Top Venezuelan Socialist and Alleged Drug Lord Claims to Win YouTube Award

Venezuelan socialist regime strongman and long-suspected drug lord Diosdado Cabello claimed on Wednesday evening that YouTube awarded his television show Con el Mazo Dando (“Hitting with the Mallet”) a commemorative plaque for allegedly reaching 100,000 subscribers on its YouTube channel.

“They sent me this plaque, get wrecked, escualidos! [‘scrawny ones,’ a slang term for the opposition],” Cabello said, claiming that YouTube administrators sent him a letter “congratulating [him] for the content and international reach of the channel.” 

“The vermin cut [my channels] every time they can,” he continued.

Cabello “predicted” that the award would lead to the closure of his YouTube channel, claiming that long-time critics, such as Venezuelan journalist Alberto Ravell, would “exert pressure” to such an end.

“Next week, they will knock down this channel. I guarantee it,” Cabello said. “You will see because, here, the Ravells will get a hernia in because they have not even been thanked, and they were looking for me to give me the plaque.”

Cabello, a former member of the Venezuelan military, is widely known as one of the most powerful members of Venezuela’s authoritarian socialist regime, having occupied numerous high-ranking positions throughout the past 25 years. Cabello is presently the vice president of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and one of the lawmakers of the National Assembly, which the Maduro regime seized control of from the Venezuelan opposition through a sham election held in December 2020.

Cabello was a close ally of late socialist dictator Hugo Chávez and was one of the military officials who participated in Chávez’s failed February 1992 coup attempt against the government of former President Carlos Andrés Pérez.

U.S. authorities have long accused Cabello of being one of the leading figures of the Cartel of the Suns, an intercontinental cocaine trafficking operation that high-ranking members of the Venezuelan military and some PSUV leading figures run.

Experts have accused the Cartel of the Suns of engaging in “asymmetric warfare” against the United States by trafficking cocaine into the U.S. The socialist drug cartel is believed to have forged alliances with the Shiite jihadist organization Hezbollah and other drug trafficking organizations, such as the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel, the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the National Liberation Army (ELN) terrorist organization.

The Southern District of New York federal court indicted Cabello in March 2020 on charges of conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism, conspiracy to import cocaine, and associated firearms charges. Since then, U.S. authorities have enacted a still-active $10 million bounty for information that can lead to Cabello’s arrest and/or conviction. The Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned Cabello and included him on its Specially Designated Nationals list in 2018.

El Mazo, Cabello’s weekly Wednesday evening show, was launched in February 2014 amidst a wave of protests against the Maduro regime that took place at the time.

The show is infamously known for featuring Cabello espousing insults and issuing intimidating threats against journalists, activists, dissidents, and critics of the ruling socialist regime — including presidents and government officials of other countries. El Mazo is commonly recorded in front of an audience of socialists, military officials, and other “VIP” guests. Socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro is a recurring guest on the show.

Cabello’s show is broadcast locally through state-owned television channels, such as Venezolana de Television and TVes, and online platforms, such as YouTube. Both Cabello and his show have extensive presences across several social media platforms.

Several of the show’s past broadcasts have featured Cabello openly leaking private conversations between journalists or politicians that the socialist regime’s intelligence apparatus obtained by breaching the privacy of its participants in violation of Venezuela’s own privacy laws.

In 2015, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) denounced Cabello and Con El Mazo Dando after the show revealed the names and exact locations of a group of people that had come before an IACHR hearing that took place at the time.

Google states that the plaques distributed throughout YouTube’s Creator Awards program are the video platform’s way of “recognizing the extraordinary effort creators put into their growing channels and to build thriving communities, responsibly.”

Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.