The Pastor Pipeline That Helped Deliver Venezuela to Israel

Freddie Ponton
21st Century Wire

Venezuela’s turn toward Israel did not begin in the rubble. The earthquake gave the world the story it was meant to see, rescue teams, drones, prayers, gratitude. But the real machinery was moving somewhere else. In Caracas, Venezuela’s Jewish-community leadership opened the door. The evangelical channel ran through Texas and Florida, where Trump’s faith network met Rubio’s Venezuela politics. The strangest part was waiting inside Chavismo itself, where Nicolás Maduro’s own son had spent years building the religious infrastructure that made the pivot possible.

The public version began on the morning of July 3, 2026, when Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, performed two acts of thanks in quick succession. One was staged for the international cameras. The other was posted on the state’s own Instagram account. In the first, Rodríguez stood before reporters and thanked Israel by name. She welcomed a delegation from the Israel Defense Forces that had arrived with drones and search-and-rescue teams after earthquakes killed more than 2,500 people along the northern coast. Venezuela had severed relations with Israel in 2009 and spent the subsequent fifteen years as one of the most vocal supporters of the Palestinian cause in the Western Hemisphere. The reversal was presented as disaster diplomacy: pragmatic, humane, and above politics.

But the mechanism was not as spontaneous as the humanitarian framing suggested. Ynet later reported that Rodríguez herself said the Israeli team had arrived through contacts established by Venezuela’s Jewish community, and that she thanked Chief Rabbi Isaac Cohén Anidjar, rendered in some Israeli coverage as Yitzhak Cohen, for coordinating the contact with the Israeli government. Cohén was more explicit in a later Ynet interview. He said he had offered Venezuela’s president “the possibility of having the Israeli delegation come to assist in the disaster.” Rodríguez, he added, “gladly accepted” and gave “all the necessary approvals for the delegation’s arrival.”

The evangelical channel made the normalisation politically usable. The Jewish-community channel got Israel through the door, and it was not only rabbinic. On July 1, the Vaad Hakehilot de Venezuela, the representative body of Venezuela’s Jewish community, publicly thanked the State of Israel and confirmed that the Israeli diplomatic-humanitarian delegation had been received by senior Venezuelan authorities and representatives of the Vaad. After seventeen years without Israeli diplomatic representation in Venezuela, the Vaad called the gesture especially significant.

The delegation was small by IDF standards, thirty people, deployed at Venezuela’s specific request. Its actual mission was not rescue but infrastructure mapping: within seventy-two hours it had assessed approximately 1,300 damaged buildings and produced a multi-year national reconstruction plan that Venezuela approved in days, a process that would normally take months. The drones it deployed were made by Israeli company Xtend, whose Honey Badger system was designed for tactical intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance in GPS-denied environments, and had been cleared by the Venezuelan government in advance.

IMAGE: Venezuela’s acting President Delcy Rodríguez meets members of the Israeli aid delegation, including IDF/Home Front Command personnel. The civilian seated beside Rodríguez closely resembles Rabbi Isaac Cohén Anidjar, whom Ynet identified as a coordinator of the Israeli contact. (Source: Ynet News)

The IDF delegation’s own documentation described its work as producing a national plan to rebuild earthquake-hit areas, a blueprint for sustained Israeli presence in a country with the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Israel’s own Foreign Ministry then confirmed that the mission had moved beyond assessment. In a July 8 post, it said that, at Rodríguez’s request to Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, the delegation would remain two more weeks “to begin implementing the reconstruction plan prepared by Israeli experts.” Netanyahu approved the extension. A state with no diplomatic relations with Israel had asked Israel to stay and start rebuilding. A thirty-person IDF team arriving without diplomatic relations, mapping 1,300 buildings, producing a national infrastructure plan in seventy-two hours, and receiving a two-week extension to begin implementing it does not qualify as a humanitarian gesture by any normal measure. It is a footprint.

