Tag: Nicolas Maduro

Trump administration blocks Venezuela from paying Maduro’s legal bills amid federal charges

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The Trump administration has moved to block the Venezuelan government from covering the legal expenses of former Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro as he fights federal drug trafficking and weapons charges in New York, according to a court filing from his attorney.

Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, pleaded not guilty in federal court in New York on Jan. 5 to drug trafficking and weapons charges, days after American forces captured them at the presidential palace in Venezuela.

In a letter to U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who is overseeing the case in the Southern District of New York, Maduro’s lawyer, Barry Pollack, said the U.S. was preventing the Venezuelan government from covering his client’s legal fees.

“The government of Venezuela has an obligation to pay Mr. Maduro’s fees. Mr. Maduro has a legitimate expectation that the government of Venezuela would do so, and Mr. Maduro cannot otherwise afford counsel,” Pollack wrote.

Nicolás Maduro is seen in handcuffs after landing at a Manhattan helipad, escorted by Federal agents as they make their way into an armored car en route to a Federal courthouse in Manhattan on Jan. 5, 2026, in New York City. (XNY/Star Max/GC Images)

In the letter, dated Feb. 20, Pollack argued that under “Venezuelan law and custom, the government of Venezuela pays the expenses of the President and First Lady.”

Pollack said that Maduro and the Venezuelan government were subjected to sanctions by the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), and his legal counsel would need to be granted a license to represent him and be paid.

While Pollack said OFAC granted licenses for both Maduro and Flores on Jan. 9, Maduro’s license was amended “without explanation” to not allow the Venezuelan government to pay for his defense costs.

MADURO ALLY ALEX SAAB ARRESTED IN JOINT US-VENEZUELAN OPERATION, OFFICIAL SAYS

Captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, appear with their attorneys Barry Pollack and Mark Donnelly at their arraignment in a federal court in New York City on Monday, Jan. 5, 2026. (Jane Rosenberg)

Flores’ license was not impacted, according to Pollack.

Pollack said that OFAC is “interfering with Mr. Maduro’s ability to retain counsel” and violating his Sixth Amendment right to counsel of his choice.

Maduro’s attorney said OFAC has not responded to his request to reinstate the original license and threatened to take legal action if it continued to do so.

RUBIO DEFENDS US ASSAULT ON VENEZUELA, CALLS OUT REPORTER FOR TRYING TO START A FIGHT

Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, are seen in handcuffs after landing at a Manhattan helipad before being escorted to a Federal courthouse in Manhattan on Jan. 5, 2026, in New York City. (XNY/Star Max/GC Images)

“If OFAC fails to act on the request to reinstate the original license, or denies that request, Mr. Maduro will file a formal motion in the coming days seeking relief from the Court,” he wrote.

The U.S. military conducted an operation to capture Maduro in Caracas on Jan. 3. He was flown to New York, where he is being held in a federal jail.

Maduro was charged with narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.

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Flores faces three charges: cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.

Fox News Digital reached out to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the Treasury Department for comment.

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February 25, 2026
Trump makes the case for his foreign policy approach at State of the Union

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President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address tilted heavily on domestic issues, but he also made the case for his foreign policy efforts to Americans who are increasingly uneasy about his priorities.The president cheered brokering a fragile ceasefire deal in Gaza and his team’s bringing home hostages taken by Hamas militants, capturing autocratic leader Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and pressing fellow NATO members to increase defense spending among his biggest wins. He also warned Iran anew as he builds up U.S. forces in the region and weighs whether to carry out new military action against Tehran.At a moment when polls show the American public increasingly concerned about the economy, Trump’s assignment Tuesday evening also was to cut through thickening skepticism that he’s staying true to his “America First” philosophy after a year in which his focus was often far from home. It’s a wariness shared by some who once counted themselves among Trump’s closest allies.But Trump attempted to make the case that he’s taking the right approach balancing domestic policy concerns while using America’s military might when needed.”As president, I will make peace wherever I can, but I will never hesitate to confront threats to America wherever we must,” Trump said.Sixty-one percent of U.S. adults said they disapprove of how Trump is handling foreign policy, while 56% say Trump has “gone too far” in using the U.S. military to intervene in other countries, according to surveys from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research conducted earlier this month and in January.Here are a few moments where Trump sought to explain his foreign policy approach 13 months into his second term:Why he is talking about attacking Iran againTrump explained to Americans why he’s pondering military action, just eight months after he claimed that U.S. strikes had “obliterated” three critical Iranian nuclear facilities and left “the bully of the Middle East” with no choice but to make peace.”We wiped it out and they want to start all over again. And they’re at this moment again pursuing their sinister ambitions,” Trump said. “We are in negotiations with them. They want to make a deal, but we haven’t heard those secret words: We will never have a nuclear weapon.”Earlier Tuesday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote on X: “Our fundamental convictions are crystal clear: Iran will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon.”Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are scheduled to meet again Thursday in Geneva with Iranian officials.But the pathway to a deal seems murky as the authoritarian clerics who rule Iran say they will only discuss the nuclear issue. The U.S. and Israel also want to address Iran’s ballistic missile program and its support for regional armed proxies, including Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis.Trump struggles to end the war in UkraineTuesday also marked the four-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.On the campaign trail, Trump boasted that he would be able to end the war in one day, but he has struggled to fulfill his pledge.He made scant mention of the war in his record-setting 108-minute speech.”The killing and slaughter between Russia and Ukraine, where 25,000 soldiers are dying each and every month,” Trump said, reiterating that he’s working to end the war.Russian and Ukrainian officials are negotiating in U.S.-mediated talks but are at loggerheads over key issues, including Russian demands that Kyiv concede Ukrainian territory still in its control and who will get the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the biggest in Europe.Trump appears eager for a peace deal before the U.S. midterm elections despite the challenges. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says the White House has set a June deadline for the war’s end and will likely pressure both sides to meet it.Video below: Catch up on the State of the Union address in 60 secondsAnother victory lap on Maduro and focus on Western HemisphereTrump again celebrated last month’s capture of the Venezuelan leader in an audacious military operation, saying the U.S. “just received from our new friend and partner, Venezuela, more than 80 million barrels of oil.” The Trump administration had previously said it was orchestrating the effort to sell a total of about 30 to 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil that had been stranded by a partial blockade imposed by the administration.Trump paid tribute to a helicopter pilot who was wounded in the operation but still managed to carry out the mission and paused to award him the Congressional Medal of Honor.He also introduced a former political prisoner, Enrique Márquez, who was freed by the Venezuelan government last month following the U.S. operation. He was a presidential candidate in the 2024 election and a former member of the National Electoral Council.”This was an absolutely colossal victory for the security of the United States,” Trump boasted.Trump’s action against Maduro, coupled with an increasingly aggressive posture in the Western Hemisphere aimed at eliminating drug trafficking and illegal migration, are a concern for many in the region — although they also have won support from some smaller countries.Trump has likened the strategy to the Monroe Doctrine, with its rejection of outside influences and assertion of U.S. primacy throughout what the administration considers to be “America’s backyard.”U.S. forces, under Trump’s orders, have carried out dozens of military strikes on alleged drug-running vessels in the Caribbean, seized sanctioned oil tankers and tightened the embargo of Cuba as part of what the president is referring to as the “Donroe Doctrine.””We’re also restoring American security and dominance in the Western Hemisphere, acting to secure our national interests and defend our country from violence, drugs, terrorism and foreign interference,” Trump said.Tariff strategy following Supreme Court rulingThe president ahead of the address ridiculed the six justices, including two conservatives he appointed in his first term, who last week struck down his use of a 1977 legal authority he had cited for most of the tariff hikes he imposed over the past year on friends and foes alike.In his speech, he took a more measured tone, calling the decision “an unfortunate ruling from the United States Supreme Court.”Trump on Monday threatened countries around the world to abide by any tariff deals they have already agreed to.Any country that wants to “play games” with the Supreme Court decision, Trump posted on social media, will be met with “a much higher Tariff, and worse, than that which they just recently agreed to.””The good news is almost all countries and corporations want to keep the deal that they already made,” Trump said Tuesday. He added, “The legal power that I, as president, have to make a new deal could be far worse for them and therefore they will continue to work along the same successful path we had negotiated before the Supreme Court’s unfortunate involvement.”___Associated Press writers Regina Garcia Cano in Caracas, Venezuela, and Colin Binkley, Jonathan J. Cooper and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed reporting

WASHINGTON —

President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address tilted heavily on domestic issues, but he also made the case for his foreign policy efforts to Americans who are increasingly uneasy about his priorities.

