Front Burner - What will follow Trump's Venezuela attack?

Episode Date: January 5, 2026

After months of rhetoric, military presence and strikes, U.S. forces have launched an attack on the Venezuelan capital Caracas. They seized the country's president, Nicolás Maduro, and flew him to New York to face narco-terrorism charges.U.S. officials say Maduro heads up a cartel responsible for flooding the United States with drugs, but critics — and Maduro himself — say the charges are just a pretext for regime change — and access to the country's vast oil reserves. U.S. President Donald Trump says the United States will "run" Venezuela for the immediate future, and that American oil companies will move in to take over the country's oil industry.Jon Lee Anderson is a staff writer with the New Yorker who has covered conflict in Latin America for decades. He explains the complicated power dynamics at play with Maduro out of the picture, and what we might see in the weeks ahead.

This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over-delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors, all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough. Defined by our uphill battle and always striving towards new heights. And you can help us keep climbing.

Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo. This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition. That was the extraordinary moment from Amarro-Lago presser Donald Trump gave on Saturday, where he flat out said that the U.S. would be running Venezuela for the time being. It followed a spectacular assault. on the country's capital Paracus,

in which the country's president, Nicholas Maduro, was seized, cuffed, and flown first to the USS Iwojima, then to Guantanamo Bay, then finally to a secure military facility north of New York City. Venezuelan authorities say at least 40 people were killed. Maduro has been indicted on charges of narco-terrorism that he and others, say, are a smokescreen for regime change and resource control.

So what happens now in the country with the world's largest oil reserves? Will what's left of the Venezuelan government bend the knee to Trump? We'll all help break loose. And what is the message being sent to a world now operating with fewer rules and guardrails? John Lee Anderson is back with me today. He is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and he's got decades of experience covering Latin America and beyond. John, thank you so much for coming on to the show. My pleasure. Nice to be with you.

So we had you on the show just over a month ago now, and we talked about whether or not it would come to this point of the U.S. taking military action in Venezuela, and just how surprised were you that it unfolded the way that it did, with the U.S. actually going into Caracas and taking Maduro? You know, there's an element of suspended belief, I guess, with these sort of situations. in a way, it was a chronicle foretold that there would be an invasion or something.

For months, really, since the election, Trump has been vilifying Venezuelans as criminals. Once he took office, he stepped it up by deporting Venezuelans to the prison in El Salvador, the kind of Devil's Island situation. As the months passed, the invective and rhetoric against Maduro, his regime increased, he levied a $50 million reward bounty for Maduro, and we began to call him a cartel head, a narco-terrorist, which, you know, there was no evidence for it. It's a little bit like the narco boats. We see them blown out of the water, but no evidence that they were actually carrying drugs. And none is provided by this administration. So we were already in this

sort of surreal escalation. And I suppose throughout the last few months and weeks, I've had a sense that things were getting closer when about a week or so ago that was the first land strike, a dock, a kind of strange strike that we all heard about sort of after the fact. President Donald Trump says the U.S. has hit a dock facility in Venezuelan territory. It's the first known American strike directly on the country. And it marks a front of the first. fresh escalation in Trump's pressure campaign on the Maduro regime. It seemed like things were now going to step up. But like everybody else, I was surprised when, before dawn, I heard the news of the strike

taking place in Venezuela and saw the images of the helicopters, the bomb blasts. And very soon after that, of the successful abduction and extraction of Maduro. In a way, what Trump has done is rather like what Putin did in 2022 when he built up 100,000 forces on the border of Ukraine and told everybody, no, we're just doing maneuvers. And then the end, invaded. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really interesting parallel. You know, just on Majoro for a moment, I want to come back to the operation itself with you in a minute.

But he has been indicted with other people, including his wife, and he's been charged with narco-terrorism conspiracy among. other things. And that indictment has now been unsealed. Is there any evidence in there that you see that kind of backs up these allegations that he is this drug kingpin heading up the Cartel de la Soles as the administration has alleged? Is there anything new in there that you found? Yeah. Not that I have seen. No. Not that I've seen. And I've keen to point out that all of the governments from Colombia on up, in fact, even below Peru, Bolivia, which are also cocaine-producing countries. But Colombia is the main cocaine-producing country. At all of the countries north of there, whether it's Haiti, Dominican Republic, Jamaica, Mexico, Belize, Honduras, et cetera, all of them

are drug transshipment points. And over the last 20 or 30 years, you could say at different times that they have, to a certain extent, been compromised by the cartels. However, there has never been proof of any sort that Nicolas Maduro himself is involved in drug trafficking. In fact, a fairly insignificant amount of the cocaine that is produced, again, in Colombia, does leave towards the north, towards the United States, or, for that matter, Europe, via Venezuelan waters. But plenty more goes out in other ways.

