In a dramatic overnight military attack that followed months of rising tensions, United States President Donald Trump announced on Saturday morning that his country’s forces had bombed Venezuela and taken First Lady Cilia Flores and President Nicolas Maduro.
Venezuela’s government said that the US had struck three states apart from the capital, Caracas, while neighbouring Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro released a longer list of places that he said had been hit.
There are few, if any, parallels between the operation and contemporary history. The US has previously captured foreign leaders, including Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Panama’s Manuel Noriega, but after invading those countries in declared wars.
What we know about the US attacks and the events that caused this escalation is as follows:
What transpired during the attack?
At least seven explosions were reported from Caracas, a city of more than three million people, at about 2am local time (06: 00 GMT), as residents said they heard low-flying aircraft. According to Lucia Newman, editor of Al Jazeera’s Latin America program, at least one of the explosions appeared to be coming from Fort Tiuna, Venezuela’s principal military base.
Earlier, the US Federal Aviation Administration had issued instructions to American commercial airlines to stay clear of Venezuelan airspace.
As soon as the explosions occurred, Maduro declared a state of emergency, naming the US as the perpetrator of the attacks, claiming that it had struck Caracas as well as the nearby states of Miranda, Aragua, and La Guaira.
The US embassy in Bogota, Colombia, referred to the reports of the explosions and asked American citizens to stay out of Venezuela, in a statement. However, the diplomatic mission did not confirm US involvement in the attacks. That came more than three hours after the bombings, from Trump.
What did Trump say?
Trump claimed in a post on his Truth Social platform that the US had “successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been captured and flown out of the country along with his wife, shortly after 09:00 GMT.”
Venezuela has not yet confirmed that Maduro was taken by US troops — but it also has not denied the claim.
Trump claimed that the attack was carried out with US law enforcement, but he did not specify who was in charge of it.
Trump announced that there would be a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida at 11am local time (16: 00 GMT) on Friday, where more details would be revealed.
Where in Venezuela did the US attack?
While neither the US nor Venezuelan authorities have pinpointed locations that were struck, Colombia’s Petro, in a social media post, listed a series of places in Venezuela that he said had been hit.
They include:
- La Carlota airbase was disabled and bombed.
- Bombed and disabled Cuartel de la Montana in Catia.
- The Federal Legislative Palace in Caracas was bombed.
- The main military complex in Venezuela, Fuerte Tiuna, was bombed.
- An airport in El Hatillo was attacked.
- Bombings occurred at the F-16 Base No 3 in Barquisimeto.
- A private airport in Charallave, near Caracas, was bombed and disabled.
- Caracas’s presidential palace, Miraflores, was attacked.
- Large parts of Caracas, including Santa Monica, Fuerte Tiuna, Los Teques, 23 de Enero and the southern areas of the capital, were left without electricity.
- Central Caracas has reported attacks.
- A military helicopter base in Higuerote was disabled and bombed.
What led to these US attacks on Venezuela?
Trump has claimed that Maduro is responsible for the Venezuelan president’s involvement in the Tren de Aragua gang, which Washington has labeled a foreign terrorist organization in recent months.
But his own intelligence agencies have said that there is no evidence that Maduro is linked to Tren de Aragua, and US data shows that Venezuela is not a major source of contraband narcotics entering the country.
The US military launched a number of strikes on alleged narcotics-carrying ships in the Caribbean Sea in September. More than 100 people have been killed in at least 30 such boat bombings, but the Trump administration is yet to present any public evidence that there were drugs on board, that the vessels were travelling to the US, or that the people on the boats belonged to banned organisations, as the US has claimed.
The US’s largest military deployment in the Caribbean Sea, spearheaded by the USS Gerald Ford, the largest aircraft carrier in the world, came just as the US made its biggest military deployment in the area in at least ten years.
In December, the US hijacked two ships carrying Venezuelan oil, and has since imposed sanctions on multiple companies and their tankers, accusing them of trying to circumvent already stringent American sanctions against Venezuela’s oil industry.
Then, last week, the US attacked a “dock” in Venezuela where Trump claimed drugs were loaded onto boats.
Could all this be about oil?
Trump has so far portrayed his military and pressure tactics against Venezuela and the Caribbean Sea as being motivated by a desire to stop the flow of dangerous drugs into the US.
