More Americans jailed in Venezuela pose a test of Trump’s deal-making foreign policy

MIAMI (AP) - Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro will be sworn in for a third term Friday, while hundreds of government opponents arrested since his disputed reelection last summer languish in the country’s packed prisons.

Sharing cells with them are as many as 10 Americans.

One is David Estrella, who was last heard from in September, when the 62-year-old native New Yorker was about to take a taxi from Colombia to Venezuela with a bag of perfume, clothes and shoes to gift to friends he made on a previous trip.

"It's like mourning someone in life," said Margarita Estrella, his ex-wife and mother of three of his children, the youngest of whom just turned 18. "We don't know anything about where he is, or how he's doing. Without being able to talk to him, to hear his voice, so he knows all we're trying to do for him, makes it a lot worse."

The circumstances around the arrest of David Estrella and the other Americans are not well known. Most have not had access to a lawyer and only limited contact with family members, who worry they could be subject to torture, as past American detainees have alleged.

None has been declared wrongfully detained by the State Department, a designation that would gives their cases more attention. Because the U.S. has diplomatic presence in Venezuela, their families can face a long process pushing for their release.

The Americans’ detentions add another complication to the many Venezuela challenges that await President-elect Donald Trump when he returns to the White House on Jan. 20.

For senior foreign policy roles in his administration, Trump has picked several architects of the "maximum pressure" campaign he pursued during his first term when he tried to oust Maduro. They include Florida Sen. Marco Rubio for secretary of state and Mauricio Claver-Carone, a former White House National Security Council aide, as special envoy to Latin America.

But the failure of those policies is readily apparent, and it's not clear whether Trump will pursue the same course this time.

For one, Maduro enjoys the backing of the armed forces, the traditional arbiter of disputes in Venezuela. The military has stuck by Maduro even as the U.S. and other foreign governments recognized his opponent, Edmundo Gonzalez, as the winner of last year’s vote. Also, crippling oil sanctions that Trump previously promoted have inadvertently strengthened American adversaries such as China, Russia and Iran in the strategic energy sector.

Meanwhile, Trump’s campaign promise of mass deportations depends on Maduro’s willingness to take back migrants from the United States. So far, Maduro has been reluctant to do so without concessions from Washington.

"To come in and take the same failed approach seems misguided," said Brian Fonseca, a former Pentagon expert on Latin America who heads a national security think tank at Florida International University.

He said Trump would be wiser to engage with Maduro in a more pragmatic way, similar to how the U.S. has long dealt with Saudi Arabia, where human rights abuses are also a major concern.

"The U.S. must adopt a realistic approach that requires short-term compromises to gain long-term leverage where it can advance human rights and democratic governance,” Fonseca said.

The Trump transition team did not respond to request for comment on its plans for Venezuela.

Maduro congratulated Trump after his victory in November and called for a fresh start in relations with the U.S. Venezuela's state-owned oil company contributed $500,000 to Trump's inauguration committee in 2016 and hired several lobbyists in an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to draw close to the White House.

But Trump hasn’t shown any signs of softening his hawkish stance.

"They'll take them back,” he said last month when asked whether Venezuelans could be deported to a country without diplomatic relations with the U.S. "If they don't, they'll be met very harshly economically."

Analysts don’t see American prisoners as an insurmountable obstacle to rebuilding ties, but they have no illusion about Maduro’s intentions in targeting Americans.

In December 2023, the Biden administration swapped a close Maduro ally who was awaiting trial on corruption charges in Miami for 10 Americans jailed in Venezuela. At the time, the White House said it secured commitments that Maduro's government would not arrest additional Americans.

The arrests since then, however, indicate Maduro has broken that pledge.

The detentions fit into a worrisome pattern of Maduro targeting foreigners with passports from countries at odds with Maduro, activists say.

Foro Penal, a Caracas-based legal assistance group, has counted 47 foreign or dual nationals from 13 countries among the nearly 1,800 people imprisoned for political reasons in Venezuela. That compares with barely 300 before the July election.

One is a national guardsman from Argentina who was arrested coming to visit his Venezuelan wife’s family. Authorities accused him of terrorism, linking him to five opposition activists who have been sheltering in the Argentine ambassador’s residence for 10 months. Other prisoners hail from Ecuador, Spain and the Czech Republic.

Maduro is playing up the arrest of foreigners - something he has been reluctant to do in the past. On Tuesday, he said two more Americans had been captured as part of a group of "mercenaries" that also included men from Colombia and Ukraine.

"I am sure in the next few hours they will confess," Maduro said, adding that the men, whom he didn’t name, "came to carry out terrorist activities against the fatherland."

Before that announcement, Venezuelan officials have given the names of seven American detainees, and human rights groups identified an additional one. The State Department has declined to provide a number, citing privacy and security concerns.

"The Maduro regime does not notify the U.S. government of the detention of U.S. citizens, and the U.S. government is not granted access to those citizens," a State Department spokesperson said.

One American detainee, Wilbert Castaneda, is a Navy SEAL. His mother told The Associated Press that he was on vacation when he traveled to Venezuela to visit a girlfriend.

Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello announced Estrella’s detention in September, alleging Estrella was part of a plot led by Castaneda to assassinate Maduro. The two Americans have never met, according to their families.

Estrella had been working as an auditor at a pharmaceutical company in the New York area when he relocated to Ecuador - where he met his wife decades earlier - during the coronavirus pandemic. The same adventure-seeking lifestyle drew him to Venezuela, where he first traveled in 2023, says his former spouse.

"You could talk to him, and within a few minutes, he was calling you his brother,” Margarita Estrella said. "He was always talking about how he was looking forward to retiring and enjoying the rest of his life."