The CIA has declassified its files on the Venezuelan electronic voting machine company, Smartmatic, appearing to confirm widely held suspicions that the company used complex algorithms to fix election results that helped keep Venezuela’s leftist regime in power for two decades. The firm that’s been newly based in the UK now provides election machines for California’s populous Orange County.
Public anger at what many perceive as the Venezuelan government’s botched response to twin earthquakes that killed nearly 4,500 people is growing, with one grieving mother caught on camera berating the son of former president Nicolás Maduro.
Maduro’s politician son received a hostile reception while visiting a semi-destroyed social housing project named after his father’s late mentor Hugo Chávez.
“I didn’t lose a kitchen! I lost a daughter!” the woman, named as Damely Yaneth Díaz, can be seen shouting at congressman Nicolás Maduro Guerra in scenes captured by the Norwegian broadcaster TV2 last week.
New footage shows the terrifying moment a building collapsed during 7.5 magnitude earthquake hit Venezuela pic.twitter.com/XNbn4ZgfYz
— Surajit (@surajit_ghosh2) July 14, 2026
Even before two powerful earthquakes reduced the OPPE 25 government housing project to an anarchy of shattered concrete and broken lives, the foundations of Hugo Chávez’s populist “Bolivarian” revolution were shaking in what was once a hotbed of support.
Gabriel González remembers his elation when, in 2013, he received the keys to his freshly completed apartment in one of the 12-floor tower blocks El Comandante had ordered to be built in an affluent corner of the resort town of Caraballeda.
The moment a building collapses as the ground shakes violently during the powerful 7.5 magnitude earthquake that struck Venezuela pic.twitter.com/Pnfy7v15pm
— Surajit (@surajit_ghosh2) July 10, 2026
When the ground shook in Venezuela, Alejandro Palombizio was home in Los Palos Grandes, a wealthy Caracas neighborhood. He heard a jarring noise, looked out, and watched the twin towers of an apartment complex fold into a cloud of dust.
The 29-year-old carried an elderly neighbor down the stairs, ran back up to get medicine for another and loaned his phone to people trying to reach family. He stayed at it for most of the next 72 hours. “These were my neighbors,” he said. “People I saw every day. I have to be here.”
️The earthquake in Venezuela has already killed over 1,000 people.
Thousands of people are also missing. pic.twitter.com/Wf3BNRPDYJ
— RussiaNews 🇷🇺 (@mog_russEN) June 27, 2026
Terremoto/ Junquito
Venezuela 😫😫😩👇😱 pic.twitter.com/o4vD0mbqsa— Me dicen la Negra 🥰 🇻🇪 (@yeligamboa) June 25, 2026
Venezuela looks like it was BOMBED after two MASSIVE 7.1 and 7.5 magnitude earthquakes.
Pray for the people, this is really bad pic.twitter.com/pIw8ywXzYe
— Ryan Rozbiani (@RyanRozbiani) June 25, 2026
The US military has killed a leader in the Venezuelan street gang Tren de Aragua, Hector Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, with the help of Venezuela, Donald Trump announced on Friday.
“At my direction, the United States Southern Command delivered a swift and lethal kinetic strike to successfully execute Niño Guerrero, the infamous leader of Tren De Aragua, one of the most bloodthirsty Terrorist Organizations on Planet Earth,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Inmates at Venezuela’s western Barinas prison staged a protest on its roof on Sunday, piling flaming mattresses and calling for the removal of the facility’s director, whom they accused of overseeing guards as they shot unarmed prisoners.
“We want justice. They are shooting us, the guards and the wardens,” a prisoner said in a video shared by the Venezuelan Observatory of Prisons, a local NGO, on X, in which a man is seen with a bullet wound in his chest.
Inmates said they were peacefully protesting when prison staff opened fire and left some wounded.
Prisoners in Venezuela’s western Barinas prison staged a protest on the roof of the detention center, piling flaming mattresses and calling for the removal of the prison’s director, who they said had overseen guards as they shot unarmed prisoners https://t.co/ppPYwrAVCN pic.twitter.com/14fHembgYs
— Reuters (@Reuters) May 25, 2026
🇻🇪 Inmates at the Barinas Judicial Internment Center in Venezuela are demanding the removal of new director Elvis Macuare Guerrero, accusing him of violent raids, isolation, and torture.
Outside the prison, families fear what could happen next.pic.twitter.com/uux4zUPr29
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) May 25, 2026
A billionaire tycoon accused of being a “bag man” for Nicolás Maduro, the deposed Venezuelan dictator, has been deported in the United States.
Alex Saab faces trial and another spell in a United States prison less than three years after he was pardoned and freed by Joe Biden as part of a prisoner swap.
His deportation continues Delcy Rodríguez’s ongoing purge of senior apparatchiks in the Maduro regime.
A judge appeared sympathetic on Thursday to legal arguments that ex-Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cillia Flores should be allowed to use Venezuelan government money to fund their defence.
Maduro and Flores’s attorneys asked the judge to dismiss the narco-terrorism case against the pair because the US has denied them use of the funds due to sanctions in place against the Latin American country.
Prosecutors argued Maduro “plundered” Venezuela’s wealth and should not be able to use its money for legal fees.
As I’ve stated several times in recent weeks, the MSM isn’t bothering to keep up with Donald Trump and Marco Rubio’s wins in Venezuela, as we attempt to stabilize our important southern neighbor. When something goes wrong, they’ll happily report on it all day long and claim nothing is working, everything is moving slowly, etc. That’s a lie at worst, a semi-maybe-half-truth missing a lot of nuance at best.
From the very start, there was something weird about Operation Absolute Resolve. The official story went something like this: after a whirlwind air attack, which included the use of suicide drones for the first time, special operators from the US Army’s renowned but shadowy SFOD-D unit (“Delta Force”) were helicoptered into the Fuerte Tiuna military complex in the south of Caracas, the capital of Venezuela. They defeated the local garrison, used “massive blowtorches” to breach heavy metal doors in a fortress-like residential site within the base, captured the President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, then spirited them back to the helicopters and flew them out to face charges in the United States. Donald Trump said it had been “an assault like people have not seen since World War Two.”
Painfully real for Maduro I’m betting.
Canadian conservative and political theorist William Barclay joins The Spectacle Podcast hosts Melissa Mackenzie and Scott McKay to discuss the future of Venezuela, the relationship between Canada and the U.S., and the rising problems posed by progressive ideology and identity politics.
The White House was conducting back-channel communications with Venezuela’s hardline interior minister Diosdado Cabello months before the US operation to seize President Nicolas Maduro, and has been in communication with him since then, according to Reuters, citing multiple government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
h/t handy n handsome
The broker told his client he had a relative in the “little red party” with links to the “famous Suns” who, for an up-front fee, would guarantee safe passage of the container with the cocaine onto the ship docked at the Venezuelan port.
The cocaine — a batch of 32 kilograms hidden inside two electrical generators — was destined for Libya.
I’m surprised CBC didn’t blame Trump.
The enfeebling ambiguity of Canada as a government and a state among the nations of the world is underlined almost every week. The prime minister’s statement on the removal of former Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro was commendably critical of the former president and skirted international law questions in a way that permits Carney to claim to recognize them without aggravating our relations with the Trump administration with whom delicate trade negotiations are underway. All the while, agitation continues in Parliament for the criminalization of those who would justify the native residential school system or minimize the negative consequences of it.
