United States President Donald Trump has said that Washington will “run” Venezuela until a political transition can take place, hours after US forces bombed the South American country and “captured” its president, Nicolas Maduro.
Speaking during a news conference on Saturday, Trump said the US would “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition”.
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“We don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in, and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years,” he said.
The Trump administration launched attacks on Venezuela’s capital, Caracas, and seized Maduro and his wife in the early hours of Saturday.
A plane carrying the Venezuelan leader landed in New York state on Saturday evening, according to US media.
Footage broadcast by CNN, Fox News and MS Now showed US officials escorting a person they identified as Maduro off a plane at the Stewart international airport, about 97 kilometres (60 miles) northwest of New York City.
Maduro’s capture took place after a months-long US pressure campaign against his government, which included US seizures of oil tankers off the Venezuelan coast, as well as deadly attacks on alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean. The attacks were widely denounced as extrajudicial killings.
Washington had accused the Venezuelan leader, who has been in power since 2013, of having ties to drug cartels. Maduro had rejected the claim, saying the US was working to depose him and take control of Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.
During Saturday’s news conference, Trump said that “very large United States oil companies” would move into Venezuela to “fix the badly broken… oil infrastructure and start making money for the country”.
He added that his administration’s actions “will make the people of Venezuela rich, independent and safe”.
The Trump administration has defended Maduro’s “capture, saying the left-wing leader faced drug-related charges in the US.
These charges include “narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices against the United States”, US Attorney General Pam Bondi said.
“They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts,” she added in a post on X.
A Justice Department official told the Reuters news agency that Maduro is expected to make an initial appearance in Manhattan federal court on Monday.
‘Illegal abduction’
But legal experts, world leaders and Democratic Party lawmakers in the US have condemned the administration’s actions as a violation of international law.
“Attacking countries, in flagrant violation of international law, is the first step towards a world of violence, chaos, and instability, where the law of the strongest prevails over multilateralism,” Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva wrote on X.
Ben Saul, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights and counterterrorism, slammed what he called Washington’s “illegal abduction” of Maduro. “I condemn the US’ illegal aggression against Venezuela,” Saul wrote on social media.
A spokesperson for UN chief Antonio Guterres said he was “deeply alarmed” by the situation, describing the US’s actions as setting “a dangerous precedent”.
“The Secretary-General continues to emphasize the importance of full respect – by all – of international law, including the UN Charter. He’s deeply concerned that the rules of international law have not been respected,” Guterres’s office said in a statement.
Earlier on Saturday, Venezuela’s defence minister released a defiant statement in response to the US attacks, urging people to remain united.
“We will not negotiate; we will not give up,” Vladimir Padrino Lopez said, stressing that Venezuela’s independence is not up for negotiation. “We must maintain calm and [be] united in order to prevail in these dire moments.”
Uncertainty prevails
It remains unclear how exactly the US plans to “run” Venezuela, and how long the purported transitional period will last.
During Saturday’s news conference, Trump said that US Secretary of State Marco Rubio had spoken with Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez.
“She was sworn in as president just a little while ago,” Trump told reporters. “She had a long conversation with [Rubio], and she said, ‘We’ll do whatever you need’. I think she was quite gracious, but she really doesn’t have a choice.”
Rodriguez appeared to contradict that in a news conference in Caracas later in the day.
“We demand the immediate release of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife. The only president of Venezuela is President Nicolas Maduro,” she said.
“We are ready to defend Venezuela. We are ready to defend our natural resources, which should be for national development,” she added.
Al Jazeera’s Latin America editor Lucia Newman, reporting from Chile, said that, if Rodriguez is “on board” with the US plan for Venezuela, as Trump and Rubio have suggested, “she certainly didn’t sound like it” during her address.
“She sounded like her typical, fiery self, very much on the side of… Maduro, demanding that he be released and saying that Venezuela would not be a colony of the United States,” Newman said.
The events of the day have brought “a rollercoaster of emotions” to “Venezuelans both inside and outside of the country”, said Caracas-based journalist Sissi de Flaviis.
“When we first heard that Maduro was taken out of the country, there was a mix of reactions,” she said. “A lot of people couldn’t believe it. Other people were pretty much celebrating. Other people were kind of on standby, waiting.”
After Trump’s news conference announcing US plans to run Venezuela, “there’s been a shock”, de Flaviis added.
“People are a bit concerned about what this will actually mean for us, what this will mean for the government and who is going to lead us in the next few days, months and years.”
Meanwhile, Harlan Ullman, a former US naval officer, told Al Jazeera that “the notion of America taking over Venezuela is going to explode in our faces”.
“When Trump says, ‘We’re going to run the country’: We’re not capable of running America, how are we going to be able to run Venezuela?” Ullman said.
“I do not believe that we have a plan for dealing with Venezuela,” he added. “A country is extraordinarily complex. We lack the knowledge, understanding and all the logistics to do this.”