United States President Donald Trump announced on Saturday that the U.S will take temporary control of Venezuela’s governance.
This declaration comes just hours after a pre-dawn military operation in Caracas resulted in the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.
Speaking from his Mar-a-Lago estate, Trump told reporters that the U.S will take control of Venezuela’s governance until a “safe, proper, and judicious transition” is in place.
“We’re going to run the country until we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” to new leadership, Trump said during a press conference in Florida.
The U.S president added that he didn’t want a new leader to take over in the wake of Maduro’s capture that would result in “the same situation that we had for the last long period of years.”
“So, we are going to run the country until we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. And it has to be judicious, because that’s what we’re all about,” Trump added. “We can’t take a chance that somebody else takes over Venezuela that doesn’t have the good of the Venezuelan people in mind.”
However, Trump, in his remarks, did not clarify what it would mean for the U.S. to “run the country” of Venezuela, but said that U.S. oil companies were prepared to make major investments in the country.
“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,” he said.
The U.S. president added that the U.S. military was prepared to strike Venezuela again if needed.
“We are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so. So we were prepared to do a second wave if we needed to do so,” Trump added.
Trump’s remarks on Venezuela’s governance came after U.S Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Venezuelan leader would “face the full wrath” of the U.S. justice system.
The charges against Maduro, in an indictment unsealed Saturday, include narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.
In the indictment, federal prosecutors alleged that Maduro “is at the forefront of that corruption and has partnered with his co-conspirators to use his illegally obtained authority and the institutions he corroded to transport thousands of tons of cocaine to the United States.”
They also alleged that Maduro and other members of the Venezuelan government sold passports, provided protection, and enabled the sale and transportation of hundreds of tons of illegal drugs through their ports, including drugs from several recognized Mexican drug cartels.
Maduro was first indicted, alongside 14 others, during Trump’s first administration in 2020 in the Southern District of New York. The Venezuelan leader first came to power in 2013 and was sworn in to a third term as president one year ago.