The president cheered brokering a fragile ceasefire deal in Gaza and his team’s bringing home hostages taken by Hamas militants, capturing autocratic leader Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and pressing fellow NATO members to increase defense spending among his biggest wins. He also warned Iran anew as he builds up U.S. forces in the region and weighs whether to carry out new military action against Tehran.

At a moment when polls show the American public increasingly concerned about the economy, Trump’s assignment Tuesday evening also was to cut through thickening skepticism that he’s staying true to his “America First” philosophy after a year in which his focus was often far from home. It’s a wariness shared by some who once counted themselves among Trump’s closest allies.

But Trump attempted to make the case that he’s taking the right approach balancing domestic policy concerns while using America’s military might when needed.

“As president, I will make peace wherever I can, but I will never hesitate to confront threats to America wherever we must,” Trump said.

Sixty-one percent of U.S. adults said they disapprove of how Trump is handling foreign policy, while 56% say Trump has “gone too far” in using the U.S. military to intervene in other countries, according to surveys from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research conducted earlier this month and in January.

Here are a few moments where Trump sought to explain his foreign policy approach 13 months into his second term:

Why he is talking about attacking Iran again

Trump explained to Americans why he’s pondering military action, just eight months after he claimed that U.S. strikes had “obliterated” three critical Iranian nuclear facilities and left “the bully of the Middle East” with no choice but to make peace.

“We wiped it out and they want to start all over again. And they’re at this moment again pursuing their sinister ambitions,” Trump said. “We are in negotiations with them. They want to make a deal, but we haven’t heard those secret words: We will never have a nuclear weapon.”

Earlier Tuesday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi wrote on X: “Our fundamental convictions are crystal clear: Iran will under no circumstances ever develop a nuclear weapon.”

Trump envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are scheduled to meet again Thursday in Geneva with Iranian officials.

But the pathway to a deal seems murky as the authoritarian clerics who rule Iran say they will only discuss the nuclear issue. The U.S. and Israel also want to address Iran’s ballistic missile program and its support for regional armed proxies, including Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis.

Trump struggles to end the war in Ukraine

Tuesday also marked the four-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

On the campaign trail, Trump boasted that he would be able to end the war in one day, but he has struggled to fulfill his pledge.

He made scant mention of the war in his record-setting 108-minute speech.

“The killing and slaughter between Russia and Ukraine, where 25,000 soldiers are dying each and every month,” Trump said, reiterating that he’s working to end the war.

Russian and Ukrainian officials are negotiating in U.S.-mediated talks but are at loggerheads over key issues, including Russian demands that Kyiv concede Ukrainian territory still in its control and who will get the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the biggest in Europe.

Trump appears eager for a peace deal before the U.S. midterm elections despite the challenges. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says the White House has set a June deadline for the war’s end and will likely pressure both sides to meet it.

Video below: Catch up on the State of the Union address in 60 seconds

Another victory lap on Maduro and focus on Western Hemisphere

Trump again celebrated last month’s capture of the Venezuelan leader in an audacious military operation, saying the U.S. “just received from our new friend and partner, Venezuela, more than 80 million barrels of oil.” The Trump administration had previously said it was orchestrating the effort to sell a total of about 30 to 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil that had been stranded by a partial blockade imposed by the administration.

Trump paid tribute to a helicopter pilot who was wounded in the operation but still managed to carry out the mission and paused to award him the Congressional Medal of Honor.

He also introduced a former political prisoner, Enrique Márquez, who was freed by the Venezuelan government last month following the U.S. operation. He was a presidential candidate in the 2024 election and a former member of the National Electoral Council.

“This was an absolutely colossal victory for the security of the United States,” Trump boasted.

Trump’s action against Maduro, coupled with an increasingly aggressive posture in the Western Hemisphere aimed at eliminating drug trafficking and illegal migration, are a concern for many in the region — although they also have won support from some smaller countries.

Trump has likened the strategy to the Monroe Doctrine, with its rejection of outside influences and assertion of U.S. primacy throughout what the administration considers to be “America’s backyard.”

U.S. forces, under Trump’s orders, have carried out dozens of military strikes on alleged drug-running vessels in the Caribbean, seized sanctioned oil tankers and tightened the embargo of Cuba as part of what the president is referring to as the “Donroe Doctrine.”

“We’re also restoring American security and dominance in the Western Hemisphere, acting to secure our national interests and defend our country from violence, drugs, terrorism and foreign interference,” Trump said.

Tariff strategy following Supreme Court ruling

The president ahead of the address ridiculed the six justices, including two conservatives he appointed in his first term, who last week struck down his use of a 1977 legal authority he had cited for most of the tariff hikes he imposed over the past year on friends and foes alike.

In his speech, he took a more measured tone, calling the decision “an unfortunate ruling from the United States Supreme Court.”

Trump on Monday threatened countries around the world to abide by any tariff deals they have already agreed to.

Any country that wants to “play games” with the Supreme Court decision, Trump posted on social media, will be met with “a much higher Tariff, and worse, than that which they just recently agreed to.”

“The good news is almost all countries and corporations want to keep the deal that they already made,” Trump said Tuesday. He added, “The legal power that I, as president, have to make a new deal could be far worse for them and therefore they will continue to work along the same successful path we had negotiated before the Supreme Court’s unfortunate involvement.”

___

Associated Press writers Regina Garcia Cano in Caracas, Venezuela, and Colin Binkley, Jonathan J. Cooper and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed reporting

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February 25, 2026
AI tool Claude helped capture Venezuelan dictator Maduro in US military raid operation: report

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The U.S. military used Anthropic’s artificial-intelligence tool Claude during the operation that captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, according to a report.

Last month, U.S. special operations forces captured Maduro and his wife, who were brought to the U.S. to face sweeping narcotics charges.

Claude was deployed through Anthropic’s partnership with data company Palantir Technologies, whose tools are widely used by the Defense Department and federal law enforcement, according to The Wall Street Journal, which cited people familiar with the matter.

“We cannot comment on whether Claude, or any other AI model, was used for any specific operation, classified or otherwise,” an Anthropic spokesperson told Fox News Digital. “Any use of Claude — whether in the private sector or across government — is required to comply with our Usage Policies, which govern how Claude can be deployed. We work closely with our partners to ensure compliance.”

US RAID IN VENEZUELA SIGNALS DETERRENCE TO ADVERSARIES ON THREE FRONTS, EXPERTS SAY

Captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is escorted, as he heads towards the Daniel Patrick Manhattan United States Courthouse for an initial appearance to face U.S. federal charges including narco-terrorism, conspiracy, drug trafficking, money laundering and others in New York City, U.S., January 5, 2026. (Adam Gray/Reuters)

Anthropic’s usage guidelines prohibit Claude from being used for violence, weapons development, or surveillance.

A source familiar with the matter told Fox News Digital that Anthropic has visibility into classified and unclassified usage and has confidence that all usage has been in line with Anthropic’s usage policy, as well as its partners’ own compliance policies.

Reached by Fox News Digital, the Department of War declined to comment.

