Review of World Affairs

• United States Attacks Venezuela: Captures President Maduro & Wife

By Shashi P.B.B. Malla

The United States carried out a lightning military strike on Venezuela early on Saturday, capturing Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, and spiriting them out of the country (AP/Associated Press, Jan. 3).

American officials say the pair will face narco-terrorism charges in a US court.

The overnight blitz-operation left Venezuela reeling, with its leadership uncertain and details of casualties and the impact on the military still to emerge.

Countries across the region and the wider world were absorbing the destabilizing implications of the unilateral US action.

Venezuelan ruling party leader Nahum Fernandez said Maduro and Flores were at their home within the Fuerte Tiuna military installation outside Caracas when they were captured (AP).

Venezuelan officials said people had been killed, but the scale of casualties was uncertain.

The attack followed months of escalating pressure by the Trump administration, which has built up naval forces in the waters off northern South America and since early September last year has carried out deadly strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the eastern Pacific and Caribbean.

Last week, the US even struck Venezuelan soil at a docking area alleged to have been used by drug cartels.

Maduro facing US terrorism charges

US Attorney General Pam Bondi said on social media ‘X’ that Maduro and Flores had both been indicted in the Southern District of New York and would ‘soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts’.

How the US operation played out

He said Maduro was ‘highly guarded’ in a presidential palace akin to a ‘fortress’ and the Venezuelan leader tried to get to a safe room but wasn’t able to get there on time.

Trump said US forces practiced the operation ahead of time on a replica building, and the US turned off ‘almost all the lights in Caracas,’ although he didn’t detail how they accomplished that.

Venezuela’s Vice-President, Delcy Rodriguez, also offered some details of the operation, saying some Venezuelan civilians and members of the military were killed.

[Considering that there was a bounty of a whopping US $ Dollar 50 million leading to Maduro’s capture, the US forces must have had access to major ‘insider information’].

Legality Questions

The US does not recognise the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, and the legal implications of the strike under US law were not immediately clear.

The Trump administration maintains that Maduro is not the legitimate leader of Venezuela and claims he has effectively turned Venezuela into a criminal enterprise at the service of drug traffickers and terrorist groups.

[But by what right does Trump and his administration claim to have jurisdiction over the affairs of Venezuela, which is a sovereign and independent state, in no way subservient to the U.S.?

What Trump ordered was clearly against the tenets of International Law and the Charta of the United Nations].

Mike Lee, US Republican senator from Utah, said on ‘X’ that the action ‘likely falls within the president’s inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution to protect US personnel from an actual or immanent attack.’

[In the first place, the US was itself employing warmongering tactics prior to the attack. Second, the US Constitution cannot be applied to foreign state and government. And in any case, International Law and the UN Charta have precedence over US laws and the Constitution].

The US Democrats were rightly more critical.

Senator Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat (and Hillary Clinton’s running mate in the 2020 presidential election), said in a statement: “President Trump’s unauthorized military attack on Venezuela to arrest Maduro – however terrible he is – is a sickening return to a day when the US asserted the right to dominate theninternal political affairs of all nations in the Western Hemisphere’’ (AP).

Venezuela’s future uncertain

Maduro’s government accused the US of an imperialist attack on civilian and military installations and urged citizens to take to the streets.

Consequently, armed individuals and uniformed members of a civilian militia took to the streets of a Caracas neighbourhood long considered a stronghold of the ruling party.

But in other areas of the city, the streets remained empty  

Parts of the city remained without power, but vehicles moved freely.

By law, Rodriguez should take power, and she has indeed been declared ‘acting President’.

On the other hand, Trump told Fox News that the US was deciding what is next for Venezuela and said ‘we’ll be involved in it very much’ as to who will govern the country.

The Role of the Opposition

There was no immediate comment from Venezuela opposition leader Maria Corina Machado.

She was in hiding for almost a year before travelling in secret to Norway last month to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.  

Trump has been very dismissive of Machado, saying she does not have the power or respect to be able to govern, despite winning an overwhelming victory in early 2024.

However, Machado has a very strong personality and it is unlikely that she would allow herself to be shunted to the side. The international community also has its say in the matter.

Experts’ opinion

Christopher Sabatini, a Latin America expert at the Chatham House international affairs think-tank, said the US strikes ‘open up an entirely unforseen, in many ways unexpected, series of events,’ and it’s unclear what kind of government will emerge.

Sabatini said elements of the Trump administration and the Venezuelan opposition have held a ‘dangerously naïve’ belief that ‘if you decapitate  the regime, figuratively speaking, by removing Maduro .  .  .  that would somehow lead to a democratic transition’.

Other countries scramble to respond

Venezuela’s neighbour Colombia sent troops to the border and anticipated an influx of refugees.

Latin American leaders were sharply divided over the strikes.

Trump’s right-wing ally President Javier Milei of Argentina celebrated the operation.

Leftist Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva condemned American actions and warned of the sharp repercussions of past American interventions in Latin America.

Cuba, a close supporter of the Maduro government and a longtime adversary of the United States, urged the international community to respond to what President Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez called ‘the criminal attack’.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry said the attack and capture of Madurio was ‘an unacceptable infringement on the sovereignty of an independent state’.

[ This was a clear example of ‘the pot calling the kettle black’ ! ].

US allies in Europe – critical of Maduro but mindful of the current sensitive state of European-American relation, especially with regard to Ukraine – offered muted responses as they scrambled to understand the scale and implications of the attack.

What Venezuelans really want

In an opinion piece in The New York Times, professor of political science at Simon Bolivar University in Caracas, Colette Capriles writes that Trump has said that the United States will run the country for the foreseeable future.

Capriles counters: “Replacing the man at the top will not dismantle the web of bosses, private loyalties, corrupt practices and institutional ruins” that have replaced public life in Venezuela (NYT, Jan. 5).

Furthermore, the state has utterly failed the people.

Life has become an exercise in struggle in an economy of scraps and favours, making do with a patchwork of informal jobs and relationships that can never quite fill the void left by the corruption and inefficiency of the government.

Capriles postulates that the authoritarianism in Venezuela is not autocratic socialism, but the worst kind of primitive capitalism.

“The government has been reduced to a mere apparatus for securing its own continuity.”

According to Capriles, Venezuelans, of course want change. This was demonstrated by the overwhelming opposition victory.

However, the demand for change is not ideological, or limited to new leadership.

Venezuelans want change:

• In their quality of life
• Want to regain more control over their futures and not be beholden to corrupt networks of power
• Want a state with the capacity to honour its obligations, whose power is balanced and limited.

[Where does all this leave Venezuela – dominated by Trump and his administration, and only interested in exploiting its vast reserves of oil ?].

An unapologetic return to ‘gunboat diplomacy’

Two other NYT-columnists, David E. Sanger and Tyler Pager write that Trump hopes to influence Venezuelan decision-making with a threatening armada just offshore.

Thus Trump’s actions on Saturday cast America back to a past era of gunboat diplomacy, when the United States used its military to grab territory and resources for its own benefit (Jan. 5).

According to John Polga-Hecimovich, a Venezuela expert at the US Naval Academy, a crucial test for future developments is how the Venezuelan armed forces react.

“If it splinters, with some backing a transition and others not, things could get violent .  .  .

“On the other hand, a unified force would help legitimize whatever government comes next” (NYT, Jan. 5).

The writer can be reached at: shashimalla125@gmail.com