US will be strongly involved in Venezuela oil industry, says Trump

President Donald Trump has said the US will be “very strongly involved” in Venezuela’s oil industry after launching a military attack that swept the country’s authoritarian leader, Nicolas Maduro from power.

The president gave a phone interview to the conservative Fox News channel hours after a dramatic pre-dawn assault on Caracas and the surrounding region ended in the capture of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

Asked about the future of Venezuela’s oil industry, Trump replied: “We’re gonna be very strongly involved in it. That’s all. What can I say? We have the greatest oil companies in the world – the biggest, the greatest, and we’re going to be very much involved in it.”

Maduro, a 63-year-old former bus driver handpicked by the dying Hugo Chávez to succeed him in 2013, has accused the US of seeking to take control of his nation’s oil reserves, the biggest in the world.

At around 2am on Saturday, explosions rocked Caracas with blasts, aircraft and black smoke seen for about 90 minutes. The Venezuelan government said the attacks also took place in the states of Miranda, Aragua and La Guaira.

Trump took a victory lap in his Fox News interview, remarking: “I’ve never seen anything like this. I was able to watch it in real time and I watched every aspect of it.”

Describing the moment that Maduro was captured, the president said: “He was in a house that was more like a fortress than a house. It had steel doors, it had what they call a safety space where it’s solid steel … He was trying to get into it, but he got bumrushed so fast that he didn’t.”

The raid had been planned for several days earlier but repeatedly delayed because of weather, Trump said. Some US forces were injured but he believes “we had nobody killed”.

“We were prepared to do a second wave. We were all set – and this was so lethal, this was so powerful, that we didn’t have to … We were out there with an armada like nobody’s ever seen before.”

Trump said Maduro and his wife had been whisked by helicopters to the USS Iwo Jima, an amphibious assault ship in the Caribbean, ahead of their transfer to New York. “They’re on a ship, and they’ll be heading into New York … They went by helicopter on a nice flight. I’m sure they loved it.”

In the run-up to the attack, Trump had sought a blockade of Venezuelan oil and expanded sanctions against the Maduro government, and staged more than two dozen strikes on vessels the US alleges were involved in trafficking drugs, killing more than 110 people.

Describing his discussions with Maduro in recent weeks, Trump recalled: “I said, ‘You have to give up. You have to surrender’ – and he was close, but in the end, we had to do something that was really much more surgical, much more powerful … This was a very important symbol.”

It was unclear if the US would now stand back while other senior figures in Venezuela’s ruling party – such as the vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez – fill the void or if there would be pressure for their removal as well.

Asked what is next for the Venezuelan people, Trump replied: “We’re making that decision now. We can’t take a chance on letting somebody else run it and just take over where he left off … We’ll be involved in it very much. And we want to do liberty for the people.”

Maduro was indicted in US federal court in 2020 on narco-terrorism and other charges for running what prosecutors called a scheme to send tonnes of cocaine to the US through an alleged Cartel de los Soles. He has always denied the allegations.

The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, wrote on X about Maduro and his wife. “They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.”

The US has not made such a direct intervention in its back-yard region since the invasion of Panama 37 years ago to depose the military leader Manuel Noriega over similar allegations.

Venezuela’s ruling “Chavismo” movement, named for Maduro’s revered predecessor Hugo Chávez, said civilians and military personnel died in Saturday’s strikes but did not give figures.

The opposition, headed by recent Nobel peace prize winner María Corina Machado, had no immediate comment but has said for 18 months that it won the 2024 election and has a democratic right to take power.

Venezuelan allies Russia, Cuba and Iran were quick to condemn the strikes as a violation of sovereignty. Iran urged the UN security council to stop the “unlawful aggression”. Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, lauded Venezuela’s new “freedom”, while Mexico condemned the intervention and Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said it crossed “an unacceptable line”.

Maduro was captured by a team that included elite US special forces, including the US army’s Delta Force, a US official told the Reuters news agency.

JD Vance, the US vice-president, posted on the X social media platform: “The president offered multiple off ramps, but was very clear throughout this process: the drug trafficking must stop, and the stolen oil must be returned to the United States. Maduro is the newest person to find out that President Trump means what he says. Kudos to our brave special operators who pulled off a truly impressive operation.”

Republican Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House of Representatives, said: “Today’s military action in Venezuela was a decisive and justified operation that will protect American lives.”

But Democrats roundly condemned the intervention for illegally bypassing Congress.

Mark Warner, vice-chair of the Senate select committee on ontelligence, said: “If the United States asserts the right to use military force to invade and capture foreign leaders it accuses of criminal conduct, what prevents China from claiming the same authority over Taiwan’s leadership?

“What stops Vladimir Putin from asserting similar justification to abduct Ukraine’s president? Once this line is crossed, the rules that restrain global chaos begin to collapse, and authoritarian regimes will be the first to exploit it.”

…The Guardian