Does Trump run Venezuela now?

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Today, the capture of Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro.

0:21In the early hours of Saturday morning, scenes unfolded on the streets of the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, that could have come from a blockbuster movie.

0:32The power was cut, explosions ripped through the city, and the US military swept him. The country's president, Nicolas Maduro, was snatched from his home and from power. Julian Borja, The Guardian's senior international correspondent, was stunned by what he saw. The way this operation has been described makes it look like a kind of made-for-TV adventure. The game plan was clearly to create a bit of shock and awe by bombing a number of places at the same time and just generally create a bit of confusion while they went in to seize Maduro. By all accounts, they had some inside informant telling them where Maduro was, and so they knew exactly where to find him.

1:15And according to the accounts given by U.S. officials, he had almost got to a safe room with a steel door and was in the process of trying to close it when he was grabbed and whisked away. By Saturday, Maduro was a prisoner on US soil, accused of being a narco-terrorist, and paraded in front of the cameras, blindfolded and handcuffed. It's almost part of the sort of ritual humiliation of an enemy of Trump and of Washington to see him in handcuffs like that. All these images are part of the orchestration of the whole operation and will no doubt, in Trump's mind, be sort of part of his highlights reel from his tenure in office.

2:03But as the world reeled from the US military going into Venezuela in the dead of night and taking the president, Donald Trump was not done. We're going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition. He announced that the United States would now run Venezuela and take control of its vast reserves of oil. We built Venezuela oil industry with American talent, drive and skill. And the socialist regime stole it from us. He also made it clear that a new era has begun, one in which America's military might triumphs over rules-based order.

2:53Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again. Won't happen. From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus. What the downfall of Nicolas Maduro means for Venezuela and the world.

3:17So, Julian Borja, you're The Guardian's senior international correspondent. Welcome to Today in Focus after what's been an incredible weekend. We've covered the maximum pressure campaign that Trump has waged against Maduro. He accused him of being responsible for drug trafficking and illegal immigration into the US. Over the past months, we've seen this ramp up even further, where Trump has moved a huge naval armada to the Caribbean and begun this bombing campaign of Venezuelan fishing boats, which the US claim are being used by drug traffickers, and which we know have so far killed at least 110 people.

3:57Maduro, of course, is considered a dictator. but these claims of him being this drugs kingpin are also considered to be pretty far-fetched. But despite all of this happening over the last few months, did the events of this weekend take you by surprise? Obviously, there was an expectation that something was coming because it would be very difficult for Trump to build up his forces to such a degree, an armada as he described it in the Caribbean and Pacific, without him getting his desired result. And Obviously, they were trying to ratchet up the pressure all along with the idea that he would break and that he would agree to some deal that maybe he went to Turkey and received some kind of assurance of safety, of safe passage and so on.

4:45That didn't happen. And he continued to mock Trump putting out sort of music videos and signaling his defiance. And so there was this expectation in the air that something would happen. But of course, when it actually does, and for it to be such a spectacular operation, obviously, it took the world by surprise. And more importantly, it took Maduro by surprise. And I mean, it was really unprecedented, wasn't it? The idea that the US would go in and snatch a president from one of his houses that they would then whisk him away to kind of stand trial in the States. You know, these are kind of audacious acts, aren't they, that the US has been perpetrating this weekend?

5:30These are definitely audacious acts. They're not necessarily unprecedented. It very closely resumed George H.W. Bush's attack on Panama some 36 years ago. The White House ordered the troops in at one o 'clock in the morning, Washington time. Thousands of men from military bases in the United States were on the move all night to reinforce the 12 ,000... Where they went into Panama, they surrounded the stronghold of Manuel Noruega, the country's strongman. and flew him back to the US. It was an unceremonious departure for the former military strongman, surrounded by men from the Drug Enforcement Agency.

6:07So it is modelled on that. The legality of that operation against Noriega was also challenged. But already a new debate is beginning. Will the case against Noriega stand up in court? Can he really get a fair trial? But clearly Trump is breaking through conventions and norms and international laws that have already been loosened by previous administrations. And talking about international law, is what the US did over the weekend considered to be illegal? I mean, it's really important to remember that the UN have estimated that more than 20 ,000 Venezuelans have been killed in extrajudicial executions under Maduro's rule.

