Special Episode: After Maduro’s Ouster, What Are Trump’s Plans for Venezuela?

0:05Welcome to a special episode of The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker. Over the weekend, U.S. forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, along with his wife, in a dramatic raid and bombing campaign. In the aftermath, President Trump declared that the United States will now, quote, run Venezuela and give U.S. oil companies favorable access to the oil. What any of that means in practice, and for how long it'll last, is still being worked out. In the meantime, the administration did not rule out more strikes or the potential deployment of U.S.

0:43troops. The operation against Maduro was the culmination of a months-long pressure campaign on Venezuela by the United States. This took the form of a massive military buildup, threats, and controversial strikes on small boats in the Caribbean, which the administration claimed were ferrying drugs. But now the reality of regime change in Venezuela raises enormous and pressing questions about what could come next. I wanted to talk to The New Yorker staff writer John Lee Anderson, who has written extensively about Latin American politics and is deeply sourced in Venezuela. He even interviewed Maduro back in 2017.

1:19I spoke with John Lee on Monday afternoon.

1:27Hi, John Lee. Thanks for being here. Hi, Tyler. Great to be with you. I have to admit that I am still reeling from this story. It seems way crazier to me than the U.S. bombing Iranian nuclear facilities last year. It even seems crazier than the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in the sense that this involved a large-scale air and ground assault on a capital city and the live capture of a sitting head of state and his spouse. Is there any other modern military operation that compares to what the U.S. just did in Venezuela? No. It was an incredible moment. And I think we're all reeling from it. It's very surreal, as well as pretty grotesque, because of the justification for the raid and the capture of Maduro and his wife.

2:13The only modern, similar operation that comes to mind is the overthrow of General Manuel Noriega in 1989, right at the end of the year, 1990. and his capture and humiliation. He was shown, you know, handcuffed to something like Maduro and being boarded onto an American military plane. He was flown to the United States where he was ultimately convicted of a series of crimes, including drug trafficking, which, again, based on informants and so on, was never, I would say, incontrovertibly proven. He was a despotic figure. and he spent he ended up spending nearly 30 years in jail so that's the only precedent for this other than the overthrow and eventual capture of Saddam Hussein curiously enough like Noriega another American proxy gone rogue so I would say that what we're what we're seeing is a kind of mash-up of what's come before and I would draw a parallel that I haven't entirely been able to kind of to reach the frontiers of the thought yet.

3:25And it's that those two operations, which were within a year of one another, not the capture, eventual capture of Saddam Hussein, but the first Gulf War in which he was humbled, but allowed to stay in office. Interesting, right? So you leave the regime in place. In that case, they left Saddam in place and eventually 13 years later overthrew him and saw him hanged. But those two operations, which were 35 years ago, roughly, came just as the Cold War was ending. We didn't fully know it at the time, but the Berlin Wall had come down. Soon, the Soviet Union would crumble. And George H.W. Bush took those two military actions to effectively rein in American proxies, American Frankensteins from the Cold War.

4:13And I've always thought of them as also messaging by that White House to the world that was emerging from the breakup of the Soviet Union and the Cold War as ways to signal America is still here. It has military power. It can do war. These were the first military interventions on any kind of scale that the United States had done since Vietnam. There had been the brief grenade invasion, 1983 under Reagan. It was a week long affair. And these were much more visible and surprising, I think. So in that sense, what we're seeing with Venezuela, there's a parallel. And not only is it a mashup in terms of the capture of a sitting president and so on and so forth, but it's also about Donald Trump laying the lodestone for his new national security strategy.

5:09That is to say that the Americans are the hegemonic power of the Western Hemisphere. And this is what we'll do if you get out of line. So I want to talk more about what that means and just the idea that we could see the U.S. going after Cuba and Colombia and other nations next. But first, I just want to go back to this raid and kind of how unprecedented it is. So Pete Hegseth, our so-called secretary of war, has described this as the most sophisticated, most complicated, and most successful joint special operations raid of all time. Now, I think we're all used to Trump officials making statements like this.

