Hi everyone-
After a major military buildup in the Caribbean around the South American nation of Venezuela, the United States conducted an operation early on Saturday morning to arrest both the leader of the nation, Nicolas Maduro, and his wife First Lady Cilia Flores. The US first cut the power to Caracas, then troops went into the Maduro compound. While at least 80 people were killed in the undertaking, no Americans or American assets were killed. The whole thing took about 2 hours. After the ouster, DHS said Venezuelans could go back home and rebuild.
Trump spoke about it Saturday morning, calling into Fox & Friends and also holding a press conference on the matter. He praised the troops that undertook the operation, said Maduro was heading to New York—he'll be arraigned at 12 pm today on narco-terrorism, trafficking and weapons charges—and that the US would undertake running the country for now. The big plan is for US oil companies to rebuild the industry that made Venezuela rich so many years ago.
Maduro was in power from 2013, when socialist leader Hugo Chavez died, to Saturday and Venezuelans showed an outpouring of support for the move that took out the man who was carrying on the tradition of Chavez's human rights violations. US Democrats and the commies all said it was terrible, except Fetterman. Press and judicial freedom were under attack under the Maduro regime, people were politically persecuted, and in one of the most oil-rich nations on the planet, people were starving because the resources were mismanaged.
Trump wants to turn all that around, and he wants the beneficiaries of that wealth to be Venezuela and the United States, not China or Russia. Rubio backed him up. The move was part of the Trump administration's adherence to the Monroe Doctrine, which urged Europe against colonizing South America and the Americas at large, saying that it was our domain and was open to no other major force.
Looking at the map, it's kind of like the game of Risk. A Chinese delegation was in Venezuela on Saturday, intending to meet with Maduro about oil etc., and Trump moved his guys in and made those negotiations impossible, laying claim to the whole thing on behalf of the United States. Already, Maduro's VP Delcy Rodriguez said she'd work with the Trump administration on "a cooperation agenda, oriented toward shared development, within the framework of international law, and to strengthen lasting community coexistence."
Libby