SEVEN US SERVICE MEMBERS INJURED IN VENEZUELA RAID TO CAPTURE MADURO, OFFICIAL SAYS

The U.S. military reportedly used Anthropic’s AI tool Claude during the operation that captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)

Anthropic was the first AI model developer to be used in classified operations by the Department of War, according to the Journal.

Anthropic has raised concerns about how Claude can be used by the Pentagon, prompting officials within the Trump administration to consider canceling its contract worth up to $200 million, which was awarded last summer, the paper reported.

The AI tools can be used for everything from summarizing documents to controlling autonomous drones, the outlet noted.

The Trump administration has prioritized AI development, and in December War Secretary Pete Hegseth said “the future of American warfare is here, and it’s spelled AI.”

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Anthropic’s artificial-intelligence model Claude was reportedly used in a classified U.S. military operation targeting Nicolás Maduro. (Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)

“As technologies advance, so do our adversaries,” he said. “But here at the War Department, we are not sitting idly by.”

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February 13, 2026
Trump heads to Fort Bragg to cheer special forces members who ousted Venezuela’s Maduro

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President Donald Trump is heading to North Carolina on Friday to celebrate members of the special forces who stormed into Venezuela on the third day of the New Year and whisked away that country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, to face U.S. smuggling charges.First Lady Melania Trump will also be making the trip to Fort Bragg, one of the largest military bases in the world by population, to spend time with military families.Trump has been hitting the road more frequently to states that could play key roles in November’s midterm congressional elections, including a stop before Christmas in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. The White House has been trying to promote Trump’s economic policies, including attempts to bring down the cost of living at a time when many Americans are becoming increasingly frustrated with Trump’s efforts to improve affordability.The president spoke at Fort Bragg in June at an event meant to recognize the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army. But that celebration was overshadowed by his partisan remarks describing protesters in Los Angeles as “animals” and his defense of deploying the military there.Trump has since deployed the National Guard to places like Washington and Memphis, Tennessee, as well as other federal law enforcement officials involved in his crackdown on immigration. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, announced Thursday that the administration is ending the operations in Minnesota that led to the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens.This time, Trump’s visit is meant to toast service members involved in his administration’s dramatic ouster of Maduro, an operation he has described as requiring bravery and advanced weapons.His administration has since pushed for broad oversight of the South American country’s oil industry. Next month, he plans to convene a gathering of leaders from a number of Latin American countries in Florida, as the administration spotlights what it sees as concerning Chinese influence in the region.The March 7 gathering can give Trump a chance to further press a new and aggressive foreign policy which the president has proudly dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine,” a reference to 19th-century President James Monroe’s belief that the U.S. should dominate its sphere of influence.

WASHINGTON —

President Donald Trump is heading to North Carolina on Friday to celebrate members of the special forces who stormed into Venezuela on the third day of the New Year and whisked away that country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, to face U.S. smuggling charges.

First Lady Melania Trump will also be making the trip to Fort Bragg, one of the largest military bases in the world by population, to spend time with military families.

Trump has been hitting the road more frequently to states that could play key roles in November’s midterm congressional elections, including a stop before Christmas in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. The White House has been trying to promote Trump’s economic policies, including attempts to bring down the cost of living at a time when many Americans are becoming increasingly frustrated with Trump’s efforts to improve affordability.

The president spoke at Fort Bragg in June at an event meant to recognize the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army. But that celebration was overshadowed by his partisan remarks describing protesters in Los Angeles as “animals” and his defense of deploying the military there.

Trump has since deployed the National Guard to places like Washington and Memphis, Tennessee, as well as other federal law enforcement officials involved in his crackdown on immigration. Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, announced Thursday that the administration is ending the operations in Minnesota that led to the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens.

This time, Trump’s visit is meant to toast service members involved in his administration’s dramatic ouster of Maduro, an operation he has described as requiring bravery and advanced weapons.

His administration has since pushed for broad oversight of the South American country’s oil industry. Next month, he plans to convene a gathering of leaders from a number of Latin American countries in Florida, as the administration spotlights what it sees as concerning Chinese influence in the region.

The March 7 gathering can give Trump a chance to further press a new and aggressive foreign policy which the president has proudly dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine,” a reference to 19th-century President James Monroe’s belief that the U.S. should dominate its sphere of influence.

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February 13, 2026
A Bridge to Venezuela

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After Hugo Chávez’s election in 1998, net emigration from Venezuela began to increase. It was a relative trickle at first. The people leaving were, broadly speaking, the well-off, the business class, those who wanted to protect their investments and properties. Next, as the economic outlook worsened, came the middle class, looking for better opportunities, and many of those who went to Colombia could be more accurately described as returnees: the children and grandchildren of Colombians who’d emigrated a generation or two earlier, now claiming their citizenship in order to start over. Both of these groups included dissidents, victims of the ever-tightening repression. Each disappointing election lost by the opposition (or, more recently, stolen by Maduro) prompted many who no longer believed that change was possible to leave.

Still, no one was really prepared for 2017, when Venezuela’s hyperinflation made daily life unsustainable. That year, the official inflation rate rose to eight hundred and sixty-three per cent; the following year, it went even higher, to an astonishing annual rate of more than a hundred and thirty thousand per cent. Faced with this untenable situation, ordinary people from across the country simply picked up their belongings and began walking, eventually crossing the Simón Bolívar bridge into Cúcuta, and then heading farther, into Colombia, and beyond. What was initially a local concern for Cúcuta—which woke to find its streets and byways lined with refugees—soon became a national, and then regional, crisis. It was unprecedented, and if you talk to Cucuteños today, many still shudder as they recall those scenes. Mention los caminantes, the walkers, and everyone here knows what you’re talking about.

Keila Vilchez, a Venezuelan journalist writing for Cúcuta’s main paper, La Opinión, told me that those people weren’t migrating so much as fleeing. “That’s all you can call it,” she said. “Because anyone who decides to walk for twenty days, thirty days, forty days to leave their country is doing it because there is no hope.” The walkers whom Vilchez met in those days while reporting from Cúcuta, and along the roads of the Colombian state of Norte de Santander, were mostly headed to Bogotá, or to the coast, or to the coffee-growing region of Colombia, having heard rumors that there might be work there. They carried their entire lives with them, rolling their bulging suitcases along the sides of roads, children in their arms. They wore sandals or were barefoot. They were desperate: no papers, no money, perhaps a phone number of a relative or an address somewhere in Bogotá. Unprepared for the altitude or for the elements, many died along the way. In 2018 alone, more than 1.3 million Venezuelans left the country. “As a Venezuelan, I couldn’t help but think how lucky I’d been,” Vilchez said.

All told, more than seven million Venezuelans—around twenty per cent of the population—have left since 2015. It’s no exaggeration to say that this unprecedented exodus has affected every country in the region: straining diplomatic relations, testing social safety nets, sparking xenophobic backlash, polarizing public opinion, and transforming politics. The humanitarian emergency arguably transformed the political debate on immigration in the U.S., as well. How many Americans had heard of Tren de Aragua before it became a shorthand for the kinds of immigrants Trump was promising to deport en masse? I was living in New York when Republican governors began sending busloads of migrants to blue-state cities like mine. In the winter of 2022 to 2023, I volunteered to meet new arrivals at the Port Authority, most of whom were Venezuelans. They were young men and women, families; I remember them as dazed and bewildered and excited, scarcely able to believe that they were in midtown Manhattan. They needed winter coats and hats and underwear and shoelaces. And more—a place to rest, a job, a school for their kids. Many had crossed the Simón Bolívar bridge, and all one could do was offer a welcome, and stand in awe of how far they’d come, every journey a kind of miracle.

