The United States attacked Venezuela and captured its long-serving President Nicolas Maduro in an overnight operation yesterday, US President Donald Trump said, promising to put the country under American control for now, including by deploying US forces if necessary. Maduro’s apparent successor, Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, appeared on Venezuelan television yesterday afternoon, flanked by 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.”
Maduro is expected to make an initial appearance in Manhattan federal court tomorrow, according to a Justice Department official.
Rodriguez spoke shortly after Trump, who was flanked by senior US officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, said his administration had been in touch with her and that she appeared co-operative, noting that, “She really doesn’t have a choice.”
At his press conference, Trump did not provide specific answers to repeated questions about how the US proposed to take over and run Venezuela, saying that “The people that are standing right behind me” – such as Rubio and Hegseth – would be overseeing the country.
He also said he was open to the idea of sending US forces into Venezuela.
“We’re not afraid of boots on the ground,” he 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.
He said yesterday that as president, including his first term, he has overseen military actions that were “only victories.” But none of those involved removing another country’s leader.
Trump in the past criticised such interventions, calling the Iraq invasion “a big fat mistake” during a 2016 presidential debate, and saying in 2021 that he was “especially proud to be the first president in decades who has started no new wars.” The United Nations Security Council is due to meet tomorrow over the US action.
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 yesterday’s press conference.
The idea that a country’s oil reserves can pay for an American invasion also recalls the 2003 Iraq war. In the run-up to the invasion, US officials repeatedly stated that the cost would largely be covered by Iraq’s assets, including its oil. Various estimates by academics say the actual cost to the United States of its years-long entanglement in Iraq ended up being at least $2 trillion.
Who the US planned to co-operate with in Venezuela was not made clear; Trump publicly closed the door on working with opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, widely seen as Maduro’s most credible opponent.
Trump said the United States has not been in contact with the Nobel Peace Prize laureate. “She doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country,” he said.
Trump’s comment outraged some supporters of Machado, who has voiced support for US actions to fight alleged drug trafficking and who dedicated her Nobel Prize win to Trump and the Venezuelan people. Machado “is the most respected politician in the country,” said Pedro Burelli, a former board member at state oil company PDVSA, on X. “Venezuela is broke and needy, but it is not about to surrender to absurd whims.”
Reuters has previously reported that members of Machado’s team helped the Trump administration build the case for an aggressive stance against the Venezuelan government, despite worries about blowback from Trump’s policies on Venezuelan immigrants living in the United States.
A source with knowledge of the matter said Machado’s team was in touch with members of Trump’s government.
The removal of Maduro, who led Venezuela with a heavy hand for more than 12 years, could open a power vacuum in the country, which is bordered by Colombia, Brazil, Guyana, and the Caribbean.
Any serious destabilisation in the nation of 28 million people could create an even more chaotic situation in a country that US officials have said is rife with drug traffickers and other criminals, as well as armed groups such as Colombia’s ELN rebels, which operate in Venezuela. The US. has not made such a direct intervention in the region since the invasion of Panama 37 years ago to depose military leader Manuel Noriega over allegations that he led a drug-running operation. The United States has leveled similar charges against Maduro, accusing him of running a “narco-state” and rigging the 2024 election. Maduro, a 63-year-old former bus driver handpicked by the dying Hugo Chavez to succeed him in 2013, has denied those claims and said Washington was intent on taking control of his nation’s oil reserves, the largest in the world.
Trump’s action recalls the Monroe Doctrine, laid out in 1823 by President James Monroe, laying US claim to calling the shots in the region, as well as the “gunboat diplomacy” seen under President Theodore Roosevelt in the early 1900s. Trump nodded to the comparisons during his Press conference, suggesting an updated version of it might be called the “Don-roe Doctrine.”
While various Latin American governments oppose Maduro and say he stole the 2024 vote, Trump’s boasts about controlling Venezuela and exploiting its oil revive painful memories of past US interventions in Latin America and is generally opposed by governments and populations in the region.
Among major Latin American nations, Argentina’s President Javier Milei lauded Venezuela’s new “freedom” while Mexico condemned the intervention and Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said it crossed “an unacceptable line.”
One former diplomat said leaders in Latin America and beyond would draw dark lessons from the unilateral US action, which he compared to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“For Latin America, it basically says no leader is safe if deemed illegitimate by the US,” said Tyson Barker, a senior associate fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations. “For the world, it flattens any moral credibility we have vis-à-vis China and Russia.”
In Venezuela, the streets were mostly calm. Soldiers patrolled some parts and some small pro-Maduro crowds began gathering 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. “It’s all calm now, but I feel like at any moment everyone will be out celebrating.”
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