by Imogen Garfinkel at Daily Mail
Venezuela’s vice-president held secret meetings with Washington in Doha in the months leading up to the US military assault on Caracas that saw Nicolás Maduro’s capture, it has been claimed.
During the covert talks, mediated by a senior member of the Qatari royal family, Delcy Rodríguez presented herself to American officials as a ‘more acceptable’ alternative to the 63-year-old dictator.
According to an October report in the Miami Herald, Rodríguez offered the US a vision of ‘Madurismo without Maduro,’ a kind of ‘regime lite’.
Details of the meetings have fueled speculation that the US capture of the Venezuelan president and his wife, Cilia Flores, was an ‘inside job’, planned meticulously over months.
As the US executed its extraordinary military intervention on Saturday, sneaking into the country at just 100ft above the water, conspiracy theorists have questioned why American helicopters were not targeted with heavy small arms fire – despite Venezuelan missiles being knocked out.
It comes as Colombia’s former vice–president Francisco Santos Calderón says he is ‘absolutely certain’ that Maduro’s second-in-command betrayed him by having ‘handed him over’ to the US without a fight.
‘They didn’t remove him, they handed him over,’ he told Colombian cable television news channel NTN24.
According to a source familiar with the matter,…
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