At the same moment, on the same day, VTV Canal 8 published Rodríguez’s other statement. She thanked “evangelical organisations coordinated by American reverend Ramiro Peña and Pastor Javier Bertucci” for their relief work. Two names. One sentence. No cameras. No international pickup.

By then, the pattern was hard to miss. Cohén supplied the rabbinic bridge. The Vaad formed the communal one. Peña, Fonseca, and Bertucci gave it evangelical cover. All that was left was for the IDF and the Israeli Foreign Ministry to turn the opening into a reconstruction foothold. The earthquake did not create the route. It only activated it.

The Prince Who Built the Machine

Nicolás Maduro Guerra, also referred to as “Nicolásito”, was easy to dismiss. Thirty-three years old, sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control in 2019, indicted in the Southern District of New York on narco-terrorism charges tied to a 2020 meeting with FARC dissidents in Medellín. He appeared at rallies with the slightly theatrical loyalty expected of a president’s son. The international press treated him as dynastic furniture.

IMAGE: Nicolás Maduro Jr. calls for reestablishing diplomatic relations with the US and Israel – 19 January, 2026 (Source: Venezuelan Voices)

Inside Venezuela, he held a more consequential title: Vice President of Religious Affairs for the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV). Between 2019 and 2025 he used it to construct a durable apparatus. He embedded Government Pastoral Councils inside evangelical congregations across the country, giving the party eyes and ears in communities it had previously struggled to reach. Through the Sistema Patria payment platform, he routed stipends to cooperative pastors, creating a class of clergy with a direct financial stake in political alignment. He cultivated Apostle Dan Suárez and the national network of the Movement of Venezuelan Evangelical Churches (MOCEV), turning Sunday services into reliable transmission belts for the party line. He turned the Poliedro de Caracas into a venue where the distinction between political rally and revival meeting largely disappeared.

The theology that flowed through this structure was not invented by Nicolásito. It was already present in large segments of Venezuela’s evangelical world, with neo-Pentecostal and dispensationalist currents that included Christian Zionism, and the belief that the modern State of Israel fulfils biblical prophecy and that faithful nations are obligated to support it. Nicolásito did not have to create the doctrine. He only had to give it state infrastructure and let it run. On January 16, 2026, thirteen days after U.S. Delta Force operators removed his father from the presidential residence, Nicolásito stood at the Teresa Carreño Theater in Caracas and publicly called for the restoration of diplomatic relations with Israel. No one in the foreign press asked why the president’s son had spent six years building the precise ideological runway the call required.

VIDEO: Nicolás Maduro Guerra speaks at a Red de Juristas meeting in Caracas, where he called for Venezuela to restore diplomatic relations with the United States and said the country could also consider relations with Israel. Source: El Nacional

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The Rabbi Who Waited

Cohén has been Chief Rabbi of Venezuela for more than forty years. He remained in Caracas after Hugo Chávez expelled the Israeli ambassador in 2009 and after years of state media that treated Zionism as a form of racism. He survived by treating proximity to power as a form of protection rather than confrontation.

IMAGE: Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro received in his office the former Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, Shlomo Moshe Amar, and Chief Rabbi Isaac Cohén Anidjar of Venezuela’s Jewish community. (Source: Esefarad)

In 2010, when Nicolás Maduro was foreign minister, Cohén spoke with him by phone every week. In 2018, at a state ceremony attended by Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro personally awarded Cohén a national medal. Cohén accepted it. In 2017, inside a country with no diplomatic relations with Israel, he declared publicly: “I am an Orthodox and Zionist rabbi, and for me, the pride of the Jewish people lies in having the flag of the State of Israel flying here in Venezuela“. He had calculated, years earlier, that Rodríguez was the figure worth investing in.

