The Decibel - U.S. attacks Venezuela, captures President Maduro

Episode Date: January 5, 2026

On Saturday, Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro was captured by U.S. military forces in an early morning raid that included attacks on the capital city of Caracas.Since September, the U.S. has conducted deadly strikes on alleged drug-smuggling boats from Venezuela, as U.S. President Donald Trump accused Maduro of leading a criminal organization.The future of the Latin American country is uncertain, as the Venezuelan leader is held in New York, facing U.S. federal drug trafficking, terrorism and weapons charges.The Globe’s U.S. correspondent Adrian Morrow joins The Decibel to break down what’s known about the military attack, its connection to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, and the U.S. plan to ‘run’ Venezuela.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail] Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Just before midnight, Friday, Donald Trump gave the authorization for the U.S. military to go into Venezuela, to grab Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and bring him back to the United States. Adrian Morrow is the globe's U.S. correspondent based in Washington. About 150 U.S. aircraft, fighter jets, bombers, and helicopters descended on Caracas on the Venezuelan capital, while the fighter jets and bombers basically took out Venezuelan air defenses by bombing Venezuelan military installations in Caracas to prevent Venezuelan Air Force from launching a counterattack on the U.S. forces as they were coming in to grab Maduro. These helicopters flew low to a military base where Maduro and his wife were in a compound. But we understand they basically fought their way through some resistance from Maduro's Pretorian Guard. and they managed to grab him and his wife.

The military attack follows U.S. President Donald Trump's months-long pressure campaign against the Venezuelan leader. Since September, U.S. forces have killed over 100 people in dozens of strikes on Venezuelan boats, which they allege were being used for drug trafficking. Legal experts say those strikes likely violated both U.S. and international law. And ahead of Saturday's attack, oil tankers from the region had begun to be targeted as well. Now, the Venezuelan leader and his wife are in New York, where Trump says they await trial on narco-terrorism charges. At a press conference on Saturday morning, the U.S. President explained next steps. So we are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.

And it has to be judicious because that's what we're all about. Part of his plans involve Venezuela's oil. The country is home to the largest known reserves in the world. 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. And we are ready to stage a second and much larger attack if we need to do so.

The U.S. actions this weekend have left the international community reeling. This is the United States going into another country with its military forces, taking the country's president out and rendering him to the United States, which raises a lot of international legal questions and potentially sets an international precedent, not just about the U.S. military going in and grabbing a foreign leader, but also about the U.S. government attempting to take control of another country. I'm Cheryl Sutherland,

and this is the decibel from the Globe and Mail. Hi, Adrian. Thanks so much for joining me on what I'm assuming is a very busy time for you. Hi, Cheryl. Thanks for having me. And just so everyone knows, we're talking at 3.45 p.m. Eastern time on Sunday, and this is a fast-moving file. So, Adrian, what happened in Venezuela this weekend is pretty unprecedented. How big of a surprise was this military attack? On one hand, Donald Trump had been threatening to do this,

actually since his first term as president, to do some sort of attack on Venezuela. And since September, the U.S. has, of course, attacked a whole bunch of alleged drug boats coming from Venezuela and killed a bunch of people they accuse of being narco-traffickers. So on one hand, they had certainly been signaling that they were going to to do something like this or that this was at least a possibility. On the other, it was a huge surprise in the sense that Donald Trump has always framed himself as a non-interventionist

as part of his kind of nationalistic brand of politics. He's definitely talked about how the U.S. should not be involved in foreign wars, that the U.S. has to just look out for its own interests and leave other conflicts to be resolved by other people. As a candidate for president, I loudly pledged a new approach. Great nations do not fight endless wars. So it was a huge turn away from that

aspect of Donald Trump's foreign policy and from the notion that non-intervention was such a kind of governing principle for him to instead doing a quite a large intervention and doing something as extraordinary as not only setting your troops into another country but taking that country's president out

to bring him back to the U.S. Yeah, and we'll get into what this means for the direction of U.S. foreign policy in a bit. But let's like focusing on the drug trafficking because the Trump administration says they've been targeting Venezuela because of drug trafficking. What are their claims there? Donald Trump has long used Venezuela and Nicolas Maduro as foils, partly on the ideological front where he says, well, Maduro calls himself a socialist. So if you vote for left-to-center policies in the United States, they're going to turn the United States. into Venezuela and it's going to be this authoritarian place with a terrible economy, you know,

