Heavily armed federal law enforcement officers on guard Sunday outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and first lady Cilia Flores are being held after being seized from the presidential palace in Caracas at the weekend. Photo by Olga Fedorova/EPA
Jan. 5 (UPI) — U.S. President Donald Trump issued a warning to Venezuela’s new president, Delcy Rodriguez, to “do what’s right,” or face a similar or worse fate than President Nicolas Maduro, who is in a U.S. prison after being seized by U.S. Special Forces over the weekend.
“If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro,” Trump told The Atlantic, adding that regime change remained on the table, saying that it was preferable to the present state of affairs and the situation “can’t get any worse.”
Rodriguez, who was due to be sworn in as president in Caracas at 7 a.m. EST with the support of the country’s military and the supreme court, has said she is willing to cooperate with the United States after initially condemning the arrest of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and demanding their release.
“We invite the U.S. government to collaborate with us on an agenda of cooperation orientated towards shared development within the framework of international law,” she told her cabinet at her first meeting in charge on Sunday.
Trump said U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had spoken with Rodriguez and that she was “essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again.”
Amid conflicting messaging, it was unclear if that was Trump’s meaning when he said in his news conference Saturday announcing the military operation that the United States was “going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition.”
“We’re going to be running it with a group, and we’re going to make sure it’s run properly,” Trump said.
Rubio clarified Sunday that Trump was talking about exerting control from outside the country to bring about major policy shifts.
He said sanctions were one of the tools at the administration’s disposal to ensure the cooperation of the acting leadership, saying in an American broadcast TV interview that a blockade on Venezuela’s oil exports, being enforced by the U.S. military, would remain in place.
“We continue with that quarantine and we expect to see that there will be changes not just in the way the oil industry is run for the benefit of the people, but also so that they stop the drug trafficking, so that we no longer have these gang problems, so that they kick the [Columbian insurgent groups] FARC and the ELN out, and that they no longer cozy up to Hizballah and Iran in our own hemisphere,” Rubio said.
Meanwhile, Maduro was due to make his first appearance in Federal Court in New York later Monday, where he and Flores will be read a 25-page indictment accusing the pair of accumulating vast wealth from a narco-terrorism conspiracy.
They also face three related charges of cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.
They are due to be transferred from the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, which houses defendants accused of regular crimes, to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in White Plains, N.Y., to appear at 12 p.m. EST.