In July 2026, that calculation paid off. According to Ynet, Cohén said he personally proposed the Israeli assistance mission to Rodríguez after the earthquakes, and Rodríguez approved the delegation’s arrival. Israeli officials also said Rodríguez asked the team to extend its stay, a detail that moved the visit beyond symbolic disaster relief and into the realm of sustained technical access. Cohén described the mission as “the first step,” and Ynet reported that Cohén’s name had already been raised as a possible Venezuelan ambassador to Israel if relations were restored.

IMAGE: Roberto Mishkin, later listed as vice president of the Vaad Hakehilot for 2025–2026, pictured in Nuevo Mundo Israelita coverage of the Vaad leadership transition with Isaac Benjamin Fhima, president of the Vaad Hakehilot de Venezuela and president of the Asociación Israelita de Venezuela (Source: Nuevo Mundo Israelita)

The lay leadership was visible too. Roberto Mishkin, president of the Unión Israelita de Caracas and vice president of the Vaad Hakehilot for the 2025–2026 term, appeared in Israeli embassy messaging around the mission, while the Vaad itself confirmed that its representatives had received the Israeli diplomatic-humanitarian delegation alongside senior Venezuelan authorities.

Two days after the January 3, 2026 operation that removed Maduro, Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar publicly declared Israel “stands alongside the freedom-loving Venezuelan people” and expressed hope for restored ties. Sa’ar had already been working the Latin America file through the Isaac Accords, and the Venezuela mission certainly did not sit outside that map. The Israeli operational contact on the state side was Yoed Magen, a diplomat and former IDF strategic planner who had grown up in Venezuela and maintained long-standing contacts in Caracas. Before departure, Israeli official messaging presented Magen as the face of the mission. He promised that Israel would “share our knowledge and experience” so Venezuela could benefit. Within days, Israeli experts were drafting and then beginning to implement a reconstruction plan

Magen flew in. He led the IDF delegation that arrived after the June earthquakes. The public welcome, which Venezuela acting President Delcy Rodríguez gave the uniformed Israelis on July 3, was a clear signal, the visible face of a back channel that had been active since January.

The Channel That Opened When the Official One Closed

On October 6, 2025, Donald Trump instructed Richard Grenell to halt all formal diplomatic outreach to Venezuela. The New York Times reported the decision. In the same month, a different channel opened, staffed not by diplomats but by pastors.

Ramiro Abel Peña Jr., founder of Christ the King Church in Waco, Texas, had served on Trump’s National Hispanic Advisory Council and worked with the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighbourhood Partnerships, formerly known as the White House Office of Faith. He had prayed privately with both Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. Colombia’s former foreign minister, Luis Gilberto Murillo, later confirmed on the record that the back-channel process “began with silent diplomacy from October,” driven by “a group of pastors, of people of faith,” with Peña and the Colombian-Venezuelan pastor Roosevelt Fonseca as the two principals.

The Venezuelan government’s own communications ministry identified Fonseca in its official account of the March 27 event as “principal leader of ‘Misión Vida Cristiana,’ Colombia-USA”, the Colombia origin the key detail that made him the channel’s hinge between Caracas and the exile community in South Florida.

IMAGE: Interim President Delcy Rodríguez attended the March 27 “Diplomacy of Faith” event for peace and prosperity in Venezuela with international religious leaders, including Pastor Ramiro Abel Peña JR, leader of the “Christ the King” Baptist Church in Waco (USA), and Pastor Roosevelt Fonseca, main leader of the “Christian Life Mission” Church (Colombia-USA) (Source: MIPPCI)

Peña flew repeatedly to Venezuela. By the time Rodríguez named him on July 3, 2026, he had spent four continuous months inside the country at the invitation of the acting president’s office. On December 14, 2025, twenty days before the operation, he spoke at the White House Christmas reception. On February 2, 2026, he hosted Colombian President Gustavo Petro for a private four-hour meeting the night before Petro’s official summit with Trump. The Colombian press called him “the man who whispers in Trump’s ear.”