just as Venezuela is. More recently, he's focused intently on Venezuela as a source of a lot of the drugs coming into the United States. And particularly during the election campaign in 2024, he focused a lot on Trend de Aragua, which is one Venezuelan gang that he essentially accused of being involved in a whole bunch of crimes, including drug trafficking and extensive violence across the United States. So essentially his accusation is that a lot of the drugs coming into the United States are going through Venezuela and that Maduro's government is facilitating that and that they're involved in trafficking drugs into the United States. And also the Trump administration added Cartel de los Soles onto a list of terrorist groups and declared that Maduro

was the leader of it. Yeah, that's right. They claim that Maduro is the leader of Cartel de las and that, and he's tried to define drug cartels as being terrorist organizations. He's tried to define fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction. And so essentially trying to give new means to the war on drugs as being, you know, tantamount to a literal war and literal attacks by terrorist organizations. And Maduro since 2020 has been subject to a U.S. indictment, accusing him of drug trafficking and terrorism and weapons offenses. And just, Saturday, shortly after the arrest of Maduro and his wife, a superseding indictment was filed in New York, essentially including him, his wife, their son, and some other Venezuelan officials,

including Maduro's chief enforcer, the country's interior minister. So Maduro has been captured by the U.S. He's in New York now. How are people in Venezuela reacting to what's happened? What I heard yesterday from someone who's on the ground in Caracas is that right after the U.S. announced that they had captured Maduro, there was some cheering and celebration that broke out in some neighborhoods in Caracas. The same person said, though, that in some places, government-aligned paramilitary groups and security forces had gone into these neighborhoods. And that subsequent to that, things were relatively quiet over the course of the weekend because

people were afraid, you know, unsure what's going to happen in this volatile situation, if there going to be more military strikes, if there's going to be a clamp down from the Maduro regime, which is still in power right now in Caracas. And then, of course, what we've heard from the rest of the regime in Venezuela is defiance and certainly an assertion that they're still in charge, you know, despite the fact that the president has been, you know, pulled out of the country. And, Adrian, just for some context here, many countries, including Canada, did not recognize Maduro's presidency as legitimate because there's evidence to show that in recent elections, Maduro did not actually win the most votes.

Yeah, that's correct. I mean, Maduro, since the 2018 election has not been recognized as Venezuela's legitimate president by Canada, the U.S., a bunch of other countries. And then in a subsequent election in 2024, a bunch of observers believe that the opposition candidate won the election, won the most votes, but that Maduro and his regime falsified the results. And so it's certainly clear that he doesn't have a popular mandate from the majority of Venezuelans. And so it's hardly surprising that there would be. at least some celebration at him being toppled. But from what I understand from this person who is currently in Caracas, a lot of that became relatively muted relatively quickly because people are unsure what's going to happen, you know, whether there'll be another attack from the United States or whether Maduro's regime is going to institute a crackdown. Yeah, absolutely. And there's a lot of uncertainty out there, I'm sure, for people that are living in Venezuela

right now. Something that's been really shocking came from Trump's press conference on Saturday. The president said that the U.S. would be running Venezuela following their capture of Maduro. Do we know anything more about what that means? Not really. The indications so far, both from Trump at that press conference and then from U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on television on Sunday, is that the plan appears to be to leave Maduro's regime in place in Venezuela for now under his number two, Delci Rodriguez. as long as they're willing to cooperate with the United States

and do what the United States wants. Rodriguez was out on Saturday, essentially accusing the United States of engaging in colonialism and saying Maduro is still the president of Venezuela. But the Americans are essentially insisting that they actually think that they can, under the threat of military force and taking Rodriguez out as well, that they can basically get her and the remnants of Maduro's regime.

