When Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro closed the border with Colombia, he did it from the presidential palace hundreds of miles away. On the ground, supervising deportations and local officials, was the country’s iron-fisted chief lawmaker, Diosdado Cabello.
When store shelves grew bare in the sputtering state-run economy, it was Cabello who flew to Brazil in June to seal the country’s biggest-ever food-supply deal. And when metal workers downed tools in protest over triple-digit inflation, Cabello flew to the steel plants and squelched the rebellion.
