Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro was in a New York detention centre on Sunday after US president Donald Trump ordered an audacious US raid to capture the South American leader and take control of the country and its vast oil reserves.
Secretary of state Marco Rubio has said the US will use an oil quarantine to get what it wants from Venezuela’s new leaders following the capture of Maduro.
Rubio told CBS News that Venezuela must sever ties to Iran and Hizbullah, stop drug trafficking and ensure that Venezuela’s oil industry doesn’t benefit adversaries of the US.
“We are going to make an assessment of what they do, not what they say publicly in the interim, not what we know, what they’ve done in the past in many cases, but what they do moving forward,” he said in an interview. “So we’re going to find out.”
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“I do know this – that if they don’t make the right decision, that the United States will retain multiple levels of leverage to ensure that our interests are protected and that includes the oil quarantine that’s in place among others,” he said.
As part of the dramatic operation early on Saturday that knocked out electricity in parts of Caracas and included strikes on military installations, US Special Forces seized Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and transported them via helicopter to a US Navy ship offshore before flying them to the US.
“We will run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” Trump told a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
A large part of Maduro’s security team was killed in the raid, Venezuelan defence minister Vladimir Padrino said in a televised statement on Sunday morning.
Padrino did not give an exact figure of casualties, but backed the declaration of vice-president Delcy Rodriguez as interim president and said the armed forces have been activated across the country to guarantee sovereignty.
For months, the Trump administration criticised Maduro (63) over what it called his involvement in shipping drugs to the US. It ramped up pressure with a massive military build-up in the Caribbean and a series of deadly missile attacks on alleged drug-running boats.
While many Western allies oppose Maduro and say he stole Venezuela’s 2024 election, Trump’s boasts about controlling the nation and exploiting its oil revived painful memories of past US interventions in Latin America, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Some legal experts questioned the legality of an operation to seize the head of state of a foreign power, while Democrats who said they were misled during recent Congress briefings demanded a plan for what is to follow. Trump said as part of the takeover, major US oil companies would move back into Venezuela, which has the world’s largest oil reserves, and refurbish badly degraded oil infrastructure, a process experts said could take years.
He said he was open to sending US forces into Venezuela. “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground,” he said.
A plane carrying Maduro landed near New York City on Saturday night. He was then flown by helicopter to the city before being taken by a large convoy to the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn under a heavy police guard.
[ Trump says US will ‘run’ Venezuela after capture of MaduroOpens in new window ]
Images released by US authorities showed the leader handcuffed and blindfolded during the flight, and later being led down a hallway at the offices of the US Drug Enforcement Administration, where he was heard wishing a “happy new year".
Maduro was indicted on various federal charges, including narco-terrorism conspiracy. He is expected to make an initial appearance in a Manhattan court on Monday, according to a Justice Department official.
It is unclear how Trump plans to oversee Venezuela. US forces have no control over the country and Maduro’s government appears not only to still be in charge, but to have no appetite for co-operating with Washington. Vice-president Rodriguez appeared on Venezuelan television on Saturday afternoon with other top officials to decry what she called a kidnapping.
“We demand the immediate release of president Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores," Rodriguez said, calling Maduro “the only president of Venezuela”. A Venezuelan court ordered Rodriguez to assume the position of interim president.
Trump did not say who will lead Venezuela when the US cedes control, but appeared to rule out working with opposition figure and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Corina Machado, widely seen as Maduro’s most credible opponent.
“She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country,” he said.
Machado released a letter addressing the Venezuelan people and said Maduro will “face international justice for the atrocious crimes committed against Venezuelans and against citizens of many other nations.”
It was unclear on Saturday if Machado was in Venezuela.
She had earlier called for Edmundo González to assume power.
In Venezuela, the streets were mostly calm after a rush for groceries and fuel. Soldiers patrolled some parts and small pro-Maduro crowds gathered in Caracas.
Others expressed relief. “I’m happy, I doubted for a moment that it was happening because it’s like a movie,” said merchant Carolina Pimentel (37) in the city of Maracay.
Many Venezuelan migrants around the world celebrated Maduro’s capture.
“We are free. We are all happy that the dictatorship has fallen and that we have a free country,” said Khaty Yanez, who lives in the Chilean capital Santiago, one of an estimated 7.7 million Venezuelans - 20 per cent of the population - who have left the country since 2014.
The UN Security Council planned to meet on Monday to discuss the actions, which secretary-general Antonio Guterres described as “a dangerous precedent”. Russia and China, both major backers of Venezuela, criticised the US.
“China firmly opposes such hegemonic behaviour by the US, which seriously violates international law, violates Venezuela’s sovereignty and threatens peace and security in Latin America and the Caribbean,” China’s foreign ministry said.
Trump’s comments about an open-ended military presence in Venezuela echoed the rhetoric around past invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which ended in American withdrawals after years of costly occupation and thousands of US casualties.
A US occupation “won’t cost us a penny” because the United States would be reimbursed from the “money coming out of the ground,” Trump said, referring to Venezuela’s oil reserves, a subject he returned to repeatedly during Saturday’s press conference. Trump’s focus on foreign affairs provides fuel for Democrats to criticise him ahead of midterm congressional elections in November, when control of both houses of Congress is at stake, with Republicans controlling both by narrow margins.
Opinion polls show the top concern for voters is high prices at home, not foreign policy.
Trump also runs the risk of alienating some of his own supporters, who have backed his “America First” agenda and oppose foreign interventions. - Reuters