to cooperate with the United States. So Trump has not really made explicitly clear, A, what he means by running Venezuela, and B, exactly what he's going to demand of Venezuela. But we certainly have had the indications so far, at least, and especially for Marco Rubio's comments today, that the current plan is to essentially leave the existing power structure in place in Venezuela, but essentially force them to take orders from Donald Trump via Marco Rubio if they want to hold under their power. Did Mark Ruby be saying anything about like an oil blockade as well being involved in this way of running Venezuela? Yeah. So the U.S. has been running an oil blockade of Venezuela, essentially trying to prevent Venezuelan tankerships from getting out with oil. And they've said

that they're going to leave that in place, at least for the time being. So that was sort of exert additional pressure on the government of Venezuela to cooperate with the Americans. And Rubio seemed to indicate that, you know, they couldn't reach a deal with with Maduro. So that's why they wanted to get them. And now it's sort of a question of whether or not Maduro's allies left in charge of Venezuela will do what the U.S. is telling them to. As you mentioned, Delsi Rodriguez, which is the vice president under Maduro is now running Venezuela. Earlier on, there was some information from the U.S. administration saying that Delsi Rodriguez was cooperating with the U.S. Is she, is she cooperating with the U.S.? Unclear. So Donald Trump said that Delcy Rodriguez was

willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again. So essentially that she was willing to take orders from the Trump administration, she subsequently came out and condemned the attack on Venezuela, said that Venezuela will not become a colony of any other country. But it's quite possible that she's saying this because this is what she feels she has to say publicly or the message that she has to present to the Chavista base in Venezuela. And that behind the scenes, she's actually been more, you know, more willing to work with the U.S. administration. Certainly on Sunday, Marco Rubio, you know, having all these, doing all these interviews on U.S. television, you know, seem to be hewing to this idea that we're going to

leave them in place for now and essentially just see if they will comply with us, which would suggest that, at least his impression, is that he thinks they will be able to work with the Venezuelan government. But it sort of remains to be seen, you know, is there going to be a point where Rubio gives an order to Delci Rodriguez and she refuses to follow it, or are they going to comply? And I don't think we've necessarily seen that yet. Adrian, a lot has been said about drugs, but we're also hearing a lot about oil, including from Trump, who talked about it in his press conference on Saturday. We built Venezuela oil industry with American talent, drive, and skill, and the socialist regime

stole it from us during those previous administration. and they stole it through force. Is this about oil? Donald Trump certainly made it sound that way where he talked about how Venezuela's oil infrastructure will be put under the control of U.S. oil companies who will build it up and will receive, he said, reimbursement for expropriations

of foreign oil companies that the Venezuelan government did, starting under Hugo Chavez, Maduro's predecessor. So like a lot of things that Donald Trump says, he gave a very sort of top line statement on that, but didn't really get into a whole lot of detail in terms of saying, okay, well, how is that going to work? You know, at what point are U.S. oil companies going to go into Venezuela? How is that going to be managed in terms of giving control of this oil infrastructure to these American companies? And when you talks about compensation, what specifically is he talking about in terms of how much of the oil or profits in the oil are going to go to American companies versus stay in Venezuela? None of that. has been made clear. But what Trump certainly did do in making that statement is he gave a very sort of easy line of criticism for people to say, well, is Donald Trump actually doing this because Maduro is a dictator or because Maduro is a narco-trafficker? Or is he just doing this because he wants access to Venezuela's oil?

We'll be right back. Adrian, how rare is it for the U.S. to remove a system? foreign leader. Not as rare as some people might think. The most obvious parallel to the Maduro situation is Manuel Noriega, who was the military dictator of Panama during the 1980s, and the U.S. invaded Panama in 1989 and 1990 to topple Noriega's government and grab him and bring him to the United States to face drug trafficking charges. So a very, very similar situation to Maduro. is a history of the United States, you know, toppling other countries' leaders. 2003, obviously, they invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam Hussein's regime there.