5:46You know, they said the same thing about the bombing of Iran last year. But do you think that in this case, the statement is true? I mean, we're talking about a raid with no reported U.S. casualties, although I should mention that Venezuela is reporting that at least 80 people were killed, including military personnel and civilians. But it does kind of seem like in military terms, this was relatively seamless. It does. It does seem relatively seamless. I mean, the operation, which ultimately resulted in the death of bin Laden, was pretty impressive as well and involved years of intelligence work and planning.

6:22There was, you know, a last minute screw up, as there often seems to be. There wasn't, in this case, of a helicopter crashing and so on. But this was incredibly seamless. I mean, it's sort of a made for a Reagan era heroic TV drama, you know, Red Dawn or something, you know. And what does that seamlessness suggest to you? Like, because I read about this and I immediately think, well, there had to have been some kind of cooperation inside of Venezuela in order to pull off something like this. Like, to what degree, and I know we're just kind of speculating here, but to what degree did people in Maduro's regime have to kind of look the other way to enable this to happen?

7:02Whether it be the fact that U.S. officials were able to figure out what compound he was staying at. I believe he was rotating, you know, amongst a variety of different kind of safe houses to the fact that the air defenses went down so quickly. Yeah, there's many questions. And depending on your, you know, inclination, one would take one side or another of the suspicions. You know, I just spoke to a friend who knows the region very well. He's from the region and he thinks that Maduro cooperated with the Americans to be brought out. It does seem that there had to have been some, obviously some plant, some informer in the inner ranks of Maduro's security operation, his security cordon, for this to have come off the way it did.

7:51For them to know exactly which house he was in that night. Of course, signals intelligence with high tech has increased hugely in the past few years. So, you know, it's again speculation that there was an informant. And of course, when we hear that kind of thing leaked out of a source near the president or in the White House, that can also be psychological warfare. That could also be black propaganda. In other words, you can't believe everything you're hearing, especially in the early days, because it makes us look better, makes us look good. Yeah. So I'm keeping my counsel on this. Look, Venezuela is and has been for a long time a very polarized nation.

8:31People close to Chavez, who was Maduro's predecessor and close to Maduro over these past 25 years, have pulled away, have fallen out of favor. Some have been jailed. Some have gone into exile. That includes people in the military. So I have no doubt. And I do think that it wouldn't be surprising that there would be an adversary within, someone who perhaps found the incentive of$50 million, which was the bounty that Trump put on Maduro's head, something worth considering. Especially in a place where the revolution has been threadbare for some time. Absolutely. I want to talk about what's going to happen next with Venezuela, but first I want to talk about what's going to happen to Maduro.

9:17So the Trump administration is framing this as an extradition related to the narco-terrorism charges that he faces in the U.S. And he was arraigned today in New York City. I believe that he, you know, when asked how he was going to plead, he said that, you know, he was kidnapped, that he is the rightful leader of Venezuela. He talked about his wife and bruising on her wrist and alleged that they hadn't received medical care. The entire thing was incredibly sort of just shocking and dramatic. and it just strikes me the fact that he's about to, I guess I don't know exactly when the trial will be, but the fact that Maduro will eventually go on trial in New York City.

9:58You know, there's something strange about how you have this incredibly complex, intricate military operation that at the end of the day, you know, it seems like its success is sort of contingent upon a jury of 12 New Yorkers deciding to convict. So do you think we're looking at a straightforward trial here? Like, is there any world in which Maduro isn't convicted? or traded. You know, anything's possible with this Trump regime, isn't it? Look, in that same courthouse just three years ago, was it? Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former Honduran president, was also brought in shackles. And he was sentenced to 44 years in prison, I think it was, and sent to a supermax.

10:43This is during the Biden administration, for basically being the Sinaloa cartel's man in Honduras during the eight years he was president, and prior to that, when he was head of the National Congress. His own brother, who had also been a senator, I believe it was, had previously been extradited, convicted, and sentenced to prison in the United States. Juan Orlando Hernandez was pardoned by Trump about a month ago, out of the blue. And the argument that Trump used was that he was framed by the Biden administration, by the Democrats. Now, I actually did a story for The New Yorker on Juan Orlando Hernandez.