VIDEO: Pastor Ramiro Pena, who has been working to unite churches and minister to Venezuelan government officials, spent the last four months ministering in Venezuela is now on the front lines of earthquake relief efforts – Jul. 2, 2026. (Source: KWTX)

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The Venezuelan government’s own communications ministry identified Fonseca at the March 27 event as the principal leader of Misión Vida Cristiana, “Colombia-USA.” That label matters. His church was in Weston, Florida, inside the South Florida exile circuit that shaped Rubio’s Venezuela policy and kept María Corina Machado at the centre of the opposition story. Murillo later named Fonseca as Peña’s co-principal in the silent-diplomacy channel. Fonseca was also present at the March 27 “Diplomacia de Fe” event, when Rodríguez first blessed the evangelical normalisation framework in public. Fonseca’s role was not incidental. It placed the channel inside the South Florida political terrain where Venezuela policy has long been made.

The Legislator and the Panama Company

Javier Bertucci, evangelical pastor and National Assembly deputy, ran against Maduro in 2018 and lost in a contest widely viewed as useful vote-splitting. He entered the Assembly in the December 2020 elections that most of the opposition boycotted. He had been deported from the United States in February 2021 on the explicit grounds of his ties to the Maduro government. A Panama company, Stockwin Enterprises Inc, was linked to his name in the Panama Papers with a declared capital of five million dollars for importing food raw materials, the kind of sector where political access can quickly become private leverage. His Maranatha church is a branch of a Panama-based Pentecostal movement with 500 churches worldwide.

On February 10, 2026, Bertucci “invited the Venezuelan government” to reestablish diplomatic relations with Israel. Not a personal statement, a legislative act, on the record, from a man with notional opposition credentials who gave the regime’s Israel pivot the cross-partisan cover it needed to avoid looking like what it was. That same day, Venezuelan crude processed through a Qatar-managed mechanism arrived for the first time at Israel’s Bazan Group refinery in Haifa Bay. Coincidence is possible. But in an investigation built on dates, February 10 is not a date to pass over.

Celebro el envío del primer cargamento de petróleo a Israel, una nación con la que Venezuela puede fortalecer una relación de cooperación, oportunidades y beneficios mutuos, especialmente en el ámbito agrícola.

Invito respetuosamente al Gobierno nacional a retomar las relaciones…

— JAVIER BERTUCCI (@JAVIERBERTUCCI) February 10, 2026

Four months later, on the morning of July 3, Venezuelan state television placed Bertucci and Ramiro Peña in the same sentence, crediting both men, in a post published directly from the presidential account, with coordinating evangelical relief organisations under Rodríguez’s direct authority. That post is the single most important document in this investigation. Not an allegation. The Venezuelan government confirming, on its own channel, that an American pastor with direct access to Trump and a Venezuelan legislator with a Panama offshore vehicle were running the same evangelical operation under presidential supervision. They named them both. They published it. They did not think anyone was putting it together.

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IMAGE/POST: VTV Canal 8, Venezuela’s state broadcaster, published Rodríguez’s July 3 statement thanking evangelical organisations coordinated by American Reverend Ramiro Peña and Pastor Javier Bertucci for earthquake relief. Source: VTV Canal 8

Post Translation: Acting President Delcy Rodríguez declared that there was “no room for politics” and called for unity, thanking donations from global companies such as Repsol and evangelical organisations coordinated by American Reverend Ramiro Peña and Pastor Javier Bertucci for responding to the emergency.

The Pentagon Doctrine

Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense who authorised the military operations in Venezuela, conducts monthly worship services at the Pentagon, carries a Jerusalem Cross tattoo, and has used explicit crusader language in official settings. He has hosted the founder of the CREC, the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, at Pentagon events and authored a book titled American Crusade. NPR reported in March 2026 that his religious rhetoric in briefings had no precedent in modern US military governance. The Atlantic called him a “Holy Warrior” bringing fundamentalist Christianity into the heart of the institution.