1954 in Guatemala, the U.S. backed a coup against a left-of-center president who was running a land before program that involved expropriating assets from American companies. The most famous Latin American example, obviously, is 1846. In 1847, the United States invaded Mexico and took half of Mexico's territory, so California and the U.S. Southwest. So there is a long history of the United States engaging in these sorts of things in different places around the world, but particularly in Latin America. What is this signal about the direction Trump is taking U.S. foreign policy? So Trump was quite explicit about this, where he, yes, did try to frame it in terms of, you know, this is the U.S. national interest. America is a safer nation this morning.

it's a prouder nation this morning because it didn't allow this horrible person and this country that was doing very bad things to us and so it sort of fits into his America first brand of Realpolitik but he also talked explicitly about the Monroe Doctrine

and this idea that that the United States is called to sort of dominate the Western Hemisphere as its sphere of influence certainly a departure from non-interventionism to basically say that Yeah, the U.S. should be in control of the Western Hemisphere, and we should be using military force and invading other countries if necessary to sort of enforce that dominance. Under our new national security strategy, American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.

He had signaled that his mind was going in this direction, you know, over the last, you know, year or so. I mean, we've heard him obviously talk about the U.S. wanting to annex Canada, wanted to annex Greenland, wanting to take back control of the Panama Canal. He's threatened to send troops into Mexico to fight Mexican drug cartels. But this is really the first time that he's acted on it in that way and basically saying that we're going to go in and do a military operation, you know, somewhere in the hemisphere. And framing it in terms of the, you know, he called it the Donro Doctrine in his press conference on Saturday is really striking.

And the Monroe Doctrine is a big deal. But we've superseded it by a lot, by a real lot. they now call it the Dunrow document, I don't know. He may not say that this is a change in foreign policy, but he's basically owning that this is what he's doing, that he's making America's foreign policy interventionist again. And just to say here that the Monroe Doctrine is the idea that the United States should have dominance

over the Western Hemisphere. Yeah, that's right. The Monroe Doctrine was originally promulgated by James Monroe's U.S. president in the 1810s and 1820s was initially framed as barring European powers from attempting to continue colonizing the Americas, but has generally also been understood to posit that the United States is the hegemon in this hemisphere, that all the Western hemispheres within the United States' sphere of influence, and it sort of has the right to go in and handle other countries in the hemisphere as it sees fit.

What jurisdiction does the U.S. have to do this? So under the U.N. Charter, countries are not supposed to invade each other or even threaten to invade each other. And a lot of world leaders have pointed to this and said that the attack on Venezuela abrogates the charter. On some level, the U.S. has tried to justify this by framing it as not an invasion necessarily, but a law enforcement operation to go in and get one guy. and pull them out of the country. But at the same time, we've got Donald Trump talking about running Venezuela, which sounds more like invading a country and taking it over. He's talked about taking infrastructure in Venezuela and giving it to American companies in some fashion. And he's certainly keeping his military arrayed around Venezuela with the threat that they'll invade again

if the Venezuelan government doesn't do what they want. So if the plan was to kind of frame this as just a simple law enforcement operation, I'm sure that people would dispute that. to begin with, but Trump has sort of gone beyond that, at least in his rhetoric and in talking about this as taking over and running a country. How have world leaders reacted to this move? You certainly had some Latin American leaders, especially those on the left, saying this is a violation of the UN charter. You know, Mexican foreign ministry came out with a statement along those lines. You know, Lula, the president of Brazil, also criticized the attack. Of course, China and Russia you know, who don't necessarily have a whole ton of respect for other people's sovereignty themselves.

You know, you see China threatening Taiwan. Russia, of course, is in the middle of invading Ukraine. They also condemn the attack. You know, on the other side, you had Javier Millet, who's the president of Argentina and an ally of Donald Trump's, you know, openly celebrating it. Somewhere sort of down the middle, but closer to the celebration side, you saw, you know, leaders like Prime Minister Mark Carney, we basically underlined that Canada doesn't see Maduro as the legitimate president of Venezuela in any event and essentially calling for a transition to democracy. Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, took a fairly similar attack, although he explicitly called on the Trump administration to install the opposition in power in Venezuela to

sort of complete the removal of Maduro's people from power. Is there concern outside of Venezuela? Like, if the U.S. is justifying doing this in Venezuela, is there concern they'll do this elsewhere? Yeah, absolutely. Donald Trump talking fairly explicitly about the Monroe Doctrine and the U.S. reasserting its hegemony in the Americas would suggest that the U.S. is at least open to the possibility of doing this sort of thing elsewhere. If we're looking at the military side, Cuba, of course, came up on Saturday at the press conference, and Marco Rubio said, Yeah, look, if I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I'd be concerned, at least a little bit. at least raising the possibility that a long time, you know, communist, you know, Thorne and the U.S.