6:53and there's overwhelming evidence that he lost the 2024 election but refused to give up power. But at the same time, that obviously doesn't mean that what the US did this weekend is legal or justified. So what have other countries said about it? Well, most other countries have been very critical about it. They see this as a violation of the UN Charter and it's hard to find an international legal expert who doesn't think that the UN Charter is fairly clear that the only justification for an attack on another country, if you believe that country, is on the point of attacking you with armed force.

7:38And it's really hard to make the situation in Venezuela fit the terms of the UN Charter. So under the UN Charter, this looks like a war of aggression.

8:00As you mentioned, Maduro is set to face criminal charges. We're recording with you on Sunday afternoon. Still so much could change. We might even see Maduro appearing in court on Monday, facing some of those charges that the US wants to place against him and his wife Celia Fores. And on Saturday, we saw these astonishing pictures of Maduro as a prisoner on this US naval ship, and then the videos of him being loaded off a plane on US soil, blindfolded and handcuffs, and then doing a perp walk to a jail cell in New York, all of which seem very much to point towards the fact that the Trump government is very keen to portray him as a drugs trafficker and not a president.

8:46But could you tell me a bit about some of the charges that they're set to face? Well, he is charged with trafficking in cocaine. And these are where the charges sort of go towards self-parody to be in possession of machine guns and other destructive devices or conspiracy to possess machine guns and other destructive devices, which is a very broad charge and, of course would apply to every government in the world. But obviously the centre of the charges is about drug trafficking. It is alleged to have run this cartel called the Cartel of the Sons, whose formal existence has very much been called into question.

9:31And the strength of the charges, that the idea that he was the kingpin of a vast smuggling network has also been called into question. And that narrative is very important, isn't it, for Trump to establish? Can you just explain why? Well, it does give some kind of legal format for the events that we've just seen over the weekend. But actually, Trump himself doesn't seem to be much bothered with the whole legal niceties. So when he appeared in his press conference on Saturday, he wasn't really talking about the legality of it. He was talking about oil, mainly. He was talking about how the US would run Venezuela and how the U.S.

10:11would take over its oil. 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. In a way, he seemed to be saying the quiet part out loud, talking about how they were going to run the country for some undetermined transition period and meantime, move in and start marketing Venezuela's oil. He made no bones about it, that this was really about oil. Yeah, and it was kind of quite staggering. That whole press conference was jaw-dropping, wasn't it?

10:56Giving this insight into what his plans for Venezuela might be. As you said, he moved pretty quickly on to how much money everyone was going to make off the oil. But even this announcement that the US was going to run Venezuela was completely extraordinary. But there are no US boots on the ground there. So what exactly is happening in Venezuela right now? Well, at the moment, the Vice President, Delcey Rodriguez, has taken over and she has been appointed as acting president by the National Assembly. And Trump himself is treating her as the interlocutor for Venezuela. He has apparently, as far as we saw, no time for the opposition leaders, including Maria Corina Machado, a longtime member of the opposition, who has risen into being a figurehead leader of the opposition, particularly after winning the Nobel Peace Prize for her opposition to the Maduro government.

11:57I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader. She doesn't have the support within or the respect within the country. She's a very nice woman, but she doesn't have the respect to be. I think what came across in that press conference is he is hoping that the pressure that didn't work on Maduro will work on Rodriguez after she's seen what can happen to an uncooperative leader and that she will cooperate and hand over the oil. Trump said we will stay around, we will stay involved, we'll stay militarily engaged until U.S. demands are met. We're there now, but we're going to stay until such time as the proper transition can take place.

12:42So we're going to stay until such time as we're going to run it, essentially, until such time as a proper transition can take place. And she did obviously also put out this quite defiant message demanding the return of Maduro. So it seems very unclear what really is going on. There doesn't seem to mean a whole lot of planning about the day after here. Can you explain the exact mechanism by which you're going to run the country? Are you going to designate a U.S. official to coordinate? It's all being done right now. We're designating people. We're talking to people. We're designating various people.

