“I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ll be able to get Eyvin back within the next four or five or six weeks,” the envoy said as we navigated the dark, winding road back to the landing strip. “And frankly, I might not have said that five or six hours ago.” He stressed the importance of personal interaction. “In every negotiation there gets to be this point of stress where the senior leadership is demanding this, that, and the other—and the people at the negotiating table have to trust each other, have to know each other, and have to be willing to, in a way, not just invest in each other, but really fight for the negotiation points that they’ve worked towards. And that does not happen unless you get face-to-face.”
He would later continue, “The people I talk to, most of them didn’t go to Harvard or the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. They came up in hard environments. Some have stolen elections. Some have killed their way to the top. Part of my job is to establish empathy.” Before each meeting, he said, “We’ll actually come up with a strategy. But when we finally sit down across from someone, especially someone that comes from a pretty tough country, an adversary, a dictatorship, you have to start relying on intuition.”
What Carstens couldn’t intuit was the fact that Rodríguez was, in diplo-speak, channel surfing—talking to other US officials, promising different things in different conversations, and basically playing the ends against the middle. A week before we had arrived in Canouan, Rodríguez, whose movements are constrained by US sanctions, had traveled to Doha for a clandestine meeting. His interlocutor on the US side was Juan Gonzalez, the NSC’s senior director for the Western Hemisphere. A Colombian-born veteran of the Obama years, he had spent more than a decade focused on the Andean region, and his views on Maduro and his minions carried weight with Biden and Sullivan.
“What we wanted was to do this in secret for a while until we actually knew where things were going,” Gonzalez told me as we huddled in an attic-like room on the top floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. “Qatar, much like they’ve been helping us in other ways, helped facilitate some of those exchanges.”
At the direction of Sullivan and his deputy, Jon Finer, Gonzalez was trying to reorient US policy on Venezuela away from Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign, which, among other things, had involved recognizing an antiregime figure, Juan Guaidó, as the legitimate leader of the country. More than 50 nations had gone along with the gambit. But in April 2023 it became untenable: Guaidó was kicked to the curb by the opposition itself. The Biden administration sensed an opening and, with the blessing of the opposition’s chief negotiator, Gerardo Blyde, began in-person talks with the Maduro regime.
Gonzalez noted that early sessions were filled with the ritual “airing of -grievances.” Despite his training as a psychiatrist, Rodríguez evidently would not contain his disdain for the US. “The interesting thing about Jorge is that his father was tortured and killed by a previous government,” Gonzalez elaborated. “So he has, in my view, a deep-seated hatred of America as an imperialist-affiliated government. These guys feel they are on this mission to bring a better Venezuela and that we are the ones standing in the way of their ability to create this socialist or communist utopia.”
“We would say to them, ‘You don’t want to be in the same club as countries like North Korea. We should focus on negotiations, clear the decks,’ ” he recalled. Some issues were resolved quickly, like the repatriation of untold numbers of people back to Venezuela who had unlawfully crossed America’s southern border. But Maduro’s representatives held firm on the issue of American hostages, whom, as Gonzalez lamented, they treated like currency.
The hostage portfolio is replete with false starts, shifting motivations, euphoric moments of promise, and dead ends. All were on full display last June when I landed at Simón Bolívar International Airport near Caracas. Rodríguez had sent word that his president was amenable to engaging with Carstens, who would be arriving on a government plane. And Maduro had seemed agreeable to granting me a rare press interview, but I was told he first wanted to take my measure. It was not clear what that would entail, but there I was in Venezuela with my blue passport, which no one asked to see, much less stamp. Rodríguez, I’m told, had set things up so that our group, flying in our own small aircraft, never encountered an immigration official.
I was ushered off the jet and into a bulletproof car with some burly bodyguards. We waited planeside until a matte gray G-III pulled up. Carstens bounded down the steps, ducked into the car, and our armored convoy raced off.
As we made our way into the capital, however, anonymous plane spotters—who had tracked the tail number of Carstens’s jet—took to social media with allegations that the envoy had arrived on a CIA aircraft and that a hostage trade or recovery was imminent. The reports were not accurate. The plane belonged to a State Department contractor, and Carstens was there to see Maduro in hopes that he might hand over an American as a good-faith gesture while continuing to seek a grander bargain with the US—one that might include sanctions relief that could help the oil-rich country reopen its spigots. For my part, I was there to see if Maduro would speak about his reasons for taking Americans hostage and the prospects for their release. Our collective hope was that the separate diplomatic and journalistic forays might aid in springing Eyvin Hernandez.
The following morning, as we wound our way through Caracas, I glanced over at Carstens, who was looking intently at a card he had taken from his wallet. When I asked him to explain, he said that when headed into a negotiation with “an adversary about trying to release an American,” he tends to refer to a Bible verse. “I’ll just read and meditate and pray to God.” The verse that day was Matthew 10:16, which he summarized as: “Help me be as wise as a serpent, innocent as a dove, and please give me the words that you want me to offer in that moment.” In essence, he was beckoning the Almighty: “I might not be smart enough to come up with the brilliant words to say. So, Lord, if you can help me by giving me the words that would be most effective, I’m here.”
We arrived at Rodríguez’s tightly guarded compound in a leafy part of town. He invited me to sit in on his meeting with Carstens. While some of it was off the record, the two men—over rounds of espresso and local pastries—shared an easy rapport. Consistent with his remit, Carstens sought the immediate return of wrongfully detained Americans. Rodríguez, though, had his own demands, and Saab was priority number one. He casually boasted that he was talking to other US parties, conferring with Gonzalez at the NSC about the broader US-Venezuelan relationship. Still, our host said Maduro wanted to see us at Miraflores, the presidential palace, at 7 p.m.
Source link : https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/americas-top-hostage-negotiator-exclusive
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Publish date : 2024-05-29 03:00:00
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