The US will “run” Venezuela until a “safe, proper and judicious transition” can be ensured, Donald Trump has said, after US strikes led to the capture of country’s President Nicolas Maduro.
US oil companies would also fix Venezuela’s “broken infrastructure” and “start making money for the country”, the US president said.
The US launched strikes on Venezuela on Saturday morning in which Maduro and his wife, First Lady Cilia Flores, were captured by US forces and removed from the country.
Venezuela announced a state of national emergency and denounced the “military aggression”, with the country’s vice president saying Maduro is its only leader.
Maduro and Flores were flown out of the capital, Caracas, on a US helicopter in the early hours of Saturday morning and taken aboard the USS Iwo Jima at an unknown location in the Caribbean Sea.
They were later flown to the Guantanamo Bay US Naval Base in Cuba before being transferred to another plane to head to New York state, and then flown by helicopter into New York City’s Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
US Attorney General Pam Bondi said Maduro and Flores had been indicted in the Southern District of New York.
The pair have been charged with conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism and import cocaine, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices against the US.
“They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts,” Bondi wrote on X.
Previously, Maduro has vehemently denied being a cartel leader and has accused the US of using its “war on drugs” as an excuse to try to depose him and get its hands on Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.
Trump told a news conference ahead of Maduro’s arrival in New York: “The oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust for a long period of time.
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”
The South American country has approximately 303 billion barrels’ worth of crude, accounting for about 20% of the world’s oil resources, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
It is unclear exactly how the US plans to “run” Venezuela, but the president said it will be a “group” of people leading the charge.
“We’re going to be running it with a group, and we’re going to make sure it’s run properly,” Trump said.
When pressed by reporters as to who inside Venezuela would form part of that group, Trump said US Secretary of State Marco Rubio had been talking to Delcy Rodríguez, the country’s vice-president.
Trump said Rodríguez – who has since been named interim president by Venezuela’s Supreme Court – had expressed her willingness to do “whatever the US asks”.
However, speaking on state TV after Trump’s remarks, Rodríguez called Maduro the “only one president in Venezuela”, adding that the government was ready to defend itself.
Trump also said he had not spoken to Venezuela’s opposition leader, María Corina Machado, who was barred from the 2024 presidential election but was instrumental in galvanising support for a rival candidate to Maduro believed to have won the poll.
The US president said Machado “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country” needed to run Venezuela.
Explosions were heard around Caracas early on Saturday morning as military bases were targeted by US forces. Over the following two hours and twenty minutes, dozens of US aircraft were seen in the skies as special forces penetrated Maduro’s safe house to retrieve him.
Venezuela’s long-term allies strongly condemned the US actions. Russia accused the US of committing “an act of armed aggression” that was “deeply concerning and condemnable”. China’s foreign ministry said it was “deeply shocked and strongly condemns” the use of force against a sovereign country and its president.
Many Latin American countries, including Venezuela’s neighbours, Colombia and Brazil, also condemned the actions. Cuba’s President Miguel Diaz-Canel described them as a “criminal attack”, while Trump’s ally in Argentina, Javier Milei, wrote “freedom moves forward” on social media.
US allies were more reserved in their responses, urging a peaceful transition of power. Sir Keir Starmer said the UK “regarded Maduro as an illegitimate president” and “shed no tears about the end of his regime”, but called for a “safe and peaceful transition to a legitimate government”.
The EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas and France’s president Emmanuel Macron offered similar sentiments calls for peace. A new government must be “respectful of the will of the Venezuelan people”, Macron wrote in a post on X.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the legality of the US operation was “complex” and warned that “political instability must not be allowed to arise in Venezuela”.
The taking of Maduro is the culmination of an escalating pressure campaign against his government by the Trump administration over the past 12 months that has included sanctions and placing a large naval force in the region.
Since September, the US has launched more than 30 strikes on what it says are boats being used for drug trafficking in the Pacific and the Caribbean, killing more than 100 people.
The Trump administration has described the strikes as attacks against terrorists attempting to bring fentanyl and cocaine to the US, however it has provided no evidence for this claim.
With the exception of two survivors – a Colombian and an Ecuadorean national – none of the identities of those aboard have been made public.
Earlier this week, the conflict escalated further when the US carried out a strike on a “dock area” linked to alleged Venezuelan drug boats.
Fentanyl is produced mainly in Mexico and reaches the US almost exclusively via land through its southern border.
Counter-narcotic experts have also described Venezuela as a relatively minor player in global drug trafficking, mainly acting as a country through which drugs produced elsewhere are smuggled.