One morning in Cúcuta, I went to Las Delicias, a neighborhood of roughly four hundred families on the outskirts of town, where dirt roads snake up and down green hills, turning to mud in the rains, and more than half the residents are Venezuelan. There had been gunfire the previous afternoon, the victims a pair of young men on a motorcycle, one of whom had been shot in the back and died. The other remained hospitalized. Neither garnered much sympathy from the residents I spoke to; they were thieves, or so it was said, and life was too difficult to spend much time feeling sorry for criminals. Las Delicias officially became part of Cúcuta in 2015, a bureaucratic change that many hoped would bring much needed services and infrastructure improvements to the neighborhood, but not much has materialized yet.

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February 7, 2026
Venezuela’s acting president proposes legislation that could lead to release of hundreds of political prisoners

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Venezuela’s acting President Delcy Rodríguez on Friday announced an amnesty bill that could lead to the release of hundreds of prisoners, including opposition leaders, journalists and human rights activists detained for political reasons.

The measure had long been sought by the United States-backed opposition. It is the latest concession Rodríguez has made since taking the reins of the country on Jan. 3 after the brazen seizure of then-President Nicolás Maduro in a U.S. military attack in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas.

Rodríguez told a gathering of justices, magistrates, ministers, military brass and other government leaders that the ruling party-controlled National Assembly would take up the bill with urgency.

“May this law serve to heal the wounds left by the political confrontation fueled by violence and extremism,” she added in the pretaped televised event. “May it serve to redirect justice in our country, and may it serve to redirect coexistence among Venezuelans.”

This comes as the U.S. Embassy for Venezuela also announced Friday that all American citizens detained in Venezuela have been released.

“We are pleased to confirm the release by the interim authorities of all known U.S. citizens held in Venezuela,” the embassy said in a social media post. Secretary of State Marco Rubio reposted the news on his personal X account.

It wasn’t immediately clear how many people were released. CBS News has reached out to the State Department.

Earlier this month, a hostage advocate familiar with the situation had told CBS News that at least four Americans were still detained in Venezuela.

In July, 10 Americans were freed from Venezuela as part of a prisoner swap involving the U.S. and El Salvador. The Americans were freed in exchange for El Salvador returning 252 Venezuelans who were deported from the U.S. to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT.

The U.S. does not physically operate an embassy in Venezuela, after it shuttered its embassy in Caracas in 2019 amid mass protests and political unrest. Since then, it has operated its consular services out of Bogota, Colombia. In the wake of the U.S. capture of Maduro in early January, the Trump administration this week notified Congress that it would begin steps to eventually reopen its embassy in Venezuela.

Laura Dogu, the chief U.S. diplomat to Venezuela, traveled to Caracas Saturday to meet with Venezuelan officials, Yvan Gil, Venezuela’s foreign affairs minister, posted on social media. Gil said their meeting is “aimed at charting a roadmap for work on matters of bilateral interest, as well as addressing and resolving existing differences through diplomatic dialogue and on the basis of mutual respect and International Law.”

Rodríguez, meanwhile also announced the shutdown of Helicoide, a prison in Caracas where torture and other human rights abuses have been repeatedly documented by independent organizations. The facility, she said, will be transformed into a sports, social and cultural center for police and surrounding neighborhoods.

Acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodriguez speaks at a rally after lawmakers approved a legislative initiative to strengthen the oil industry, opening the country’s oil sector to privatization. Jan. 29, 2026.

Javier Campos/Picture Alliance via Getty Images

Rodríguez made her announcement before some of the officials that former prisoners and human rights watchdogs have accused of ordering the abuses committed at Helicoide and other detention facilities.

Relatives of some prisoners livestreamed Rodríguez’s speech on a phone as they gathered outside Helicoide. Some cried. Many chanted “Freedom! Freedom!”

“God is good. God heard us,” Johana Chirinos, a prisoner’s aunt, said as tears rolled down her face.

Opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado in a statement said the announced actions were not taken “voluntarily, but rather in response to pressure from the U.S. government.” She also noted that people have been detained for their political activities from anywhere between a month and 23 years.

“The regime’s repressive apparatus is brutal and has responded to the numerous criminal forces that answer to this regime, and it is all that remains,” Machado said. “When repression disappears and fear is lost, it will be the end of tyranny.”

The Venezuelan-based prisoners’ rights group Foro Penal estimates that 711 people are in detention facilities across the South American country for their political activities. Of those, 183 have been sentenced.

Among the prominent members of the political opposition who were detained after the 2024 presidential election and remain in prison are former lawmaker Freddy Superlano, Machado’s lawyer Perkins Rocha, as well as Juan Pablo Guanipa, a former governor and one of Machado’s closest allies.

The government did not release the text of the bill on Friday, leaving unclear the specific criteria that will be used to determine who qualifies for amnesty.

Rodríguez said the “general amnesty law” will cover the “entire period of political violence from 1999 to the present.” She also explained that people convicted of murder, drug trafficking, corruption or human rights violations will not qualify for relief.

Rodríguez’s government earlier this month announced plans to release a significant number of prisoners in a goodwill gesture, but relatives of those detained have condemned the slow pace of the releases.

“A general amnesty is welcome as long as its elements and conditions include all of civil society, without discrimination, that it does not become a cloak of impunity, and that it contributes to dismantling the repressive apparatus of political persecution,” Alfredo Romero, president of Foro Penal, said on social media.

The organization has tallied 302 releases since the Jan. 8 announcement.

The human rights group Provea in a statement called out the lack of transparency and “trickle” pace of prisoner releases. It also underscored that while the freeing of those still detained “is urgent, the announcement of an amnesty should not be conceived, under any circumstances, as a pardon or act of clemency on the part of the State.”

“We recall that these people were arbitrarily imprisoned for exercising rights protected by international human rights instruments, the National Constitution, and Venezuelan laws,” the organization said.

Outside another detention facility in Caracas, Edward Ocariz, who was detained for more than five months after the 2024 election, joined prisoners’ relatives in demanding their loved ones’ swift release.

“We, Venezuelans, have all endured so much, all unjust, merciless and trampling on our dignity. No one deserves this,” Ocariz said. “And today, the guilty continue to govern Venezuela.”

Margaret Brennan

contributed to this report.

In:

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January 31, 2026
Why Venezuelans support Trump’s capture of Maduro
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This week, guest host Zach Weissmueller is joined by Freddy Guevara, a Venezuelan opposition leader who was imprisoned by the regime of Nicolás Maduro and now lives in exile.

Guevara first entered politics as a student activist opposing Hugo Chávez, later becoming the youngest elected city council member in Venezuelan history before winning a seat in the National Assembly. After the government stripped the assembly of power and escalated repression, Guevara spent three years as a political refugee in the Chilean Embassy in Caracas and was later imprisoned by the Maduro regime. He has lived in exile since 2021 and is now a visiting fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, where he studies democratic transitions and political repression.

Weissmueller and Guevara discuss how authoritarianism operated under Nicolás Maduro, including political imprisonment, surveillance, and the foreign alliances that helped sustain his oppressive regime. They examine Maduro’s capture, why many Venezuelans support U.S. intervention, and what a democratic transition would require after decades of dictatorship. Guevara challenges common assumptions in the West about sovereignty and regime change and makes the case that Venezuelans themselves have driven the push to remove Maduro – while explaining how Venezuela’s collapse was not simply the result of corruption but a predictable consequence of socialism in practice.

The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie goes deep with the artists, entrepreneurs, and scholars who are making the world a more libertarian—or at least a more interesting—place by championing “free minds and free markets.”

0:00—Introduction

1:09—Guevara’s arrest in Venezuela

8:34—The mechanics of oppression

12:27—The capture of Maduro

15:31—Delcy Rodríguez

20:38—Venezuelan oil and national sovereignty

27:19—The Trump administration’s transition strategy

29:47—U.S. media coverage of Venezuelan politics

32:22—María Corina Machado

36:45—Marco Rubio’s three-phase strategy

41:12—Maduro indictment

47:20—The consequences of socialism

50:45—What will progress look like for Venezuela?

