Updated 6:12 p.m.
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Hours after an audacious military operation that plucked leader Nicolás Maduro from power and removed him from the country, President Donald Trump said Saturday that the United States would run Venezuela at least temporarily and tap its vast oil reserves to sell to other nations.
The dramatic action capped an intensive Trump administration pressure campaign on the South American nation and its autocratic leader and months of secret planning resulting in the most assertive American action to achieve regime change since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Legal experts immediately raised questions about whether the operation was lawful, and Venezuela’s vice president demanded in a speech that the U.S. free Maduro and called him the country’s rightful leader.
Speaking to reporters hours after Maduro’s capture, Trump revealed his plans to exploit the leadership void to “fix” the country’s oil infrastructure and sell “large amounts” of oil to other countries.
Maduro and his wife, seized overnight from their home on a military base, were first taken aboard a U.S. warship on their way to face prosecution for a Justice Department indictment accusing them of participating in a narco-terrorism conspiracy. A plane believed to be carrying the deposed leader landed Saturday evening in New York.
A person in custody was escorted off the jet, gingerly making his way down a stairway before being led across the tarmac surrounded by federal agents. Several agents appeared to film the person on their phones.
The legal authority for the incursion, done without congressional approval, was not immediately clear, but the Trump administration promoted the ouster as a step toward reducing the flow of dangerous drugs into the U.S. The president touted what he saw as other potential benefits, including a leadership stake in the country and greater control of oil.
Trump claimed the U.S. government would help run the country and was already doing so, though there were no immediate signs of that. Venezuelan state TV continued to air pro-Maduro propaganda, broadcasting live images of supporters taking to the streets in Caracas in protest.
“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” Trump said at a Mar-a-Lago news conference where he boasted that this “extremely successful operation should serve as warning to anyone who would threaten American sovereignty or endanger American lives.”
Maduro and other Venezuelan officials were indicted in 2020 on “narco-terrorism” conspiracy charges, but the Justice Department released a new indictment Saturday of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, that painted the regime as a “corrupt, illegitimate government” fueled by a drug trafficking operation that flooded the U.S with cocaine. The U.S. government does not recognize Maduro as the country’s leader.
Trump posted a photo on social media showing Maduro wearing a sweatsuit and a blindfold on board the USS Iwo Jima.
Early morning attack
The operation followed a monthslong Trump administration effort to push the Venezuelan leader, including a major buildup of American forces in the waters off South America and attacks on boats in the eastern Pacific and Caribbean accused of carrying drugs. Last week, the CIA was behind a drone strike at a docking area believed to have been used by Venezuelan drug cartels — the first known direct operation on Venezuelan soil since the U.S. began strikes in September.
Maduro had decried prior military operations as a thinly veiled effort to topple him from power.
Taking place 36 years to the day after the 1990 U.S. invasion of Panama that led to the surrender and seizure of leader Manuel Antonio Noriega, the Venezuela operation unfolded under the cover of darkness early Saturday as Trump said the U.S. turned off “almost all of the lights” in the capital city of Caracas while forces moved in to extract Maduro and his wife.
Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said U.S. forces had rehearsed their maneuvers for months, learning everything about Maduro — where he was and what he ate, as well as details of his pets and his clothes.
“We think, we develop, we train, we rehearse, we debrief, we rehearse again and again,” Caine said. “Not to get it right, but to ensure we cannot get it wrong.”
