WASHINGTON, Jan 4 — United States (US) President Donald Trump has said he was putting Venezuela under temporary American control after the US captured President Nicolás Maduro in an audacious raid and whisked him to New York to face drug-trafficking charges.
"We will run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. We cannot take a chance that someone else takes over Venezuela who does not have the interests of Venezuelans in mind," he said during a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Trump added that as part of the takeover, major US oil companies would move into Venezuela, which has the world's largest oil reserves, and refurbish badly degraded oil infrastructure, a process experts said could take years.
Critics said his focus on oil at the press conference raised questions about his administration's efforts to frame the capture of Maduro and a series of deadly missile attacks on alleged drug boats as a law enforcement operation aimed at choking off drug shipments to the US.
As part of the dramatic overnight operation that knocked out electricity in parts of Caracas and included strikes on military installations, US Special Forces captured Maduro in or near one of his safe houses.
The Venezuelan President and his wife Cilia Flores were transported to a US Navy ship offshore before being flown to the US on Saturday evening.
Video showed a plane arriving at Stewart International Airport about 97km northwest of New York City, with several US personnel boarding the aircraft after it landed. A Justice Department official confirmed Maduro had landed in New York, and video later showed a large convoy arriving at the Metropolitan Detention Centre in Brooklyn under a heavy police presence.
A Justice Department official said that Maduro, who was indicted on various US charges, including narco-terrorism conspiracy, is expected to make an initial appearance in Manhattan federal court on Monday. Flores also faces charges, including cocaine importation conspiracy.
It is unclear how Trump plans to oversee Venezuela. US forces have no control over the country itself, and Maduro's government appears not only to still be in charge but to have no appetite for cooperating with Washington.
Trump did not say who would lead Venezuela when the US cedes control.
Maduro's apparent successor, Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, appeared on Venezuelan television Saturday afternoon with other top officials to decry what she called a kidnapping.
“We demand the immediate release of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores," Rodriguez said, calling Maduro "the only president of Venezuela." A Venezuelan court later ordered Rodriguez to serve as interim president.
In the US, some legal experts questioned the legality of an operation to seize the head of state of a foreign power, and Democrats who said they were misled during recent briefings demanded a plan on what would now follow.
Potential power vacuum
In Venezuela, the streets were mostly calm on Saturday. Soldiers patrolled some parts, and small pro-Maduro crowds gathered in Caracas.
Others expressed relief. "I am happy, I doubted for a moment that it was happening because it is like a movie," said merchant Carolina Pimentel, 37, in the city of Maracay.
At his press conference, where he was accompanied by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, Trump did not provide specific answers to repeated questions about how the US would run Venezuela, given that its government and military are still functioning.
"The people that are standing right behind me" — such as Rubio and Hegseth — would oversee the country, Trump said.
He noted that he was open to sending US forces into Venezuela. "We are not afraid of boots on the ground," Trump said.
The removal of Maduro, whom critics called a dictator as he 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.
Trump publicly closed the door on working with opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, widely seen as Maduro's most credible opponent.
Trump said the US has not been in contact with Machado, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year.
"She does not have the support within or the respect within the country," he said.
Recalling past regime changes
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, thousands of US casualties, and hundreds of thousands of people in both countries killed.
On Saturday, he said 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.
In the past, Trump 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."
Before Saturday, the US had 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 US has levelled 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 Chávez to succeed him in 2013, has denied those claims and said Washington was intent on taking control of his nation's oil reserves.
Trump's action recalls the Monroe Doctrine, laid out in 1823 by President James Monroe, laying the 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 "Donroe 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 that are generally opposed by governments and people in the region.
Argentina's President Javier Milei lauded Venezuela's new "freedom," while Mexico condemned the intervention, and Brazil's President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said it crossed "an unacceptable line."
Russia and China, both major backers of Venezuela, criticised the US action.
"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.
Political risks to Trump at home
Trump claimed that a US occupation "will not cost us a penny" because the country would be reimbursed from the "money coming out of the ground", referring to Venezuela's oil reserves, a subject he returned to repeatedly during Saturday'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 US$2 trillion (RM8.11 trillion).
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. Republicans control both chambers 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.
Voicing those concerns, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican who has broken with Trump in recent months, said on social media, "This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end. Boy, were we wrong."