Upcoming Reason Events
- Producer: Paul Alexander
- Audio Mixer: Ian Keyser
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Zach Weissmueller

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January 21, 2026
‘Nobody Can Stop Us’

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In the months before the U.S. military snatched Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from their home, President Trump justified his buildup of forces in the Caribbean as an extension of his “America First” domestic agenda. He was ordering deadly missile strikes against boats in the region because they were smuggling drugs at Maduro’s behest and those drugs were killing Americans, he claimed. A similar, if not necessarily coordinated, attack on Americans’ safety was being perpetrated at home by undocumented immigrants, whom Trump accused, without evidence, of all being violent criminals.

But as soon as the raid was over, leaving at least 60 people dead and Venezuela’s economic resources in U.S. hands, Trump and his top aides pivoted to bald-faced imperialism, musing openly about other countries they could soon put under American control.

“Cuba is ready to fall,” the president said dryly as anti-Trump protesters flooded Havana. “Colombia is very sick, too, run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and sending it to the United States, and he’s not going to be doing it very long” — an unambiguous threat against President Gustavo Petro. “Something’s going to have to be done with Mexico,” he later said. Stephen Miller used the occasion to rattle officials in Denmark as well as the putative NATO allies of the U.S. by declaring Greenland as good as ours. “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper. The administration is so eager to assert what it sees as its natural imperialist mandate that Trump has dubbed it the “Donroe Doctrine,” a winking play on President James Monroe’s 1823 declaration that foreign powers who tried to colonize the Western Hemisphere were effectively picking a fight with the U.S., the region’s sole and rightful plunderer.

The American looting of Venezuela already seems to be underway. “We are in the midst right now and in fact about to execute on a deal to take all the oil,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced on January 7. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies … go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, and start making money” by “taking a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground,” Trump said. They were vague about logistics, and while at least some of the profits will purportedly “flow back into Venezuela to benefit the Venezuelan people,” the U.S. plans to keep some as “reimbursement,” a legal-sounding rebrand of what is essentially rich goons seizing a country’s resources at gunpoint.

Oil is not the only thing being stolen here. The U.S. government has also robbed the Venezuelan people of any semblance of self-determination. In spite of the compelling pro-democracy case for ousting Maduro, a brutal dictator who held onto power after losing his 2024 reelection bid in a landslide, Trump has blithely dismissed Maduro’s main political opponent, Nobel Peace Prize winner Carmen María Machado, as “a very nice woman” who lacks “support or respect within the country.” Instead, Trump and Rubio have propped up Maduro’s vice-president, Delcy Rodriguez, seemingly because they think she will be easier to bully than her predecessor. (“If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price,” Trump told The Atlantic.) Whether or not that holds true, she has ensured some autocratic continuity — police in Caracas have reportedly been interrogating residents at checkpoints and boarding buses to search people’s phones, trying to suss out anyone who celebrated Maduro’s removal.

The rest of the world has taken note. French president Emmanuel Macron used an annual foreign-policy address to accuse the U.S. of turning away from the “international rules that it used to promote” and abandoning allies. “Every day, people are wondering if Greenland will be invaded, or whether Canada will face the threat of becoming the 51st state,” he said. When Trump suggested that Mexico could be his next target, President Claudia Sheinbaum replied, “The history of Latin America is clear and compelling: intervention has never brought democracy, never generated well-being, nor lasting stability.”

Yet amid the international uproar, the pretense that Trump’s foreign policy reflects an “America First” posture was undercut most profoundly by a tragedy at home. On January 7, an ICE agent fired his gun multiple times into an SUV driven by Renee Nicole Good, killing the 37-year-old mother of three on a snow-lined street in residential Minneapolis. Trump had recently ordered a surge of federal agents to Minnesota, apparently to intimidate the local Somali American population, which he had disparaged as “garbage” the month before; faced instead with rationalizing the shooting death of a white woman, the administration rushed to smear Good as a “domestic terrorist,” arguing, again without evidence, that she had put the agent’s life in danger. Homeland Security director Kristi Noem was in New York the next day announcing the arrests of “illegal criminal aliens,” her rhetoric about keeping Americans safe rendered especially hollow after what amounted to a deadly mugging in broad daylight in Minneapolis, captured from multiple camera angles by bystanders.

This, on a grand scale, has become the defining feature of the current phase of American preeminence: robbery. It is happening overseas, as Trump seeks to remake Venezuela into a U.S. vassal state, and at home, where he is stripping state governors of their authority and residents of their basic civil liberties and, as of January 7, their lives. Asked by the New York Times if there were any limits on his global powers, Trump replied, “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” As Miller put it in his conversation with Jake Tapper, “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning.”

It’s true that, in spite of the shocking developments of the past few weeks, there’s a creeping sense that we are witnessing a tale as old as time. But there’s something going here on that supersedes any assertion of brute force or regional influence put forth when the U.S. was finding its footing as a global player. This isn’t the 19th century anymore; America is the world’s leading economic and military power. That its government is as disdainful of international sovereignty as it is of its own increasingly heavily policed residents makes it the world’s most powerful thief.

The scorn that Trump’s allies continue to heap on Good can be seen as an expression of the timeless authoritarian character of American policing. (George Floyd was choked to death less than a mile from where Good was shot.) But Venezuela feels like a turning point. State violence at home is justified at all costs, as are Trump’s decisions about which foreign nations to menace, and how. It’s not clear what the end result will be, but the effect is the firm establishment of a governing principle rooted in Trump’s declaration on Fox News soon after the raid: “Nobody can stop us.”

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If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the January 12, 2026, issue of
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Zak Cheney-Rice

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January 10, 2026
The Aggressive Ambitions of Trump’s “Donroe Doctrine”

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The fate of the largest island in the world could upend transatlantic ties, in turn undermining the most important political and military alliance in the world. Denmark is one of the original members of NATO. After Trump’s comments, Mette Frederiksen, the Danish Prime Minister, warned about the consequences: “If the U.S. chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops, including NATO and thus the security that has been established since the end of the Second World War.” On Tuesday, a joint statement by seven European countries asserted that Greenland’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, as part of Denmark, were protected by the U.N. Charter. Nicholas Burns, a former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, called picking a fight over Greenland “a colossal mistake.” Douglas Lute, a retired three-star general and another former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, predicted that European allies “will be increasingly reluctant to depend on the United States, as they have for nearly eighty years, and not only because Trump and his Administration are focussed on the Western Hemisphere but because what the President says cannot be trusted.”

And, in the Middle East, the President notified Iran—on his Truth Social account, the day before the operation in Venezuela—that U.S. forces were “locked and loaded” and ready to intervene if the theocracy used lethal force when responding to peaceful anti-government demonstrations that had erupted across the country. Over the weekend, the State Department’s Farsi account posted another warning superimposed over a black-and-white photo of Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the C.I.A. chief, John Ratcliffe, as they watched the raid on Venezuela. In huge red letters, in Farsi, the message read, “Don’t play games with President Trump.” It added, “President Trump is a man of action. If you didn’t know, now you know.” The U.S. threats followed Trump’s meeting with the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, last week at Mar-a-Lago, when the two leaders jointly vowed to again strike Iran if its nuclear and ballistic-missile programs are rebuilt.

In December, the State Department rebranded the U.S. Institute of Peace by tacking on “Donald J. Trump” in big silver letters above the entryway. A White House spokesperson said the peace institute’s rebranding “beautifully and aptly” honored a President “who ended eight wars in less than a year” and was a “powerful reminder of what strong leadership can accomplish for global stability.”