aside in the Caribbean in Cuba, potentially could be at risk. You know, Trump has talked many times about sending U.S. forces into Mexico. Thadia Shanebaum, the Mexican president, has told him, you know, multiple times that that that would be a violation of Mexican sovereignty and that she, you know, is willing to sort of work with with the U.S. on fighting the cartels, but that Mexico would not take kindly to the U.S. setting military forces in the country, but certainly a possibility that he does that. So those are sort of the two obvious ones. When he was asked previously about Panama and Canada and Greenland and whether or not he

would use military force to annex them, he did not rule it out in either the case of the Panama Canal Zone or Greenland. In the case of Canada, he talked about using economic force to make Canada join the United States. And he certainly made good on that particular threat. the sense that he's, you know, in the middle of fighting a trade war with Canada and trying to punish the Canadian economy. But yeah, I mean, it's certainly, Trump being willing to do this with Maduro does raise the possibility that he may decide to do this, you know, elsewhere that he

decides he wants to. Yeah. And on the point of economic force when it comes to Canada, I mean, what's really interesting here is the oil aspect, right? We're going to get into this a lot more tomorrow on our episode. But it does seem like this could be a real issue for Canada when it comes to oil in our oil economy. I'm almost certain that Trump and his people are going to raise it. in that context that they might say in the upcoming USMCA negotiations, you know, hey, we now have control of oil from Venezuela so we don't need Canadian oil as much. So that basically takes away, you know, at least some of your leverage. You know, the reality is a bit more complicated in the sense that there would have to be a lot of work done in Venezuela to get it producing

to a level that it could replace Canadian oil as a supplier to the United States. So the notion that the United States could just completely weed itself off of. It's depending on Canadian oil tomorrow by getting oil from Venezuela. It's laughable. But it's certainly something that I'm sure the Trump administration will raise in its talks with Canada to say that, you know, with Venezuela's government being under American control now, apparently they have access to oil resources that they did not before. And therefore, Canada has less leverage. We already saw, you know, Katie Miller, former Trump administration official and influential MAGA media personalities married to Stephen Miller, one of Trump's top advisors, crowing on Twitter, that the U.S. doesn't need anything from

Canada. And she said, you know, free trade is over in response to discussion online about the significance of the U.S. controlling Venezuela's oil reserves. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot still developing here. You know, a lot of things we still don't know. But what are you going to be watching for next? I think, first of all, we just really want to see details on what's going to happen in Venezuela, both in terms of how Trump intends to run Venezuela. We've got a little bit of that so far from what Rubio said, but there's a lot more detail to come. What's actually going to happen with the oil industry? How they intend to put Venezuela's oil infrastructure under American control?

None of that has really been sketched out. Those are sort of on the logistical front. On the humanitarian front, of course, we're going on to see what has. happens in Venezuela, if there is a crackdown, or if somehow there's a transition towards democracy, I mean, obviously if there's more chaos, if there's more outmigration of people trying to leave the country, which has been a huge issue in recent years, if there's violence and political repression, we'll be watching for that. In a broader sense, I think we're also going to be watching for what kind of precedent this might set. Are Russia and China going to start

citing the U.S. invading Venezuela as justification for what they want to do? I mean, is Vladimir Putin going to start pointing to the U.S. invading Venezuela to say, well, you know, if you can do that, then why would anybody criticize my invading Ukraine? You know, it's quite possible. If China feels emboldened to move on Taiwan. And, yeah, and of course we'll be watching on the oil front as it relates to Canada. And if that changes the balance of the negotiations in what we're already going to be some pretty fraught discussions over the U.S.MCA trade agreement between the U.S. and Canada and Mexico. Thank you. Adrienne, I really appreciate making the time. Thanks so much. Thank you. That was Adrian Morrow, the Globe's U.S. correspondent based in Washington, D.C. That's it for today. I'm Cheryl Sutherland.

Our producers are Madeline White, Mikhail Stein, and Ali Graham. Our editor is David Crosby. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening. Thank you.