(MENAFN- The Rio Times) Donald Trump has floated the idea of“sitting down” with Nicolás Maduro – and that single line says a lot about how far Venezuela's crisis has travelled.

For years, Washington has treated Maduro as a pariah: a strongman who dismantled checks and balances, wrecked a once-wealthy oil economy and drove millions to flee.

US prosecutors accuse his inner circle of running a state-protected drug network known as the Cartel de los Soles, using the armed forces and security services to move cocaine and cash in on illegal mining.

Sanctions have cut Venezuela out of global finance, and a new US move to brand that network a foreign terrorist organization aims to tighten the screws even more.

At the same time, the Pentagon has quietly built up firepower just off Venezuela's coast, sending the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier group and other warships into the Caribbean while US forces destroy suspected drug boats at sea.



For Maduro, that mix of legal pressure and military muscle is a reminder that his room for manoeuvre is shrinking. This is the backdrop to Trump 's comment that“Venezuela would like to talk.”

It is less a sudden change of heart and more the logic of hard bargaining: you turn the pressure dial up, then see what you can extract at the table.

Talks, if they happen, would not be about rewarding the regime, but about trading concessions – on drugs, migration, political prisoners, and a controlled opening of the economy – for some relief from isolation.

The story behind the story is simple but uncomfortable. A radical project that promised social justice has produced hyperinflation, shortages, and the largest peacetime exodus in modern Latin American history.

Now, with the state itself accused of behaving like a cartel, the question for outsiders is no longer whether Maduro is a problem, but how to unwind that problem without tipping the Caribbean into open conflict.

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