it's really splitting hairs. There may be military men within the superstructure of the state that are involved. In fact, there may even be generals or commanders or others who Maduro himself suspects of being involved,

but maybe doesn't have the proof or, for that matter, the power or the clout to go after. And we see this also in places like Mexico and also in countries where we are allied to their governments. And I know this because I've talked with some of those leaders themselves, some of the gangsters, and also DEA officials. And so there's a kind of toxic symbiosis that's evolved in the course of this history of narco-trafficking that is, it's much grayer than meets the eye, you know.

The fact that the fact that drugs leave Venezuela under Maduro's presidency does not mean, therefore, that he is a drug trafficker. You would not be hard pressed to find a legal expert right now who would call this military raid in Caracas a violation of international law on account of it being on foreign soil without permission, not in defense, etc. Vice President J.D. Vance posted that the operation wasn't illegal

because Maduro faces these indictments in the United States. But just what's your reaction to that legal argument from Vance? I find very little that J.D. Vance says that I take very seriously. You know, this is a man who let it be known that he thought Trump was the most dangerous man in America and could be something like the next Hitler if he was allowed to take power again. And so one of the takeaways is not just that the Republican Party base is somehow fundamentally flawed in a way that's unique in American political history. It's that Trump is a really bad candidate and, frankly, I think a really bad person. Now he's serving him and clearly wants to succeed him in power.

I mean, what can one say about a person like that? I've known very few people in my life that have so contradicted themselves in public view. You know, you can say that black is white until the cows come home. And in a sense, that's what we see from various members, senior members of this administration. I'm no legal expert, but I think that the fact that, you know, it's legal because we said so, that doesn't really cut it in the world of rule of law. Just to come back to the operation itself, it was given the code name, Operation Absolute Resolved.

There are reports in Reuters, for example, that the CIA had a team on the ground for months, that they had a source really close to Majoro who was helping them track him. And I just wonder if you can tell me a little bit more about what we know about, how this all went down on Tatter Day and sort of the stuff that you find the most interesting. Look, it's entirely possible.

This is a country that has been gone through waves of polarization over the past 25 years. It is a highly polarized society. And even within El Chavismo, which is the name given to the Funal Amon, because of Hugo Chavez, the paratrooper turned revolutionary, who began this government and the source. successor of whom is Nicolas Maduro, you know, Eve, if you go back over the years, you'll see that plenty of people that were close at one point loyalists, fervent loyalists of Chavez and later of Maduro ended up in jail or fled abroad and it become their most

fervent opponents. If you've seen that kind of attrition within the ranks of a revolutionary regime, I'm not surprised to find out that the CIA found someone near Maduro who could feed them information. And look, there's been a long history of the CIA in Latin America. It's not a very clean business. And so I was surprised that it came off as clean as it did, that they had the absolute knowledge of where Maduro was at a time when we had been hearing that he was sleeping in a different house every night, et cetera, you know. But we did learn that a number of guards were killed, didn't we? Yeah, I think they've wiped out or killed most of his security team was the latest that I had heard.

But just on the cleanliness of it, right? There are more kind of speculative reports that I'm sure you've seen that, you know, essentially there may have been some kind of back channel deal with the remains of the Venezuelan government where they, you know, you know, facilitated the handover of Maduro here? And do you think that's a plausible situation? I do. I can't discount it as a possibility. We know that there were backroom,

there was backroom dialogue going on between the regime, the American regime, and Delcie Rodriguez, the vice president, who, as we've seen, Trump has seen fit to leave in place as the transitional president. Now, you wonder, what does that mean exactly? Does that mean she's sold out Maduro?

Well, it's possible. On the other hand, publicly, she's heatedly denouncing his capture. Maybe she has to for public. We won't really know. We don't know her truth. Now, what is her power vis-a-vis the other two power centers? Vladimir Padino Lopez, the head of the army, who again, you know, fervent disciple of Chavez and the revolution, and the intelligence chief, Diozado Cabell, who has his own retinue of security.