Except Trump has not really “ended” wars anywhere, he has only spun fragile ceasefires as examples of lasting peace. One of the wars the President claims to have ended was the long-standing conflict between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The President presided over the signing of a peace treaty between the two countries last month. But the reprieve lasted only a few days. And, in the past month, hundreds of people have reportedly died in new fighting along the Rwanda-Congo border.

Former senior American and European officials scoff at Trump’s claims of being the President of peace. Lute, who served as the deputy national-security adviser under the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations, chuckled when I asked him how many wars Trump has ended. “Zero,” he replied. “He may give himself credit to have paused eight conflicts, but I don’t count any of these as resolved.” Trump has even upped the numbers. “Now it’s eight and a quarter,” Lute noted. “He has this new math on Cambodia and Thailand, which he said he had to sort of solve again. So, he’s giving himself another point-two-five.”

Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza is far from fully resolved, despite a Trump-brokered agreement last fall. “It’s not very clear what happens first and what happens next,” the Norwegian Foreign Minister, Espen Barth Eide, said at the Doha Forum in December. Without imminent progress, all parties risked a return to war “or descent into total anarchy,” Eide said. In May, Trump notably claimed to have ended hostilities between India and Pakistan, a conflict that dates back to 1947 over control of predominantly Muslim Kashmir by predominantly Hindu India. The President said that he used trade concessions as incentives to get both countries to end a four-day skirmish in the Kashmir region, last spring. After a ceasefire was announced, the government of Pakistan, which had already nominated Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize, thanked him, but India claimed to know nothing about any concessions. “They’re not shooting at one another,” Lute said. “But that doesn’t stop the underlined conflict between India and Pakistan.” The ceasefire did not address the long-standing issue of Kashmir, and troops of both countries remain deployed along the volatile border.

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Robin Wright

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January 8, 2026
New poll shows Americans are divided on Venezuela as Trump says oversight could last years

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A recent CBS News poll shows Americans are split on the Trump administration’s operation to remove Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela. This comes as President Trump comments on the country’s future. CBS News’ Anthony Salvanto has more on the data.

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January 8, 2026
Maduro didn’t flood the US with fentanyl

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A White House social media post misleadingly links deposed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro with the U.S. fentanyl crisis.

The X post includes a video highlighting parents who lost children to fentanyl overdoses thanking President Donald Trump for capturing Maduro.

“Angel Families thank President Trump for saving lives & capturing Maduro — the kingpin flooding America with deadly fentanyl,” the White House’s Jan. 5 X post said. “Justice is being served.”

U.S. troops captured Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, at their Caracas home in the early hours of Jan. 3. The two pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking charges Jan. 5 in New York federal court.

The White House post isn’t the first time the Trump administration blamed Maduro for trafficking fentanyl to the U.S. Trump has cited the potent synthetic opioid that is responsible for most U.S. drug overdose deaths to justify pressure on Venezuela in the months before Maduro’s capture.

But neither Venezuela nor Maduro plays a role in smuggling fentanyl to the U.S. The majority of U.S. fentanyl comes from Mexico and is made with chemicals from China, according to U.S. government reports and drug policy experts.

The White House did not respond to PolitiFact’s request for comment.

Vice President JD Vance addressed fentanyl in a Jan. 4 X post, the day before the White House’s post, saying cocaine is “the main drug trafficked out of Venezuela,” and, “Yes, a lot of fentanyl is coming out of Mexico. That continues to be a focus of our policy in Mexico and is a reason why President Trump shut the border on day one.”

Drug experts previously told PolitiFact that Venezuela acts as a transit country for some cocaine trafficking in part because its neighboring country, Colombia, is the world’s main cocaine producer. However, most of the cocaine that enters the U.S. doesn’t go through Venezuela.

Drug trafficking experts, government reports say fentanyl does not come from Venezuela

The Drug Enforcement Agency’s annual National Drug Threat Assessment reports for years have pointed to Mexico and China as the countries responsible for illicit fentanyl in the U.S. None of the agency’s reports from 2017 through 2025 list Venezuela as a fentanyl producer or trafficker.

Most illicit fentanyl entered the U.S. via the southern border at official ports of entry, and 83.5% of the smugglers in fiscal year 2024 were U.S. citizens.

“There is no evidence of fentanyl or cocaine laced with fentanyl coming from Venezuela or anywhere else in South America,” David Smilde, a Tulane University sociologist who studies violence in Venezuela, told PolitiFact in September.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime World Drug Report also points to Mexico as the country of origin for the most fentanyl seized in the U.S.

U.S. fentanyl overdose deaths recently have dropped. From May 2024 to April 2025, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported 43,000 synthetic opioid deaths, most of which were from fentanyl, down from nearly 70,000 in the previous year.

“The United States has been suffering an enormous overdose crisis driven by opioids and fentanyl in particular in recent years,” John Walsh, director for drug policy at the Washington Office on Latin America, a group advocating for human rights in the Americas, previously told PolitiFact. “I would say it has zero to do with anything in South America or the Caribbean.”

Maduro’s indictment on drug-related charges doesn’t mention fentanyl

The Justice Department first indicted Maduro in 2020 for alleged drug-related actions dating to 1999. A newly unsealed and updated indictment filed in the Southern District of New York charges Maduro and two co-defendants with narcoterrorism conspiracy and he, Flores and the four other co-defendants with cocaine importation conspiracy and possession of machine guns.

The indictment calls Maduro an illegitimate leader who transported cocaine under Venezuelan law enforcement protection, enriching his family and cementing power.

The 25-page document does not mention fentanyl or fentanyl trafficking.

Our ruling

The Trump White House described Maduro as “flooding America with deadly fentanyl.”

Drug experts and official government and international reports point to Mexico and China as the countries primarily involved in producing and trafficking the illicit fentanyl that reaches the U.S. The majority of fentanyl in the U.S. comes from Mexico, is made with chemicals from China, and is smuggled by U.S. citizens via official ports of entry at the southern border.

The U.S. Justice Department indicted Maduro on charges related to cocaine. The indictment does not mention fentanyl.

We rate the statement False.

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January 7, 2026
The Former Trump Skeptics Getting Behind His War in Venezuela

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Last week, Donald Trump ordered a military operation in Venezuela that included a series of air strikes in Caracas and the seizure of Nicolás Maduro, the country’s President, and his wife. The couple were then brought to New York City to face drug-trafficking and other charges. (They have pleaded not guilty.) The operation, which killed more than seventy people, has been followed by vows from President Trump to take Venezuela’s oil—something that he said the new Venezuelan government would facilitate. Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s Vice-President, the interim leader of the country, has contradicted Trump’s claim that he will “run” Venezuela, but she nevertheless is currently favored by the American government to remain in charge. Trump has pushed aside the opposition to Maduro, who won the election that Maduro stole, in 2024.

Democrats have largely condemned Trump’s actions in Venezuela, but Republican support has been strong, even among some so-called Never Trump Republicans, including the former congressman Adam Kinzinger, who backed Kamala Harris in the 2024 Presidential election. But there’s bipartisan concern, shared by American allies abroad, about Trump’s escalating threats to Greenland, which is part of Denmark, and which Trump and the White House have repeatedly said should be taken by the United States.

I recently spoke by phone with Matthew Kroenig, who is a professor at Georgetown and the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, and a columnist for Foreign Policy magazine. Kroenig recently wrote a piece for the New York Times titled “Trump Was Right to Oust Maduro.” (Kroenig has worked as an adviser to Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio, and in the Pentagon during Trump’s first term.) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what Trump’s ultimate aims are in Venezuela, the possibility of an American attack on Greenland, and whether there is a danger in encouraging Trump’s bellicosity.

Why do you think that the move by the Trump Administration to remove Maduro was the right one?

