressed heavily for 100 consecutive days with others. Others were even killed with the equipment that the regime has been using during the last, at least, seven years.
I would say those are the four, but then we could add the regime of Nicaragua. For example, Nicaragua's regime has already offered to Maduro revolutionary fighters. That's what Ortega calls them, “revolutionary fighters”. They are—