security goons and paramilitaries and is the power center himself. Why wouldn't they move against her if they thought she was a traitor? Could it be because Trump, in his press conference, said, we're willing to work with the vice president. But if things get out of hand, I forget his exact language, we'll come in hard again a lot harder than we did. We're going to have this done right. We're not going to just do this with Madura, then leave like everybody else leave and say, let it go to hell. If we just left, it has zero chance of ever coming back. That was a direct threat to them. So what appears to be the case is that Trump has created a situation in which they've essentially invaded Venezuela. They've taken away the president. They've left the regime

in place and said, behave, follow our rules, or else. And so you have these people potential at each other's necks. And I would say that's very thin ice. It's a very tense, tight rope. And it's not one that could necessarily will last. But given the threat of ending up in a supermax for 40 years, you know, as they'll probably try to do to Maduro themselves, it could be just enough to keep people who may see Delci Rodriguez as some kind of Yankee stooge.

from attacking her. Let's see. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often. You've got to be an underdog that always over delivers. You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors all doing so much with so little. You've got to be Scarborough Defined by our uphill battle And always striving towards new heights

And you can help us keep climbing Donate at lovescarbro.cairot.ca. With the Morale app, you can sharpen your French skills in no time. You'll have a blast learning with content from Radio Canada. It's easy as Arndor Tro. Learn French, have fun, repeat. Download the free Morial app now. When Trump said that the United States is going to run the country for the immediate future,

like I just wonder if you could elaborate for me on what you think that actually means. I see Secretary of State Marco Rubio kind of backtrapped on that a little bit on Sunday. He said that the U.S. would use leverage gain from its oil blockade on the country and regional military buildup to achieve its policy aims. And so that's why we have a quarantine. There's a quarantine right now. in which sanctioned oil shipments. There's a boat, and that boat is under U.S. sanctions.

We go get a court order. We will seize it. That remains in place. And that's a tremendous amount of leverage that will continue to be in place until we see changes. Not just further the national interest of the United States, which is number one, but also that lead to a better future for the people of Venezuela. And so that's the sort of control the president is pointing to when he says that. He did not say that the U.S. would directly govern Venezuela.

Well, that's right. I mean, Trump speaks in a country. cartoonish way. We know that. Rubio, of course, you know, has a little more savoy fare in dealing with the English language. My expectation, even before Rubio spoke, was that they would do the following, more or less. They, yes, they have all this arsenal ready to go. He talked about the oil majors, American oil companies that will come in and revive. So most of those, you know, they're in the Orinoco Delta. They're over in the Bay of Maracaibo. They're away from Karaka They're in relatively rural places.

And I believe that what they will likely do is where you will see American personnel on the ground will maybe be private military contractors, in other words, private armies, with the oil people going in and taking over oil extraction areas and working away from population centers. and then using that idea of rebuilding Venezuela as oil potential and wealth potential to sort of mitigate or to use as leverage with the Rump regime left in place. Quite how they will deal with the existing army, which has been revved up for years on nationalistic discourse. I'm not sure. But I guess the threat of a bombing campaign, strikes, drone hits, will keep them in place for a while.

Right. And I think that's kind of what Rubio is seeing. He's imagining that somehow a combination of old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy and high-tech drone warfare, death from the skies, can somehow allow the Americans to exercise, tutelage in a kind of new imperialist way, you know, without really getting their hands. dirty. Let's see. I think that's what he's talking about. Well, what do you think? I mean, you know, I'm thinking about, well, just, I'm just thinking about Iraq and how it became not just an occupation, but also a civil war. The potential is there. Because of this tense situation

that they've created, leaving the Rump regime in place, while effectively shouldering aside the genuine civic and political opposition to Chavismo, essentially saying, you have to to wait, you don't have the place here. They're going to have to finesse that pretty quickly because those people are going to be furious and feel betrayed. And you have, so you have four, possibly five, possibly more potential power centers, some armed, some not armed, that could begin to go to battle with one another. So the potential for a kind of very messy war, it could begin with gangs in the slums. It could begin a lot of ways. is there without a kind of overseer force determined to keep order.

And we don't know that Diosdado Cabello or Padrino Lopez, the heads of the security forces and intelligence services, necessarily will always feel that it's in their best interest to keep order. They may try to engineer a situation where they've lost control. It's not really them, you know, or it could be that the, Machado opposition goes to the streets. And what do they do then? Do they shoot them down?

Do they hit them with rubber bullets? Do they fire ozes at them? You know, what do they do? There are many scenarios where this could really go pear-shaped. Right. This is Maria Carino, Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader, who recently won a Nobel Peace Prize and actually dedicated that prize to Trump. I noted in that presser at Mar-a-Lago that he kind of like was very dismissive of her.