Well, Maduro’s a bad guy and it’s good that he’s gone is the bottom line, and he gave America’s adversaries like Russia, China, and Iran a foothold in the Western Hemisphere. He mismanaged his economy so badly that about a quarter of the population fled, contributing to a refugee crisis and pressure on the U.S.’s southern border. And he is charged with trafficking drugs into the U.S. So he was bad—bad for U.S. security, and bad for the Venezuelan people, and it’s better that he’s gone.

Do you have some sense that the Trump Administration cares about the welfare of the Venezuelan people and the future of Venezuela? I read a piece of yours in Foreign Policy in November where you said that it’s important for the Trump Administration to try to insure that a pro-American democracy arises in Venezuela after Maduro.

In terms of the mismanagement of domestic politics and economics in Venezuela, there are two ways you could get somewhere better. One is a policy change and the other is a regime change. It does seem like the near-term strategy is to use carrots and sticks to encourage the current leaders in Venezuela to change policy. It is possible that the remnants of the Maduro regime could put in place the right policies—economic reforms to curb or stop drug trafficking, and to push out the Russians, the Chinese, and the Iranians—for a variety of reasons, including that they don’t want to have happen to them what happened to Maduro. But I do think over the longer term, the outcome we would want is a democratic Venezuela. As to whether the Administration cares about that—if you just look at Trump’s statements on Saturday or Rubio’s appearances on the Sunday shows, they did talk multiple times about how they were pursuing America’s interests, but also that this would be to the benefit of the Venezuelan people. [The New York Times reported on Wednesday that repression in Venezuela had ramped up, from already high levels, since Maduro’s removal, with journalists and people who celebrated Maduro’s capture being detained.]

You could make a utilitarian case that an invasion or a regime change will improve the lives of the Venezuelan people. That’s a little different than saying that the Trump Administration cares about democracy. Because Trump seems like he’s more interested in pursuing oil rights for American companies and whatever else.

Yeah. Well, and so again, looking at the Rubio interviews, he did talk about how democracy is the goal, but he said we have to be realistic. The opposition [to Maduro] is not in the country. These things take time.

Trump seems like he’s soured on the opposition.

Yeah, I think that’s right. Obviously America has an Iraq and Afghanistan hangover and part of how I see the strategy is that it’s kind of correcting for some of the mistakes of Iraq and Afghanistan. And I think one of the mistakes was overpromising on democracy in places where it was not realistic. I see Rubio as trying to downplay the expectations that a Jeffersonian democracy is going to pop up overnight. But even Trump was asked about elections, and he said something, like, Well, I hope it happens quickly, but it’s a process.

Sure, but you’re a very smart guy. You know that Trump doesn’t actually care about Venezuela in terms of whether it’s a democracy or not, right?

I think that’s fair—that he’s less focussed on values than traditional U.S. politicians.

Less focussed. Yeah.

Yeah. Whereas I do think that Rubio does care, including because of his family background and his long record in the Senate being a supporter of democracy and human rights.

Your Times piece does not address the fact that the person carrying this out has the qualities of Donald Trump, and that he’s also threatened a bunch of other countries in the past several days. The Administration seems to even be threatening Greenland. I’m curious if that should be part of our calculation as Americans when we wonder whether it’s a good idea for the President to order a military operation to remove a head of state.

I guess I do see the cases as different, and you’re right that Trump has threatened adversaries and allies. But in the case of Maduro—this is a leader who has stolen an election, who’s committed human-rights abuses, who was not recognized by Joe Biden or by the European Union. And so this is kind of the easiest case. With Greenland, Denmark is a NATO ally, and it’s very hard for me to see something similar happening there. With Mexico, the President has a pretty good relationship with Claudia Sheinbaum. She and the Colombian President, Gustavo Petro, are both democratically elected. The one place where I do think there should be some concern is Cuba: Rubio was asked about this and he said, ‘Yeah, if I lived in Havana, and I was in the government, I’d be concerned.’ And, in fact, the cutting off of Venezuelan oil is already really putting a lot of pressure on the government in Cuba. So I do think this is a model that could be applied elsewhere, but I think some of the hyperventilating over the past few days that this is going to be unleashed everywhere probably goes too far.

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Isaac Chotiner

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January 7, 2026
What Will Become of Venezuela’s Political Prisoners?

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El Helicoide, a brutalist complex sitting atop a hill in central Caracas, is known as one of Latin America’s most notorious detention centers. Built as a shopping mall in the nineteen-fifties, the structure was taken over by Venezuela’s national-intelligence services, who turned its abandoned storefronts and lavatories into makeshift prison cells.

Early on Saturday afternoon, hours after American forces captured Nicolás Maduro, Amanda Monasterios sped off to El Helicoide. Her son, Jesús Armas, a prominent opposition leader, was among the political prisoners held inside. Monasterios, who is seventy-four, looked out at the capital’s eerily deserted streets: caraqueños had awakened to a bombed city, where people had been called on to begin la lucha armada. She arrived at El Helicoide to find that armed men had sealed off the premises. Patrol cars guarded the entrance—and there was no way to get near the prison. “It was as if the entire national police were guarding the approaches,” she said.

Her son had been in detention for just over a year, during which time Monasterios had been allowed to see him only occasionally. Clutching a bag of homemade food, she was prepared to step out of her car and seek a way into El Helicoide, but a companion advised her against it. “Don’t do it,” the person implored her. “We’ll come back on Wednesday.”

An engineer by training, Armas made a foray into politics as a student and was later elected a councilman in Caracas. He worked to address the city’s crumbling infrastructure, but it was his work in the general election of 2024 that drew the regime’s attention. After officials barred María Corina Machado, the opposition leader, from entering the race, she anointed a retired diplomat named Edmundo González to run in her place. Armas helped lead González’s campaign in the capital.

The election was mired in fraud: Armas, along with others, rallied hundreds of volunteers to observe the vote and preserve printed tallies from every voting machine. When polls closed, Maduro rushed to claim victory—a claim the opposition forcefully disputed, showing proof that González had won in a landslide. The regime never released a full count of the vote. Instead, officials engaged in a vicious crusade to repress whoever dared challenge the outcome.

On the morning of December 10, 2024, Armas was abducted from a cafeteria in eastern Caracas. It took almost a week—and a sustained public campaign—for him to be tracked down. Saimar Rivas, Armas’s partner and a longtime civil-rights activist, told me that he had been taken to a clandestine site run by the SEBIN, Venezuela’s intelligence agency. “There, he was tortured, asphyxiated with plastic bags, and questioned about the whereabouts of Edmundo, María Corina, and other opposition leaders,” Rivas said. “They offered him to become an informant, but he refused.”

What followed was a ten-month period of isolation at El Helicoide, where Armas was barred from any visits. He became one of about two thousand Venezuelans detained in the election’s aftermath; many of them remain behind bars to this day. “Every single leader who was involved in the election is either in detention, living in exile, or hiding,” Rivas said.

From the beginning, Donald Trump’s pressure campaign against Maduro raised numerous questions about the fate of Venezuela’s political prisoners. Inside detention centers, rumors spread that an American intervention would trigger a killing spree. Family members worried that their relatives could be held hostage or disappeared by the regime. “I haven’t slept in a year,” Monasterios said. Stories abounded of prisoners gone missing and of relatives who never got to see their loved ones again. Now, people worried that detainees could be used as human shields.

Trump’s silence on the subject had only raised more doubts. In public, the President had seldom mentioned political prisoners. His rhetoric around Venezuela had focussed almost entirely on the country’s oil resources and on what the U.S. stood to gain. In the eyes of many Venezuelans, his endorsement of Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s second-in-command, was proof of his disregard for Venezuela’s democracy. “The fact that Delcy has been sworn in as President is, in itself, a flagrant violation of our sovereignty,” Rivas said. “And to do so under an American tutelage is to double down on that violation.”