But he has increasingly also sought Maduro’s departure from power, despite a phone call in early December that the Venezuelan president described as “cordial”.
Venezuela’s oil reserves, which are unmatched anywhere in the world, totaled 303 billion barrels (Bbbl) in 2023, have been the subject of more senior aides of the US president’s aides in recent weeks.
On December 17, Trump’s top adviser Stephen Miller claimed that the US had “created the oil industry in Venezuela” and that the South American country’s oil should therefore belong to the US.
However, international law is clear: sovereign states, in this case Venezuela, own the natural resources within their borders under the principle of Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources (PSNR), despite US companies being the first to drill for oil in Venezuela in the early 1900s.
Venezuela nationalised its oil industry in 1976. Venezuela has a tense relationship with the US since Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s mentor and predecessor, took office in 1999.
Still,  , one major US oil company, Chevron, continues to operate in the country.
The Venezuelan opposition, led by Maria Corina Machado, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, has publicly demanded that the US step in and help with Venezuela’s new dispensation.
Oil has long been Venezuela’s biggest export, but US sanctions since 2008 have crippled formal sales and the country today earns only a fraction of what it once did.
How has Venezuela’s government reacted?
Vice President Delcy Rodrigues told state-owned VTV that Maduro and First Lady Flores had lost contact with Venezuela and had not received any information about their whereabouts, even though Venezuela has not confirmed their whereabouts.
She demanded that the US provide “proof of life” of Maduro and Flores, and added that Venezuela’s defences were activated.
The Venezuelan government previously stated in a statement that it “rejects, repudiates, and denounces” the attacks.
It said that the aggression threatens the stability of Latin America and the Caribbean, and places the lives of millions of people at risk. It claimed that the US had attempted to impose a colonial war and to impose a regime change, and that these efforts would fail.
What follows for Maduro?
In a statement posted on X, Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that Maduro and his wife have been indicted in the Southern District of New York.
According to Bondi, Maduro has been accused of “Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy” and “Cocaine Importation Conspiracy” among other crimes. It was unclear if his wife is facing the same charges, but she referred to the Maduro couple as “alleged international narco traffickers”.
She continued, “They will soon face the full wrath of American justice in American courts.”
Mike Lee, a Republican senator from Utah, earlier posted on X that he had spoken to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who had told him that Maduro had been “arrested by US personnel to stand trial on criminal charges in the United States, and that the kinetic action we saw tonight was deployed to protect and defend those executing the arrest warrant”.
US prosecutors charged Maduro with operating a cocaine-trafficking network in 2020.
But US officials remain silent on the illegality of Maduro’s capture and the attacks on Venezuela, which violate UN charter principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity of nations.
Close Maduro allies, Cuba and Russia, both condemned the attack. Colombia, which neighbours Venezuela and has itself been in Trump’s crosshairs, said that it “rejects the aggression against the sovereignty of Venezuela and of Latin America” – even though Bogota itself does not recognise Maduro’s government.
Most other countries have so far responded to US aggression with a relatively muted tone.
What’s next for Venezuela?
If Maduro has been allegedly sucked out of Venezuela by the US, then Rodriguez, the vice president, is constitutionally the one in charge.
Other senior leaders seen as close to Maduro and influential within the Venezuelan hierarchy include Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, National Assembly President — and Delcy’s brother — Jorge Rodriguez, and military chief General Vladimir Padrino López.
However, it’s not clear whether Chavez and Maduro’s meticulous construction of the state apparatus will survive without it.
“Maduro’s capture is a devastating moral blow for the political movement started by Hugo Chavez in 1999, which has devolved into a dictatorship since Nicolas Maduro took power”, Carlos Pina, a Venezuelan analyst based in Mexico, told Al Jazeera.
Machado could be a front-liner contender to take Venezuela’s top job if the US does engineer a regime change, despite the uncertainty of how well-known that might be. In a November poll in Venezuela, 55 percent of participants were opposed to military intervention in their country, and an equal number were opposed to economic sanctions against Venezuela.
According to Christopher Sabatini, a senior research fellow for Latin America, the US and North America program at Chatham House, Trump might be mistaken if he believes the US can survive the chaos that will likely follow in a post-Maduro Venezuela.
“Assuming even if there is regime change – of some sort, and it’s by no means clear even if it does happen that it will be democratic – the US’s military action will likely require sustained US engagement of some sort”, he said.
Source: Aljazeera
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