I 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 the leader. I just wonder what you made of those remarks. Well, it was, as you said, pretty rude and dismissive. I wonder if he's still smarting over the fact that she got the mobile piece provides, and he didn't. But I think it's a calculation that if they had allowed she and her, sidekick Edmund Gonzalez, who was the actual straw man in the election and apparently won them,

the ones that were stolen and quote unquote by Maduro. These are all, you know, this is all alleged, of course, but instead of allowing them to assume in the vacuum of Maduro power, as they apparently believed that would be the case, that they would, as the legitimate winners of the election, they should be president and vice president. By telling them, no, you're not in this, and I'm leaving Maduro's number two in place and the army, they must be very disconcerted right now. They must feel, they must feel betrayed and worried as hell. And I think that's one of the reasons why we see such quiet

on the streets of Venezuela. Nobody can really figure this out. Liberation Day hasn't come to Venezuela. Something else has. And between Trump and Rubio, we're beginning to hear in very vague terms what this new phase means, and it's still not very clear to anybody. If they go out of their houses, they still have to deal with the soldiers and the intelligence people of the Maduro regime and the cells in the intelligence prison

where people are brutalized and so forth. So it's very strange. It's very strange. But I think the calculation, as far as I understand, is that if they, and I think this was the White House calculation, if they had allowed Machado and Gonzalez to say, if they flew them back and installed them in the palace, that fighting would have begun almost immediately. And it would be, because she's, she's been an object of sort of channeled official hatred for years in Venezuela. And so there are a lot of people who would see this as the true enemy of the revolution being installed by the Americans

would be the ultimate affront and you would see people pour out of neighborhoods to the militias, the people who, you know, have always followed and been there for the Chavistas.

They, and there would have been fighting. So this way, they keep it under wraps until they can figure out what to do next. Yeah. It seems very unclear what they want,

very vague. What they wanted to do. I was watching Rubio Sunday on the talk shows, and, you know, he was asked about elections, and he basically laughed. Elections? Well, look, this is a country that's been governed by this regime now for 14 or 15 years. The elections should have happened a long time ago. The elections did happen. They lost them, and they didn't count the votes, or they refused to count the votes, and everyone knows it. They seem to have no interest in that at the moment, obviously. You know, you made this very

interesting parallel to Russia earlier in the conversation, but the U.S. has not intervened in Latin America, this since it invaded Panama and deposed Manuel Noriega in 1989. At about 8.50 this evening, General Noriega turned himself into U.S. authorities in Panama with the full knowledge of the Panamanian government. He was taken to Howard Air Force Base in Panama, where he was arrested by DEA. A U.S. Air Force C. 130 is now transporting General or Yeager to Homestead Air Force Base, Florida. What parallels or differences, maybe importantly, do you see there? That's an important parallel.

Now, he was accused of similar things, you know, of sort of drug trafficking and all manner of things, which I never saw that the evidence was incontrovertible. You know, it was sort of, again, covert informants saying this. he was definitely a proxy, American proxy, who went rogue. You know, Maddo was never an American proxy, but he was rogue. You know, he dissed Washington. They didn't like that.

And so, you know, it was a disciplinary action in a country that was seen as an American, you know, a vassal state, really. You know, yes, we'd let them have the canal back, but, you know, we made Panama kind of idea, which is fairly true, actually, historically speaking. Now, it's interesting that that happened and then was followed by the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein within about a year of each other, right around the same time the Soviet Union and communism was crumbling the Berlin Wall and the Cold War ended. And it fell upon George H.W. Bush, the father of George W., who was president at the time, to carry out these two military actions, which were unusual.

There had been no real American military action since the Vietnam War with the exception of the grenade invasion, which was a sort of week-long thing back in 1983. And these two, interestingly, what did they have in common? Noriega and Saddam Hussein, the first one, they were our proxies who had kind of gone rogue. They were our Frankensteins, and they were brought to Brooke. In the case of Noriega, he was taken to jail.

In the case of Saddam, he was allowed to stay in power. And for the next 12 years, he remained in power, and eventually, with George W. Bush, he was taken out. So there is a weird mishmash, or a mashup, I should say, between these past American experiments and, or, you know, they were rather experimental, weren't they? And this one, because, again, why leave Saddam Hussein in power? Well, they've made certain geostrategic calculations vis-a-vis Iran next door, and so on. But both of these actions appeared almost also destined to send a message to America's, you know, enemies out there that Soviet Union has collapsed. We're the big guys on the block now.

