Though President Donald Trump may not admit it, Saturday’s capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro means the United States is once again in the business of regime change.
At least that’s the usual outcome when a country’s leader is forcibly deposed.
On Sunday afternoon, administration officials reiterated Trump’s plan to now “run” Venezuela, by bullying and threatening the current leadership in Venezuela.
They’re holding Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, on an increasingly short leash.
While Trump initially assured Rodríguez would fall in line, saying, “she’s essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” his rhetoric Sunday was decidedly sharper. “If she doesn’t do what’s right,” Trump told the Atlantic, “she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”
For her part, Rodríguez’s response to Maduro’s capture was to call for his return, saying, “Never again will we be a colony of any empire. We’re ready to defend Venezuela.”
Venezuela declared its independence from Spain in the early 1800s after 300 years of occupation.
According to Marco Rubio, U.S. Secretary of State, Saturday’s capture of President Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, was a law enforcement mission, but that veil quickly fell away when Trump couldn’t stop talking about Venezuela’s vast oil resources and how they had been badly mismanaged.
In our opinion, aiding and abetting the sale of illicit drugs is the least of Maduro’s offenses when compared to his rigging the 2024 presidential election results in his favor, his administration’s human rights offenses, and the gross mismanagement of Venezuela’s economy.
The U.S. says it will work with Maduro’s top tier to get what it wants (read: oil). But the prospect of working with Maduro’s cronies is quickly deflating the hopes of Venezuelan activists who cheered Maduro’s arrest and harbored the hope of imminent elections.
An estimated 8 million Venezuelans have emigrated to other countries since Maduro took office in 2013 due to the country’s economic collapse and ruthless dictatorship.
But Trump made no mention of these crimes, instead using the spectre of “narcoterrorism” as reason to seize Maduro.
Trump said Maduro’s compliance with drug lords was a direct threat to Americans. Yet last month he pardoned former Honduran President Juan Hernandez, who was tried, convicted and sentenced to 45 years in prison for trafficking hundreds of tons of cocaine into the U.S.
The double standard reveals Trump’s biggest beef with Venezuela, which he maintains has stolen U.S. oil industry assets when Venezuela nationalized the industry in 1976, forcing companies around the world to cease production, leaving the industry in tatters. The only American company to stick it out was Chevron, which formed a partnership with Venezuela and resumed pumping oil in July when U.S. sanctions were eased.
With the United States taking over its oil industry, “We’ll make the people of Venezuela rich, independent and safe,” Trump predicted.
Is the White House really that confident it can manage another country, along with this one? Venezuela, a country of 28 million and bigger than Texas, is now in a U.S.-triggered spiral. This is bigger than a rebrand. As Colin Powell said before the war in Iraq, “You break it, you own it.”
