{"id":51202,"date":"2026-06-18T11:33:39","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T11:33:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/michelbaljet.com\/?p=51202"},"modified":"2026-07-04T09:37:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T09:37:10","slug":"not-showing-for-about-ten-seconds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michelbaljet.com\/en\/wat-tien-seconden-niet-laten-zien\/","title":{"rendered":"What Ten Seconds Doesn't Show"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"_chunkWrapper_6ta1u_30\">\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The video lasts ten seconds. A drone hovers over the jungle of southeastern Bol\u00edvar; a building with a green metal roof fills the frame, and then it explodes in a white flash. The President of the United States posts it on Truth Social and writes: <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">a swift and lethal kinetic strike.<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> A swift, deadly blow. And with that, so the story goes, H\u00e9ctor Guerrero Flores\u2014alias Ni\u00f1o Guerrero, the Warrior\u2019s Child\u2014has vanished from the face of the earth. For over a decade, he was the face of the Tren de Aragua.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I met that man in the world he had built for himself. That\u2019s why I keep coming back to those ten seconds\u2014not out of sentimentality, but because I know how little a bird\u2019s-eye view reveals of what\u2019s happening on the ground.<\/span><\/p>\n<div style=\"width: 800px;\" class=\"wp-video\"><video class=\"wp-video-shortcode\" id=\"video-51202-1\" width=\"800\" height=\"451\" preload=\"metadata\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"video\/mp4\" src=\"https:\/\/michelbaljet.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/document_5868401747113812249.mp4?_=1\" \/><a href=\"https:\/\/michelbaljet.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/document_5868401747113812249.mp4\">https:\/\/michelbaljet.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/document_5868401747113812249.mp4<\/a><\/video><\/div>\n<h3><b>The Man Behind the Roof<\/b><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In 2014, I voluntarily spent a few days locked up in Tocor\u00f3n, the prison in Aragua state that Guerrero had turned into his capital. In 2017, I returned. It was no longer a prison in any sense that we recognize. The state had relinquished control and was now only guarding the fence; inside, the warrior's child reigned supreme. There was a swimming pool. A zoo with flamingos and a panther, fed day and night, while the animals in Caracas\u2019s state zoo were starving to death. A disco, restaurants, gambling dens. A bank\u2014the Banco de Tokyo\u2014that transferred money for a ten percent commission, and offered loans at ten to twenty percent interest. A building designed for 750 prisoners, converted into a small village that housed many thousands. And a courthouse, where Guerrero himself presided over trials.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I\u2019m not telling this story to romanticize the man. I\u2019m telling it because it reveals something that disappears in ten seconds of drone footage: this was no fringe gang. Just like Tocor\u00f3n\u2014until it was razed by the government\u2014the gold mines were also a state within a state, with their own economy, legal system, and population. You can\u2019t build something like that without the real state allowing it. And something like that doesn\u2019t disappear with a single explosion.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><b>Who says he's dead?<\/b><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Let\u2019s be precise about what we know. On June 12, U.S. Southern Command reported a deadly attack in southeastern Bol\u00edvar (which had taken place on the morning of June 9). Trump announced it late that evening and said the operation had been coordinated with his <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">friends in Venezuela.<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Secretary of War Pete Hegseth confirmed this on behalf of the Pentagon. The Venezuelan Ministry of Communications confirmed this on behalf of Caracas.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That\u2019s where the confirmation ends. Three parties were involved, and all three needed this story. Trump wanted a victory in his crusade against the cartels. The government of Delcy Rodr\u00edguez\u2014which has held de facto power since the Americans removed Maduro from Caracas in January\u2014wanted to prove its worth to Washington. The reporting is based entirely on statements from both governments; no physical evidence has been made public. Major media outlets are treating his death as a fact, but always with phrasing such as \u2018Trump says\u2019 or \u2018the U.S. and Venezuela say.\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I\u2019ve learned not to take such death tolls at face value. When I walked through Tocor\u00f3n in 2017, the official death toll from the clashes in which Guerrero had regained power stood at sixteen. The videos the prisoners showed me told a different story. In Venezuela, the gap between what the authorities claim and what actually happened is not an isolated incident\u2014it is the norm. That was the case during the 2014 protests, and it was the case with the regime\u2019s extrajudicial executions in the years that followed.