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 […]