US captures Venezuela's Maduro, Trump says US will run the country

The United States attacked Venezuela and captured its long-serving President Nicolas Maduro on Saturday, with U.S. President Donald Trump promising to put the country under American control for now, even as Venezuelan officials vowed defiance. 

As part of a dramatic overnight operation that knocked out electricity in parts of Caracas, U.S. Special Forces captured Maduro in or near one of his safe houses, Trump said. With Maduro in U.S. custody, "We will run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition," Trump said during a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. "We can't take a chance that someone else takes over Venezuela who doesn't have the interests of Venezuelans in mind."

A plane carrying Maduro landed in upstate New York on Saturday evening, multiple news outlets reported.

Video showed a plane arriving at Stewart International Airport about 60 miles (97 km) northwest of New York City, with several U.S. personnel in FBI and other apparel boarding the aircraft after it landed. TV news networks, including CNN, Fox News and MS Now, identified a person who disembarked from the plane as Maduro. 

It is unclear how Trump plans to oversee Venezuela. U.S. 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.

Maduro, who was indicted on various U.S. charges, including narco-terrorism conspiracy, is expected to make an initial appearance in Manhattan federal court on Monday, according to a Justice Department official. 

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 Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores," Rodriguez said, calling Maduro "the only president of Venezuela."

Rodriguez spoke hours after Trump said his administration had been in touch with her and that she appeared cooperative, adding that "She really doesn't have a choice."

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'm happy, I doubted for a moment that it was happening because it's like a movie," said merchant Carolina Pimentel, 37, in the city of Maracay. "It's all calm now, but I feel like at any moment everyone will be out celebrating."

At his press conference, where he was accompanied by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Trump did not provide specific answers to repeated questions about how the United States would take over and run Venezuela.

"The people that are standing right behind me" — such as Rubio and Hegseth — would oversee the country, Trump said.

He said he was open to sending U.S. forces into Venezuela. "We're not afraid of boots on the ground," he 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. 

Who the U.S. planned to cooperate with in Venezuela was not made clear; Trump publicly closed the door on working with opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, widely seen as Maduro's most credible opponent.

Trump said the United States has not been in contact with Machado. "She doesn't have the support within or the respect within the country," he said.

Trump's comment outraged some supporters of Machado, who has voiced support for U.S. actions to fight alleged drug trafficking and who dedicated her Nobel Prize win to Trump and the Venezuelan people.

Machado "is the most respected politician in the country," said Pedro Burelli, a former board member at state oil company PDVSA, on X. "Venezuela is broke and needy, but it is not about to surrender to absurd whims."

Reuters has previously reported that members of Machado’s team helped the Trump administration build the case for an aggressive stance against the Venezuelan government, despite worries about blowback from Trump’s policies on Venezuelan immigrants living in the United States. 

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 and thousands of U.S. casualties.

He said on Saturday 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. 

Trump in the past criticized 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." 

The United Nations Security Council is due to meet on Monday over the U.S. action.

Before Saturday, the U.S. 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 United States has leveled 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 Chavez to succeed him in 2013, has denied those claims and said Washington was intent on taking control of his nation's oil reserves, the largest in the world. 

Trump's action recalls the Monroe Doctrine, laid out in 1823 by President James Monroe, laying U.S. 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 "Don-roe 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 U.S. 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 Inacio Lula da Silva said it crossed "an unacceptable line." 

One former diplomat said leaders in Latin America and beyond would draw dark lessons from the unilateral U.S. action, which he compared to Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

"For Latin America, it basically says no leader is safe if deemed illegitimate by the U.S.," said Tyson Barker, a senior associate fellow at the German Council on Foreign Relations. "For the world, it flattens any moral credibility we have vis-à-vis China and Russia."

U.S. TO BE REIMBURSED: TRUMP

A U.S. occupation "won't cost us a penny" because the United States would be reimbursed from the "money coming out of the ground," Trump said, 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, U.S. 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 $2 trillion.

Trump’s attention to foreign affairs provides fuel for Democrats to criticize 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. "How does going to war in South America help regular Americans who are struggling?" U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat, wrote on X.

Outside the White House, about 100 protesters organized by the ANSWER Coalition, an anti-war group, and the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which has supported Maduro in the past, called on the White House to return Maduro to Venezuela, calling it a "kidnapping."