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And the on-the-ground reporting this month paints a much more chaotic picture than those crisp ten seconds. The Venezuelan <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">La Patilla<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> followed the operation day by day. Not a surgical strike, but a ground operation that began on Monday, June 8, and lasted for days, targeting a whole series of gang leaders at once. Armed helicopters hovered over the gold fields. After 72 hours of the incursion, no official authority had confirmed whether there were any deaths, injuries, or arrests. News of Guerrero\u2019s death initially circulated as a rumor, as an unofficial account, and within WhatsApp groups. On June 10, residents of the mining town of Las Claritas blocked the access road and demanded that the operation be halted, citing mistreatment and, in their words, human rights violations. To date, no figures have been provided regarding the number of mines cleared or the number of people displaced.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I have to be honest here, because doubt that only goes one way is propaganda. Even Mar\u00eda Corina Machado\u2014opposition leader, Nobel Prize winner, and the face of the democratic resistance\u2014publicly praised Trump for the operation. And the <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Wall Street Journal<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> reported that the CIA provided the key intelligence. The official story carries weight and has sources. But from what I gathered from people on the ground, Guerrero and two others had been warned three days before the operation began. I\u2019ll leave it to the reader to decide what that means for the image of the elusive fugitive being snatched from the sky. I\u2019ll simply note this: the only ones confirming his death are the parties who stand to gain from it, and the people who lived there saw something other than a ten-second flash.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><b>Why there of all places?<\/b><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It\u2019s no coincidence that Nino was located in southeastern Bol\u00edvar. Las Claritas and Kil\u00f3metro 88 sit atop Venezuela\u2019s largest gold reserves, near the border with Brazil and Guyana. Guerrero\u2019s co-founder, Yohan Petrica, had been running an illegal gold mine there for years; that is why Guerrero found refuge there.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And this is where it\u2019s worth reading more slowly. The operation came about two months after Caracas had passed a new mining law\u2014a law that allows foreign investors access to precisely these gold-mining areas. First, the gold sector is legally opened up to foreign capital. Then, the criminal network that had been operating there is dismantled\u2014or appears to be dismantled. Who benefits from the vacuum left behind is a question the drone footage does not ask.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><b>Not an incident<\/b><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Because Guerrero isn't an isolated case. He is the most recent, most spectacular moment in a trend that has taken shape over the past six months.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In January, U.S. troops took President Maduro and his wife from Caracas to a prison cell in New York. In February, Nemesio Oseguera, known as \u201cEl Mencho,\u201d the leader of the Jalisco Cartel, was killed in Mexico during a Mexican operation based on U.S. intelligence, followed by a wave of retaliatory violence in which twenty-five members of the National Guard were killed. And now Guerrero.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Underlying all of this is the deadliest constant: since September, the U.S. has been blowing up small boats it suspects of drug smuggling. By mid-March, a defense official confirmed to Congress that 157 people had been killed across 47 vessels; by summer, the death toll had risen well above two hundred. The public has not been shown any hard evidence that all the affected boats were transporting drugs; what we see are grainy videos of explosions and very limited official information. And when Congress asked whether fewer drugs were now entering the country, the defense official could not demonstrate this; he merely pointed to a decrease of about twenty percent in the movements of suspicious boats. Dozens of people are being shot out of the water for a campaign that, by its own figures, is not reducing the flow of drugs.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There\u2019s one image from that campaign I just can\u2019t get out of my head. It was in the records of the Dutch House of Representatives: two crew members of a boat that had come under fire were bombed while clinging to the wreckage of their ship. That\u2019s not an interception. That\u2019s the killing of shipwrecked people.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><b>The roof over the system<\/b><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In Doral, at Trump's own golf resort, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">the Shield of the Americas\u2014the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition\u2014was founded,<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> with Kristi Noem as its envoy.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The significance lies in who was absent. Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico\u2014the three largest countries in the region, which together account for more than half of the region\u2019s gross domestic product, all three led by governments that are not to Washington\u2019s liking\u2014were missing. A coalition against drug trafficking without the world\u2019s largest cocaine producer, without the most important transit country, and without a producer of Peru\u2019s caliber. The selection was not operational. It was political. Membership did not depend on how much drugs flowed through your country, but on how willing you were to listen to Washington. And Noem articulated the second agenda openly: the coalition had to curb Chinese influence in the region\u2019s economy and infrastructure. It\u2019s not just about cocaine. It\u2019s about pulling an entire hemisphere away from Beijing.