11:26I was in Honduras. And it was very strange to me at the time. He was still a president sitting there. Nobody wanted to talk about what they knew about him. He had been photographed next to Trump in Trump's first term, and he remained in office. everybody knew that he was culpable and like there was an indictment that was sealed that would be unsealed the minute he left office and that's what happened but the u.s didn't move against him while he was in office weirdly on the apparent basis that that's not done well that was just thrown out the window wasn't it with this raid on venezuela again as as with these narco boats that Hegseth has been attacking and over 100 people have now been killed in the Caribbean and in the Pacific.

12:14There's been no proof presented to the American public that any of the boats were carrying drugs. They may have been. But while his Pentagon is killing people, our Coast Guard is going around in some cases trying to save them and also arresting actual drug traffickers and showing to us the evidence of their seizures. Now, in the case of Maduro, the point I'm making is that it's rather similar to these narco boats. Earlier this year, you know, he was accused and indicted of being a drug trafficker, amongst other things. There's no proof of it. There's no proof of it. He talks about him being a narco-terrorist, the head of a cartel, the Cartel de los Soles of the Sons, which by all accounts, and I mean, I've covered the region in Venezuela for years, I've inquired about the Carta de los Salas.

13:04Nobody can tell you for sure that it exists. It's a name. I don't know. It's like saying people from Hollywood, Hollywooders. I don't know. It's a name you come up with. Is there thuggery? Is there gangsterism? Is there drug trafficking in Venezuela? Yeah. And there is in plenty of other countries in the region, including American proxies. There's also drug trafficking in the United States. Does that make Trump the leader of the fentanyl cartel? No. Nor does the fact that some of Colombia's cocaine that comes to the United States or Europe through Venezuelan territory make Maduro a drug trafficker.

13:46It just doesn't. How much of this is about oil? You know, like I feel like that's when you look at like kind of the hypocrisy with Honduras and Venezuela, it seems like part of it just stems from the fact that Venezuela has these significant oil reserves that Honduras doesn't. And, you know, I feel like it's not even speculating that much because when Trump gave his celebratory press conference about the raid, he openly admitted how interested he was in Venezuela's oil and use that as a justification for the U.S. running Venezuela for a while. So I guess, how does that factor into, you know, the way that we should be absorbing this story and what comes next?

14:24I think there's no doubt that it's about oil. I think, you know, Rubio then came out and sort of gave a slightly more intelligible but equally aggressive sort of interpretation of the invasion. First of all, he denied that it was invasion. He said it was a police action. This was an indicted individual. We brought him out. As for the oil, well, Trump, the way he says it is that's our oil. They took it away from us. He's talking about a nationalization that happened 50 years ago, long before Chavez and Maduro, as many other nations around the world did. Post-colonial nations back in the mid 20th century, it became a thing to nationalize their property.

15:08And finally, in some cases, disastrously because they didn't know how to run their economies. But it was important for the national sovereignty of those countries in the mid-20th century. The fact of the matter is, after a period of time, successive Venezuelan regimes, actually including Chavez and Maduro, invited back in some majors, including the U.S., American companies. But they didn't have the whole shebang. And I think Hegseth has come out and said something very similar, echoing Trump today, basically saying, that's our oil and we're taking it back. So this was an operation aimed at, one, on the surface, you know, getting rid of a noisome regime that spouted anti-imperialist, anti-Yankee, left-wing ideas.

15:58Two, had allowed itself to become a sanctuary or a safe zone for actors that the U.S. doesn't like, Russia, China, and Iran amongst them. I should point out that Chevron is pumping oil in Venezuela as we speak. Again, one of the very surreal dualities of all of this. So, you know, I think what we're looking at is Trump coming up with a kind of grab bag of justifications in the world's most oil-rich nation. By all accounts, Venezuela's reserves are the biggest in the world. And they don't want the Chinese anywhere near it. So they're laying down turf. They're laying down a minefield and they're making Venezuela pay the price for what could be coercive action elsewhere and to vouchsafe and guarantee American hegemony from the Arctic to the Antarctic.