And we know what to do when we have to do it. So watch out everybody. And that's how essentially, you know, the 90s began, right? The post-Code war began with these actions expressing American. bellicose power. And in a rather, in a rather odd way, no? But, and again, that seems to be what we're seeing again here. You can't say that Trump represents the end of a cold war exactly, but he definitely represents the end of an era and the beginning of another. And that other era is being formed before eyes, and it's the Trump era. And he's finishing what he wasn't able to do in

the first one. And what he has clearly made very clear in his inaugural speech, and now in national security strategy, and now with the invasion of Venezuela, is that the U.S. will be the hegemon in the Western Hemisphere. It is ours. We do what we want with it. Its resources are also ours. You know, we've been talking about that last time you were on this show and also in the context of their new national security strategy, which is like this updated Monroe doctrine of American hegemony. And Trump actually called it the Don Roe doctrine after these raids in crack, which is wild. Incredible, yeah. You know, but like Trump has talked a lot about the drugs, you know, pouring into the United States from Mexico, for example, Rubio singled out Cuba, in particular.

this weekend. He said, yeah, look, I've lived in Havana and I was in the government. I'd be concerned, at least, a little bit. And so, do these countries have to worry about direct American intervention? I might even mention here that Stephen Miller, U.S., top U.S.A. Stephen Miller's wife hosted a picture of Greenland with an American flag on it that just said soon, in all caps. I think, I think what we see is what we're going to get. We're going to, these people are going to try to do, you know, this kind of, we used to think that, you know, oh, Trump's just being Trump. Trump's exaggerating. It's a joke. No, it's not a joke. He mentioned we're going to take back Panama. And above all, China is

operating the Panama Canal. And we didn't give it to China. We gave it to Panama. And we're taking it back. Greenland is going to be ours. We need Greenland for national security and even international security and we're working with everybody involved to try and get it. But we need it really for international world security. And I think we're going to get it. One way or the other, we're going to get it. Canada should be ours. But look, what I'd like to see, Canada become our 51st state. We give them protection, military protection. He mentioned manifest destiny and territorial expansion. So they're doing it. And it's pretty clear that they're they intend to go ahead with Greenland. I don't know what's going to happen with Mexico. Panama has effectively

been made to kneel to American power. Despite the protestations of its president, he basically signed over free base strides to American military already. He has done that. So the Americans consider it once again an American vassal state. It's obvious and has been obvious for some time that Rubio sees Venezuela. He's made this quite clear as a key to the final step

in exterminating the communist regime in Cuba. Venezuela, it's true, is the country that has kept Cuba alive with energy resources. That's no longer going to happen. And the country is on the ropes. The regime has never been as desperate as it is today.

And I'm sure that that is Rubio's plan and will become Trumps as well. So I have no doubt that they will begin to perhaps a blockade. Let's see, but they will do something on Cuba. And I'll just say for our listeners, I'm glad you mentioned Canada there. We're working on an episode for tomorrow

just homing in on the implications of oil and otherwise for us here. And just a final question for you, Before you go, you've been so generous with your time. If we could zoom out even more here beyond the hemisphere, this level of impunity that we are seeing to impose whatever you want in your backyard, what message does that send to the world? I think we're all thinking the same thing, that this is a message to Putin.

In a sense, Trump is emulating Putin, isn't he? He's always kind of, he's always had that fanboy thing with strong men. We know that, and especially with Putin. We have seen the way he's temporized and accommodated Putin. And if he's questioned anybody, he's questioned Selensky, arms have been withheld. He's allowing Putin to inch forward in Ukraine. It's been a slippery slope, and we're all seeing it coming, right? And meanwhile, he and his deputies have vilified the Democratic West in Europe.

they ridicule it they have criticized it openly in untoward ways they have made it clear that they support the far right parties that have yet to get into power in Western Europe that they've made it clear

that they don't regard Europe as theirs. By extension whose is it, right? Well, one guy is acting to make it his and that's Vladimir Putin. He's doing it militarily. Over into China way, we have

Chi, who's made it very clear that he intends to take back Taiwan by force of arms. I mean, just last week, we saw the blockade of the island, right? And it was a rehearsal. But he's made it increasingly clear that they're going to do this. And I fully expect them to do it. And I think Trump's invasion of Venezuela is dispensing with the norms and protocols that were built up to contain one another. and maintain a kind of global modicum of peace

and mutual respect, national sovereignty. He's thrown that out of the window. And we are seeing the world now being, it's as if he said to China and go for it. That bit's yours. Putin, that's been yours. If you can grab it, I may meddle. But, hey, this whole region from the Arctic to the Antarctic

to the Antarctic is mine. okay I feel like that's a good place for us to end today um John thank you yeah not a good place but a place to end today um thank you very much for this you're very welcome it's always a pleasure all right that is all for today just a note again that we're working on an episode looking at the implications for Canada so I do hope that you guys will tune into that tomorrow I'm Jamie Thank you so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.