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><b>Cuba: the same hand, without a glove<\/b><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Nowhere is this method more blatant than in Cuba. When Maduro fell, Cuba\u2019s fuel supply dried up; Venezuela had been supplying Cuba with oil for decades\u2014or rather, Cuba had ensured all those years that it would continue to receive oil from Venezuela. On top of that, Trump threatened to impose tariffs on any country that continued to supply oil to Havana. The island plunged into darkness: days-long blackouts, parts of Havana without power for nineteen hours a day, protests, and a party headquarters set ablaze.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And the demand behind it was not concealed. Rubio made it clear that the embargo would only be eased once political change took place and \u2018new people were at the helm.\u2019 Hunger, openly, as leverage for regime change. Havana\u2019s response followed the script set by Caracas: the announcement of the release of fifty-one prisoners, and talks. Pressure, a gesture, dialogue.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><b>The smoothest lever<\/b><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The final piece of the puzzle is the quietest\u2014and therefore perhaps the most enduring: the ballot box. In a number of countries, governments that align with Washington have come to power. Note that word\u2014in Latin America, such a government is called \u201cright-wing,\u201d but that label covers a spectrum ranging from Milei\u2019s market radicalism to Bukele\u2019s security authoritarianism, and it has little to do with what a European imagines when hearing the term. The common denominator is not economics and not even ideology. It is the willingness to go along with the flow.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Chile elected Jos\u00e9 Antonio Kast as president. And in Colombia\u2014the world\u2019s largest cocaine producer, tellingly excluded from the Shield\u2014the outsider Abelardo de la Espriella won the first round of the election: a hard-liner on security and openly supported by Trump. Incumbent left-wing President Petro alleged fraud, but international observers described the election as orderly and transparent; the claim did not hold up. In Venezuela, it was the losers who cast doubt on the results. In Colombia, the losing incumbent administration is now doing the same. The second round will take place this coming Sunday, June 21. The direction is easy to guess.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The threads intertwine in an almost unsettling way. Alex Saab, Maduro\u2019s finance chief\u2014who was handed over by Venezuela to the U.S. in May and may become a key witness against his former patron\u2014was once represented in court by that same De la Espriella. The man who could come to lead Colombia once defended the accountant of the regime that Washington has just ousted.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><b>And then, the silence<\/b><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is what I want to get at, because this is what concerns me the most. Not power\u2014power does what power does. But the silence surrounding it.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It wasn\u2019t always there. When Maduro was removed in January, for example: within a day, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Spain, and Uruguay, among others, issued statements condemning the unilateral action; some called it a dangerous precedent. Sheinbaum said it jeopardized regional stability. Petro demanded an emergency session of the Security Council. There was a voice.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Five months later, with more than two hundred people killed as a result of U.S. operations against drug trafficking, and in Guerrero, that voice has fallen silent. And it\u2019s not hard to see why. Trump has since punished or threatened each of those leaders for not falling in line\u2014with tariffs, with exclusion, with support for their domestic rivals\u2014while those who show loyalty are rewarded and shielded from scrutiny. The resistance didn\u2019t just evaporate on its own. It was made too costly to maintain. That isn\u2019t an absence of opinion. That\u2019s an opinion that has been bought off or suppressed.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And look beyond the region. Human rights institutions did, in fact, speak out; the UN High Commissioner had already described the boat attacks back in October as violations that must stop immediately, and UN experts said that whoever ordered and carried them out should be prosecuted for murder. But a statement is not enough. Which government with real power has put a price on it? Are you listening, Europe? A continent that for years spoke endlessly about democracy and human rights in Venezuela is now watching as two hundred people are killed without trial and says nothing with any real teeth. No sanctions, no ambassador recalled, no condemnation that actually costs anything.