16:59That's why, that's the talk about Greenland, Canada, Panama Canal, Now that's ours. We're taking it back. Venezuela, that was our oil. We're taking it back. And all the way down. At the moment, he doesn't have to intervene in either Chile or Argentina, because in Argentina, he has Javier Millet, whom he's bailed out to the tune of$20 billion. And shortly there will be the right-wing president of Chile. And he's on board with Trump. So no problem there but venezuela cuba and um maybe nicaragua no river talks about it but but cuba is problematic for and clearly the apple in the eye for marco rubio especially it's a 700 mile long island that's on the ropes as a communist government and really has no solutions anymore to provide for its people.

17:54It has depended on Venezuela for years, 20 years, for its energy supplies. Those are going to end now. As we know, you know, it had long been a kind of rumor, we now know for sure that, you know, Maduro's security cordon were Cubans and 32 of them were killed in this operation. So presumably the Americans will also have collected evidence that they will use against Cuba, and indicting Cuba or maybe Cuba's leaders in the same way that they have done against Maduro to justify maybe a blockade to asphyxiate the island. Let's see. Let's see what they do. But I think it will be something along those lines.

18:35No, I'm eager to talk to you about that and just kind of like future operations that you can imagine happening. But first, we're going to take a quick break. And then when we return, I actually want to talk a little bit more about this idea of the U.S. kind of running Venezuela for a while and how in the world that is actually supposed to work. This is a special episode of The Political Scene from The New Yorker. We'll be right back.

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19:42so when you heard trump say at the press conference that the u.s was going to be running venezuela for a while what was your reaction to that like did you think that that was what the the next step here was going to be or were you expecting that he was then going to say that the the next leader was, you know, Maria Carina Machado. I guess, yeah, I probably expected that. Or else that he would say, I'm going to run Venezuela from now on. And I'm not kidding. You know, it's rare to hear him talk in the collective. So yes, I was pretty shocked by that. Of course, we're used to sort of his crassness, his blatancy.

20:21And so in the hours that passed that bizarre press conference at which he said that, and that we're going to come in and we're going to develop the oil. Our great American oil companies are going to come in and do it. We're going to restore those oil companies that have been ground down and everybody's going to make money, the Venezuelans too. And then he talked about Delce Rodriguez, Maduro's vice president, and he didn't talk about the military, the intelligence service, who had been the repressive arm of the Maduro government. And he said that Maria Corina Machado was a nice gal, but she has problems or something like that, right?

20:56So basically he shouldered aside the globally renowned civic and political opposition to Maduro and left them in the lurch. And he effectively said, this ain't regime change, it's leadership removal, and we're leaving the regime in place. And he also said, if they don't behave, we'll come again hard, much harder than we did. So the message he was sending to the Venezuelan, the rump regime, Delcio Rodriguez, Vladimir Padrino Lopez, the head of the army, and Diosdado Cabello, the quite radical Chavista, you know, quite radical anti -American, now head of the intelligence services with his own paramilitary force.

21:40he was saying delsi's our lady we're going to talk to her if you don't behave we'll bomb you and the same thing that happened to madura can happen again can happen to you so they've laid down a coercive environment in which these leaders have been told keep your jobs but if you step out of line we're snatching you we'll come in hard and for the time being we'll keep this woman maria Corina Machado, whom you despise because the Maduro crowd really hates her. She's a kind of right-wing Catholic and charismatic and a populist, and they've long seen her as the ultimate bugbear. So this is the way we're going to keep the place stable.

22:29So a lot of people said, what does that mean? Boots on the ground, Americans are coming in. I immediately thought, no, what they're going to do is they're going to come in with those American oil companies, most of which are in rural or far-flung areas. And they'll probably have maybe some contingents of special forces, but certainly private military contractors, used to be called mercenaries, perhaps including the one that extracted Maria Corina Machado a month or so ago for her Nobel Peace Prize. Remember? What was it called? I don't know. Gulf Bear or Golden Dawn? I can't remember. Anyway, one of those.