IMAGE: Faith in the US Military: SECWAR’s Pete Hegseth Leads Pentagon Prayer Service (Source: Defense Now)

His religious-political framework, aligned with Christian Zionist assumptions, supplied the military counterpart to the pastoral architecture being run by Peña and Fonseca from the civilian side. They are not coordinated in any documented way, even though they are operating in parallel tracks in the broader conservative evangelical and Trump-aligned circles. This was not a command structure because it did not have to be. The same religious-political language that made Israel’s return legible in Venezuelan churches also framed Washington’s military posture as providential rather than strategic. Nicolásito‘s six-year project inside Venezuela had already prepared the receiving end of that same doctrine. What Hegseth and Peña were transmitting from Washington, the machine Nicolásito built was already receiving in Caracas.

The oil had already begun moving. Under the US-administered export arrangement imposed after January 3, commodity traders Vitol and Trafigura were lifting Venezuelan crude and routing proceeds through a Qatar-held account under White House oversight — with cargoes reaching India, Spain, the US, and, on February 10, Israel’s Bazan Group refinery in Haifa for the first time since 2020. The Venezuelan government officially denied the shipment. The oil moved regardless. By February 2026, Netanyahu received the crude, the symbolic normalisation, and the weakening of Latin America’s pro-Palestinian bloc. Trump received the outlines of a managed transition, with Rodríguez kept in place under a faith-and-reconstruction narrative. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), the pro-Israel think tank that had spent years linking Venezuela’s Maduro to Iran’s drone and proxy networks as a shared threat to Israel and the US, had supplied the intellectual architecture for treating both as a single strategic problem

The Machine Changes Hands

After Maduro’s removal, the evangelical apparatus Nicolásito had spent years building began to come apart. In March 2026, MOCEV leader Moisés García told Religion News Service that the organisation had offered Rodríguez its support two days after the operation and received no answer. “She is not fond of Christianity,” he said. The rupture had been building for some time. García traced MOCEV’s cooling relationship with Chavismo to Maduro’s 2024 meeting in Puerto Cabello, where the government appeared to favour pastors from the largest megachurches over the older political-evangelical machinery. By the time Rodríguez took power, MOCEV’s offer of loyalty no longer mattered.

IMAGE: Nicolás Maduro Guerra in the National Assembly, still inside the Chavista machinery Rodríguez would soon bypass. (Source: Asamblea Nacional)

The silence was revealing. MOCEV had served the old Chavista machine. Pastors distributed stipends, filled Government Pastoral Councils, and helped turn party loyalty into religious legitimacy. Rodríguez inherited the structure, but not the need to keep its operators in place.

Nicolásito’s network had been domestic, Chavista, and transactional. What replaced it was more useful to Rodríguez because it was external, evangelical, and diplomatic. She had Peña with his White House access, Fonseca with his Florida diaspora network, and Bertucci with his Assembly seat and Panama vehicle. The pastors who had once depended on Nicolasito’s patronage were now watching another network walk into Miraflores.

Nicolásito, meanwhile, had become a liability. The updated US indictment names Nicolás Ernesto Maduro Guerra, known as “Nicolásito” or “The Prince,” alongside Maduro, Cilia Flores, Diosdado Cabello, Ramón Rodríguez Chacín, and Tren de Aragua leader Hector Guerrero Flores. Prosecutors accuse the group of narco-terrorism, cocaine importation, and weapons conspiracies allegedly tied to drug trafficking into the United States. The man who had helped build Venezuela’s evangelical infrastructure was now a federal defendant in New York, while American pastors met in Miraflores with the acting president his father left behind.

The Billionaire Signal

Rodríguez’s new evangelical channel did more than replace the old Chavista pastors. It also reached into the part of the American right where Trump’s Venezuela operation had caused real discomfort.

Gary Heavin was in Miraflores on July 2, 2026, seated with Rodríguez and Ramiro Peña. The founder of Curves International was not there as a neutral relief donor. He had publicly renounced Christian Zionism and described Israel’s policies toward Palestinians as “Satanic.”