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">My own country, least of all, and that affects me personally, because Cura\u00e7ao is located about seventy kilometers from the Venezuelan coast. For years, the Netherlands worked together with the U.S. Coast Guard: marines boarded suspicious ships based on U.S. intelligence, tens of thousands of kilograms of cocaine were intercepted, and suspects were handed over for trial. Trial\u2014note that word, because that is precisely what distinguishes a constitutional state from a firing squad. When the U.S. switched from boarding to firing on ships, the Netherlands withdrew from international waters. A wise move. But when asked for an opinion, Prime Minister Schoof said the cabinet had not yet taken a position, and he emphasized that the Netherlands is not involved. Former diplomats warned why that isn\u2019t enough: if your intelligence leads to boats that are subsequently shot down at sea, you\u2019re involved, whether you like it or not. You don\u2019t want, said a former ambassador to Venezuela, to be accused of having led them there. Withdrawing without condemning is not neutrality. It is looking the other way with the goal of having a clear conscience.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><b>Who has benefited from this?<\/b><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Ask the simple question, \u201cWho benefits?\u201d and the pattern becomes clear.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Washington regained control of its backyard: Maduro behind bars, Caracas cooperating, Havana brought to its knees, a coalition under its thumb, and China pushed back a step. The Rodr\u00edguez administration retained its position by delivering exactly what was asked of it. Foreign capital, now allowed into Venezuela\u2019s gold and oil sectors, was given a clear playing field. Loyal leaders received their rewards. Those who resisted paid the price.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And who paid the price? The two hundred in the water, whose names no one knows and whose bodies no one saw. The shipwrecked survivors clinging to their wreckage when the second missile struck. The Cuban who sits in the dark nineteen hours a day because hunger has been elevated to a policy tool. The residents of Las Claritas, who saw their town flooded with armed helicopters and whose dead aren\u2019t even counted. The ordinary people, time and again, while the power above their heads changes hands.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><b>The head is gone, but the body is intact<\/b><\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In February, I wrote about Venezuela after Maduro, saying that it wasn\u2019t a transition but a consolidation: America had removed the head of the regime and left the body in place, and was now speaking through that same mouth. What I wrote then about a single country now applies to an entire continent. Except that the voice is now that of an entire region that has learned when it is better to remain silent.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Notice how silence has been bought. Not with money, but with the victims\u2019 choice. A cartel boss. Drug smugglers. A dictator. Who\u2019s going to take a stand for them? Anyone who stands up for the man on the small boat seems to be standing up for the smuggler. And that\u2019s how you buy silence about the method\u2014by choosing precisely those targets that no one wants to defend. But the method remains, even if the targets change. Anyone who looks the other way today when a boat is stopped without evidence will have no grounds tomorrow to call anything else a violation. A precedent never asks for permission. It just waits for the next time.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Perhaps the Warrior\u2019s Child is truly dead. Perhaps a man was blown to pieces last week under a metal roof in Bol\u00edvar, and the world is one cruel man poorer. But the question I asked in February now sounds more pressing. It\u2019s not whether Latin America can change\u2014it can. The question is whether it is allowed to change, and by whose hand, and at what cost. Because for the ordinary Venezuelan, the ordinary Cuban, the ordinary Colombian, it ultimately makes little difference whether power comes from Havana, Beijing, or Washington\u2014as long as they have no say in their own future, and the whole world has decided that this is precisely the moment to look the other way.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tien seconden duurt het beeld. Een drone hangt boven de jungle van zuidoost-Bol\u00edvar, een gebouw met een groen metalen dak vult het kader, en dan spat het uiteen in een witte flits. De president van de Verenigde Staten plaatst het op Truth Social en schrijft erbij: a swift and lethal kinetic strike. Een snelle, dodelijke [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":51193,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[203,186],"tags":[200,197,198,115,40],"class_list":["post-51202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-verbeterd-met-ai","tag-amerika","tag-colombia","tag-mexico","tag-tocoron","tag-venezuela"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michelbaljet.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michelbaljet.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michelbaljet.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michelbaljet.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michelbaljet.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51202"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/michelbaljet.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51212,"href":"https:\/\/michelbaljet.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51202\/revisions\/51212"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michelbaljet.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michelbaljet.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michelbaljet.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}