FLORIDA: United States President Donald Trump on Saturday said the US will “run” Venezuela until a political transition can occur, after the spectacular US military operation to remove Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro from the country.
“We’re going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,” Trump told a press conference, adding that US forces were ready to conduct a second, “much bigger” wave of strikes if necessary.
Trump said he would allow American oil companies to head into Venezuela to tap its massive crude reserves after a US military operation to seize Maduro.
“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,” Trump added.
However, he said that US oil embargo on Venezuela remains in force.
The US president said that the military caused a blackout in the Venezuelan capital Caracas so it could carry out a stunning operation to seize Maduro.
“It was dark. The lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a certain expertise that we have,” Trump added.
The US military operation to extract the Venezuelan president in a nighttime raid in Caracas took “months of planning and rehearsal,” and more than 150 US aircraft were used, top US General Dan Caine told reporters.
“The word integration does not explain the sheer complexity of such a mission, an extraction so precise — it involved more than 150 aircraft launching across the Western Hemisphere,” Caine told the joint press conference with Trump.
Shortly before the presser, Trump posted a photo of the Venezuelan leader in custody on a US naval ship and wearing both a blindfold and handcuffs.
“Nicolas Maduro on board the USS Iwo Jima,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, along with a picture showing Maduro hours after he was snatched by US forces.
The Venezuelan leader had on what appeared to be noise-canceling ear muffs and grey Nike-branded sweatpants and a jacket.
Earlier today, US forces captured Maduro and his wife after launching a “large-scale strike” on the South American country.
“The United States of America has successfully carried out a large-scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country,” Trump said on Truth Social.
US Attorney General Pamela Bondi later said that Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were indicted in the Southern District of New York.
“Nicolas Maduro has been charged with Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy, Cocaine Importation Conspiracy, Possession of Machineguns and Destructive Devices, and Conspiracy to Possess Machineguns and Destructive Devices against the United States,” she wrote in a post on X.
The couple, she said, would soon “face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts”.