IMAGE: Gary and Diane Heavin, founders of Curves International, joined Waco pastor Ramiro Peña on the ground in Venezuela after 7.2- and 7.5-magnitude earthquakes devastated the Caribbean country (Source: KWTX)

Heavin brought another kind of baggage. In 2015, he flew to Haiti with Rand Paul on his private jet and was described as capable of putting more than ten million dollars behind Paul’s presidential campaign. Paul had spent late 2025 attacking Trump’s Venezuela operation and trying to block it through a War Powers Resolution. One day after the January 3 operation, Heavin called it “We Stole Their Oil.”

By May, Pastor Peña, his friend of twenty-six years, had brought him in through a phone call about food containers. By July 2, Heavin was inside Miraflores. Venezuelan media presented it as humanitarian coordination. Politically, it showed something else. A figure trusted by the Rand Paul wing of the Republican coalition was no longer outside the Venezuela project. He was in the room.

Whether that signal was designed or accidental is not in the documents. That it was sent is.

What the Same Morning Contained

The story that will be told about Venezuela in late 2026 is one of humanitarian recovery and faith-based reconstruction. Every element of that narrative is factually true: the IDF mission occurred, the earthquake relief coordination occurred, the public thanks to Israel occurred.

IMAGE: Israel Defence Forces (IDF) inspect buildings damaged in Venezuela’s earthquake (Source: Reuters/Leonardo Fernandez Viloria)

What the public record also shows is a different architecture that predates the earthquake by months and the military operation by years: oil revenue routed through Qatar, a CIA assessment that had already identified Rodríguez as the preferred post-Maduro figure, a Department of Justice instructed to stand down on her prosecution, a Texas pastor who met with Trump’s cabinet twenty days before the operation and then spent four months embedded in Caracas afterward, and a Chavista prince who spent six years embedding the precise ideological infrastructure that made the subsequent normalisation politically legible inside Venezuela’s evangelical communities.

Venezuela was not an improvisation. The Isaac Accords, formally launched by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Argentine President Javier Milei in Jerusalem on April 19, 2026, supplied the explicit institutional framework for what later happened in Caracas. Conceived as a Latin American sequel to the Abraham Accords and operationalised through the American Friends of Isaac Accords, whose stated method is “faith-based diplomacy“ through evangelical legislators, the Accords commit member countries to countering Iran, designating Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organisations, and relocating their embassies to Jerusalem. On June 29, 2026, four days before Rodríguez publicly thanked the IDF, legislators from 14 Latin American countries signed those principles in Buenos Aires. Venezuela’s evangelical normalisation was not a humanitarian accident. It was the pipeline already being built.

READ MORE: The Rise of the Isaac Accords: How Israel is Redrawing South America’s Political Landscape

None of it was possible without Washington. Marco Rubio, who built his political career inside Miami’s Venezuelan exile community and whose State Department stood down the DOJ prosecution of Rodríguez, supplied the diplomatic cover. Trump supplied the military operation, the Qatar oil account, and the ideological environment in which a Secretary of Defense with a Jerusalem Cross tattoo could host evangelical pastors at the Pentagon without institutional friction. Their unshakable support for Israel did not merely enable what happened in Venezuela. It designed the conditions under which it became possible to call it humanitarian aid

What the documents show is that Israel was not waiting passively for an opening. Cohén had spent decades cultivating access in Caracas. Magen supplied the state-side operator. Xtend brought Israeli drone technology into the disaster zone. The IDF team produced a reconstruction plan in seventy-two hours. The Isaac Accords supplied the regional framework. When the earthquake came, Israel already had the people, the doctrine, the technology, and the institutional path.

On July 3, 2026, the Venezuelan state itself named the two pastors on its own television channel on the same morning it welcomed the Israeli soldiers. The documents were never secret. They simply had not been read together until now.

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Source: https://21stcenturywire.com/2026/07/09/the-pastor-pipeline-that-helped-deliver-venezuela-to-israel/