13:17And we're going to let you know who those people are. When Trump was asked who was exactly going to run the country, he sort of seemed to gesture at the members of his cabinet, you know, Defence Secretary, Secretary of State behind him and say, well, I'll be designating some people. They clearly didn't seem to know much about it. Well, it's largely going to be for a period of time, the people that are standing right behind me, we're going to be running it. We're going to be bringing it back. It's a it's a dead... I mean, all the signs are this hasn't been thought through at all. So, I mean, it really does seem quite nakedly about economic enrichment and about this oil.

13:55Could you tell me a bit about why this is so important? I was really struck by how many people at that conference kept talking about how the oil was stolen from the US. Yes, I mean, this is the US narrative that the US companies, big oil companies had interests in Venezuela and then they were nationalised under a socialist government. And so there is this feeling of, oh, we're just going to get our, what belongs to us back. In addition, Venezuela unilaterally seized and sold American oil, American assets and American platforms, costing us billions and billions of dollars. They did this a while ago, but we never had a president that did anything about it.

14:42They took all of our property. It was our property. We built it. And obviously has a record of this. He talked about going in and taking the oil from Syria and from Iraq. This is how he sees geopolitics. It's really a sort of 19th century style imperialism, but with 21st century weapons. Yeah. And I mean, that was also quite telling, wasn't it? In that press conference on Saturday with Trump, as you said, bringing up the Monroe Doctrine, which first came about in the 19th century and has been used as a way for the US to claim all of the Americas and its resources. And the Monroe Doctrine is a big deal, but we've superseded it by a lot, by a real lot.

15:31They now call it the Donroe Doctrine, I don't know. It's Monroe Doctrine. Could you just explain what that might mean for the whole region, not just Venezuela? Well, what it means for the region is that the US is a hegemonic power, which means that it says what goes in the Americas and that it will focus its resources, its military power on the region to make sure the region works in US national interest. So it is a return from this idea of a rule-based order, world order that followed the Second World War, and a return to something more akin to the 19th century, arguably to the 1930s as well, where different big powers had their spheres of influence, and they were left to dominate those areas, and each major power had its own backyards.

16:36I was wondering what you thought, what the implications that this might have for other power, for other governments, other states in the region. Trump mentioned Cuba in his press conference. So I was wondering what you think might happen next. Well, I think this obviously of concern to Havana when Trump was asked at his press conference, what does this mean for Cuba? He said, well, it's a similar sort of case. They're very unhappy. We want to help the Cuban people, which obviously is the sort of language was used in the run up to the Venezuelan intervention. And Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, also said that Cubans should be concerned after what happened in Venezuela.

17:18And so this is a sign from everything we saw at that press conference on Saturday, that this is a president who has long sought to be omnipotent, certainly in the region, but has been reluctant until now to use military force, not quite confidence. This stunning success of this operation is quite likely to embolden him and to see military solutions in other parts of the region. And it's just such a strong show, isn't it, of US military might and this assertion that if you have the muscle, you're free to go and take whatever you want. Do you think this could also set a worrying precedent for other superpowers around the world?

18:04Yes, certainly. I think the slide from the idea of a rule-based order to one of spheres of influence where what happens in a region depends on who has the military might and who has the willingness to use it, is the kind of world that Vladimir Putin is interested in, the sort of world that Xi Jinping is also interested in running. They've always saw this idea of a rule-based system as really just a pretext for Western domination. And this is really their lines, although of course they were outwardly critical of this operation, it really, in terms of the world that it creates, it very much suits them.

18:50This marks the moment where Trump is in absolute agreement with Putin and Xi about what the world should look like. Yeah, and you kind of think automatically towards China and Taiwan, Russia and Ukraine. It does set a model, doesn't it, that could potentially be followed if the brakes are off? Certainly, I think, yeah. His aspirations to win the Nobel Peace Prize really guided a lot of his actions last year. He was determined to get some kind of deal in Ukraine, also to get a deal in Gaza, claimed to have ended eight other conflicts. And everything he did seemed almost to be seemed focused on getting the Nobel Peace Prize.

19:36That didn't happen. It went, ironically, to Maria Corina Machado instead. And what we see, I think, now in the beginning of 26 is that Trump is thrilled by the use of military force. This seems to be sort of a more glittering prize than the Nobel Peace Prize for now. There's the use, the potential use of U.S. military force to solve his other problems in the region. And so that will be a worry to Denmark when it comes to Greenland. It'll be a worry to Cuba. It'll be a worry to Mexico and to Iran. Do you think this is effectively it? It's 2026. Do you think it marks the end of international rule of law and rules-based order?