23:04And they'll be around. And of course, I don't know if they'll keep the Iwo Jima or the Eisenhower, whatever the aircraft carrier is called out there, but they will continue to have a military force arrayed around Venezuela that can do, I suppose, drone strikes, snatch and grab operations, missile strikes, whatever they want, as long as they want. And they are saying that there will be a transition, we'll decide how long it's going to be. But he never talked about democracy, really. And it became clear that, of course, this is Trump. It's not about democracy. It's about oil. It's about making money.

23:44And I think that's, and it's about keeping the Chinese out, especially the Chinese. It's really about keeping the Chinese out. If it has to be dressed up and given some kind of geostrategic justification, it's about keeping the Chinese out. What can you tell us about Delce Rodriguez? Like, I guess it seems like she's communicated that she's ready to play ball, but it doesn't seem like she really has any other choice. I mean, Trump's going around threatening, you know, he told the Atlantic, if she doesn't do what's right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro. So it's not like, you know, she's necessarily cooperating voluntarily.

24:22But given that she was such a Maduro loyalist and also that she herself was not like democratically elected vice president, Like, how do the people feel about her? What can we anticipate in terms of like her actions going forward? And just who is she? Yeah, sure. I've met her. I know her somewhat. And her brother, Jorge, who is also a key operator of the regime. Jorge is the head of the National Assembly, effectively the president of Congress for Maduro. The two of them have been interchangeable pieces in the senior apparatus for some time. I think Delcy previously was, for a time, a foreign minister.

25:00She may have also been president of Congress. I can't remember. She's had many jobs. I think she's also oil minister or energy minister at the moment as well. That's apparently why the Trump administration likes her, is that they were impressed by her sort of ability to deal with the oil industry. She's kind of a nerd. She's very, not really. I mean, she's bright. I know people who knew her in college as well. And, you know, she and her brother are interesting. They are the children of an urban guerrilla, Marxist guerrilla, who was involved in the kidnapping of an American businessman back in the 70s and who himself was murdered or killed, whatever the case may be, in an operation I've heard orchestrated by the CIA.

25:46So they have a reputation for being bright and quite resentful of, at least in earlier years, personally quite resentful of the U.S. and quite ideological. And they are the kind of brain, the duo of brains around Maduro. You know, they have university educations. They're fairly sophisticated people. Yeah, so that's Delcey Rodriguez. She's something of a black box, actually, in the end. And prior to this current period, her brother Jorge was the guy that was the go-to guy for American, senior American State Department or other envoys who needed to deal one-on-one with somebody close to the Chavez and then close to Maduro to extract American hostages, propose negotiations.

26:49That was Jorge Rodriguez. They would meet in Qatar or Mexico or, you know, other places. And more recently, I gather, it's been Delcy. And I gather that intermediaries for the White House established a line to Delcy some time ago and have been talking with her. And there have been various blandishments offered to Maduro, which I gather she was the courier for, and which he turned down. Was she a traitor? Did she betray Maduro? And did she know that this was coming? I have no information about that. I don't think so. What I've also heard is that Maduro himself was in his own security bubble, so they didn't necessarily see each other all the time.

27:45It is worthwhile noting, of course, that she, as the vice president, in light of the vacuum of power, constitutionally, you know, becomes the president. So on the surface of it, what she did is what she was legally required to do. And in a way, she has no choice but to, on the one hand, denounce the capture and extraction of the man she served, Maduro. And on the other hand, tried to prevent a further military attack and tell the americans much like every other president the region has done you know we'll cooperate with you don't don't you know don't do this don't do that to trump right and i guess she's expected to keep the heads of the military and the intelligence services from doing any power grabs or displacing her, but there may be mutual suspicions there.

28:49So it's a kind of a knife-edge situation. And meanwhile, let's talk about the Venezuelan people for a minute. They expected to be liberated. They expected those who voted for Maria Corina Machado, and she is popular in the country with people who don't like Maduro, the middle class, upper middle classes. And not only, also in the popular classes in the slums. But she isn't coming. I mean, maybe they'll allow her to stand in elections that will be held at some point in the future. But, you know, one explanation I was given by someone close to some of this was that the calculation, I presume it wasn't a calculation by Trump, because I'm not sure he calculates.