How Trump went from boat strikes to regime change in Venezuela |
President Donald Trump called for the US to “run” Venezuela on Saturday, shortly after the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro amid US strikes on the country’s capital of Caracas. The attack is a major escalation in Trump’s months-long pressure campaign against Venezuela and pushes the US into uncertain territory legally, politically, and militarily. Here’s what we know.
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US forces launched attacks against an unspecified number of targets in Caracas, Venezuela, overnight, and successfully located and captured Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. The couple has since been flown out of the country, Trump said in an early morning social media post, and will be taken by ship to face criminal charges in the US. Much is still unclear, but Trump claims US troops are thought to have been killed in the attack.
Maduro has been under indictment in the US since March 2020, when the Southern District of New York charged him with narco-terrorism, drug trafficking, and corruption, along with 14 others. On Saturday, the Justice Department unsealed a new superseding indictment that brought additional charges against Maduro and also charged Flores and other members of Maduro’s family, and FBI agents reportedly worked with US special forces to detain Maduro; the chair of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Dan Caine, described it on Saturday as an........