20:26I think it looks very much like near the end of the rule-based order and international law. I think Trump has driven so many trucks through the edifice of international law, global norms, that there's not really much left. There's just a wreckage. But ultimately, it has to come back in that after Trump, in a world after Trump, because it is in the ultimate interest of certainly of small, medium-sized countries that there should be some kind of rules. That's why the UN was created in the aftermath of the Second World War, because everyone could see where the idea of competing powers and spheres of influence got the world.

21:12It got them into a world war. And I think it is very difficult for the world to go on without such an order. But how long it will take to restore how much damage the Trump administration and together with Putin and Xi Jinping will do to the idea, the hope of a rules based order. I mean, that's really what's in question.

21:39Coming up, can anyone stop Trump?

21:57What's really struck me as well is how there really isn't many people who can stop Trump and unfettered Trump. I mean, there has been condemnation over the weekend. But our own Prime Minister Keir Starmer is very unwilling to speak out and condemn the action in Venezuela. Which the White House has said is that America carried out strikes on Venezuela and captured their leader, Maduro. Some politicians in this country have already condemned that. Do you? Well, I want to establish the facts first. I want to speak to President Trump. I want to speak to allies. As I say, I can be absolutely clear that we were not involved in that.

22:38What have you thought about the international reaction so far? Obviously very mild. Macron, President Macron in France was actually supportive of it. Chancellor Mertz was dubious and Keir Starmer has ever tried to sit on the fence saying, well, we believe in international law, but I wait till I talk to Donald Trump to find out the facts, butting off making any kind of statement about this. The only real area where they've held together significantly, more or less, is Ukraine. But on anything else, they have failed to put up a united front to try and push back on what Trump is doing. And I think in their minds, Ukraine is the number one concern because it affects European security.

23:28So they're thinking they've got to choose their battles. The main battle is to stop Ukraine falling to the Russian invasion. And really, in those conditions, there isn't much to stop Trump. Really, the only sort of constellation of forces that could perhaps stop him is if all his allies, if all of Europe got together and put up a significant opposition to this kind of actions in the UN, in public statements, that is not happening. Is there anything that can stop him internally? You know, this is all obviously a far cry from Trump's stated aim. One of the things he got elected on, which was to put America first and be a no-war president.

24:21How do we even know how MAGA supporters feel about his stated aim of running Venezuela? I think the great part of MAGA support is really a personality cult. And so they will support Trump no matter what he does, no matter what comes up in the Epstein files, no matter what countries he invades, they will more or less stand by him and whether that's 30 % or 33%. But at the margin, there is an element of Manka support that was really believed in what he said, that he was going to extract US from foreign wars. He was going to concentrate on the homeland. And that's not happening. The economy is in bad shape.

25:09Inflation is bad. A lot of the things I hope for haven't happened. And one of the things they hoped for was no more foreign adventures. And so there are voices in the Republican, the MAGA camp you're hearing, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who are really unhappy about this new direction that Trump has taken. And Julian, what do you think is going to happen next over the coming weeks? I think it's really hard to see what's coming in the next days and weeks because I don't think the Trump administration has much idea about what will happen. They have very vague ideas about how the Venezuelan regime, the what's left of it, will cooperate with the US and do what it's told.

25:59Now, whether that will happen or not is really up in the air. No one knows how much resistance the Venezuelan government has in them on whether they are ready now to bow to U.S. demands. But eventually those U.S. demands might also involve them leading office. And there's a long way to go. And when it comes to the oil itself, it's not a simple matter of going and just removing it. The refinery capabilities of Venezuela are decrepit. and they would need billions of dollars of investment. Trump says he's prepared to put boots on the ground if necessary. Is he really prepared to go through with that?

26:42Because that really would be unpopular with his base because it would seem open-ended and expose US soldiers to danger. So there are really so many unanswered questions And they are there because the Trump administration and their planning didn't really answer these questions when it went in. But it seems really unlikely that this will play out in the smooth handover of natural resources that Trump envisaged. Thank you so much, Julian. Extraordinary times. More to come, I think. Thanks so much for talking to us today. Thank you. That was Julian Borgia, The Guardian's senior international correspondent.