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Stephania Taladrid

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January 7, 2026
Full interview: María Corina Machado on Maduro and Venezuela

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María Corina Machado spoke with “CBS Evening News” anchor Tony Dokoupil on Tuesday, January 6, about the U.S. capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, her opposition movement that she says is ready to lead the country, Venezuelan Interim President Delcy Rodriguez and more.

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January 6, 2026
Inside Hezbollah’s influence in Venezuela

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Questions remain over how Venezuela will be run in the aftermath of the U.S. capture of its former leader, Nicolás Maduro. One outstanding issue is how the U.S. will handle the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, which has had a drug operation stronghold in the country for decades. CBS News’ Anna Schecter has more.

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January 6, 2026
Trump says up to 50 million barrels of oil turned over to US by Venezuela

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Trump says Venezuela will send up to 50M barrels of oil to U.S., with proceeds controlled by his administration.

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January 6, 2026
U.S. Marine imprisoned under Maduro’s rule says Venezuela uses detained Americans as “trading chips”

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A U.S. Marine who was held captive in Venezuela for two years under Nicolás Maduro‘s regime recalled on Tuesday being handcuffed and electrocuted after he says he was wrongfully detained.

Matthew Heath, a corporal in the Corps from 1999 until 2003, says Maduro detained Americans to be used as “trading chips” and a policy tool, telling CBS News’ Major Garrett on “The Takeout” that he was arrested by Venezuelan authorities in September 2020 after showing Venezuelan authorities his passport at a regular checkpoint.

“I was placed in their holding facility called Casa de los Sueños, the House of Dreams,” Heath said. “I can assure you it does not live up to its name.”

Matthew Health, a U.S. Marine imprisoned under Nicolas Maduro, on “The Takeout” on Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2025.

CBS News

There are at least four detained Americans being held in Venezuela, according to a hostage advocate familiar with the situation. Health says they’re under “terrible treatment” without access to clean drinking water or medical facility and recounted his own experience.

“I was tortured. They handcuffed me to the frame of metal bed and electrocuted me with a car battery and jumper cables,” he told CBS News. “It’s not exactly polite conversation but I can tell you that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”

Health was accused of entering Venezuela illegally, the prosecutor said, claiming that he didn’t have a passport but rather had a copy of it hidden in one of his shoes. Three Venezuelan nationals were also accused of conspiring with Heath.

The Venezuelan government also accused him of being a spy and charged him in an alleged terrorist plot to sabotage oil refineries and electrical service in order to stir unrest.

The Marine was released in October 2022 along with six other Americans imprisoned in the South American country in exchange for the release of two nephews of Maduro’s wife who had been jailed for years by the U.S. on drug smuggling convictions. Their release came after senior U.S. government officials traveled to Caracas that summer in a bid to bring home detained Americans. The trip also followed a public plea from Heath’s family to the Biden administration to take urgent action to save his life following what they said was a suicide attempt.

When asked whether he wants President Trump to publicly call on the interim president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, to released the detainees, Health said it would likely help the moral of their family members — but added that Mr. Trump can do more.

“I think [Mr. Trump] should get on the phone tonight. Call Delcy Rodríguez and say that he’s sending a plane down there and that he’d like them loaded on that plane immediately. I think that we still got time to get them home tonight,” Heath said.

Camilla Schick and

Margaret Brennan

contributed to this report.

U.S. Strikes Venezuela

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January 6, 2026
Venezuelan singer-songwriter looks to the future for the US and his former homeland – WTOP News

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For a singer-songwriter who came to the United States from Venezuela seven years ago, the news that the U.S. had removed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro from power was welcome news.

For a singer-songwriter who came to the U.S. from Venezuela seven years ago, the news that the U.S. had removed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro from power was welcome news.

Jonathan Acosta, who made his home in Virginia, told WTOP in an interview that when he initially heard the news, he was overjoyed.

“The reaction was something like, ‘Oh, my God, we got it,’” Acosta said.

He explained that, in his eyes, Maduro was a dictator.

Acosta said there had been many human rights abuses under the Maduro regime. Maduro has also been accused of stealing elections.

“We don’t have a regular government, a conventional government, a normal government in Venezuela,” he said.

When he appeared in court to face charges of conspiracy and drug trafficking, Maduro said he was “captured” and pleaded not guilty.

Some Venezuelans living in the U.S., as well as Americans, have been critical of the military action and the lack of consultation with Congress before President Donald Trump’s administration deployed U.S. forces into Venezuela.

Acosta said if he were asked whether he would prefer Venezuela to be aligned with Russia, China or the U.S., “My response for you is very clear. I prefer the United States.”

At the same time, Acosta said it’s disheartening to see how Venezuelan immigrants as a whole have been portrayed as gang members and criminals.

“It’s true that Tren de Aragua came from Venezuela. That is true,” he said, while noting the majority of Venezuelan immigrants “are good people … working very hard.”

Acosta has performed locally, including at the Kennedy Center, and sang the national anthem at a Washington Wizards game in September 2024. He described that experience as important, because he felt he represented Venezuelans and the Hispanic community to a broad audience.

“I was singing to say ‘thank you’ to the United States,” he said of the experience.

Acosta has released a new album called “Americano Somos,” a nod to the cultures of North America, Central America and South America. The music spotlights what Acosta said he wants listeners to recognize, that all residents of the continents are Americans.

“With the music, we can bring hope, esperanza,” Acosta said. “That is my work, my job now.”

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Kate Ryan

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January 6, 2026
CIA advised Trump against supporting Venezuela’s democratic opposition

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WASHINGTON — A highly confidential CIA assessment produced at the request of the White House warned President Trump of a wider conflict in Venezuela if he were to support the country’s democratic opposition once its president, Nicolás Maduro, was deposed, a person familiar with the matter told The Times.

The assessment was a tightly held CIA product commissioned at the request of senior policymakers before Trump decided whether to authorize Operation Absolute Resolve, the stunning U.S. mission that seized Maduro and his wife from their bedroom in Caracas over the weekend.

Announcing the results of the operation on Sunday, Trump surprised an anxious Venezuelan public when he was quick to dismiss the leadership of the democratic opposition — led by María Corina Machado, last year’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and Edmundo González Urrutia, the opposition candidate who won the 2024 presidential election that was ultimately stolen by Maduro.

Instead, Trump said his administration was working with Maduro’s handpicked vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who has since been named the country’s interim president. The rest of Maduro’s government remains in place.

Endorsing the opposition would probably have required U.S. military backing, with the Venezuelan armed forces still under the control of loyalists to Maduro unwilling to relinquish power.

A second official said that the administration sought to avoid one of the cardinal mistakes of the invasion of Iraq, when the Bush administration ordered party loyalists of the deposed Saddam Hussein to be excluded from the country’s interim government. That decision, known as de-Baathification, led those in charge of Iraq’s stockpiles of weapons to establish armed resistance to the U.S. campaign.

The CIA product was not an assessment that was shared across the 18 government agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, whose head, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, was largely absent from deliberations — and who has yet to comment on the operation, despite CIA operatives being deployed in harm’s way before and throughout the weekend mission.

The core team that worked on Absolute Resolve included Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine and CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who met routinely over several months, sometimes daily, the source added.

The existence of the CIA assessment was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Signs have emerged that Trump’s team was in communication with Rodríguez ahead of the operation, although the president has denied that his administration gave Rodríguez advance notice of Maduro’s ouster.

“There are a number of unanswered questions,” said Evan Ellis, who served in Trump’s first term planning State Department policy on Latin America, the Caribbean and international narcotics. “There may have been a cynical calculation that one can work with them.”

Rodríguez served as a point of contact with the Biden administration, experts note, and also was in touch with Richard Grenell, a top Trump aide who heads the Kennedy Center, early on in Trump’s second term, when he was testing engagement with Caracas.

While the federal indictment unsealed against Maduro after his seizure named several other senior officials in his government, Rodríguez’s name was notably absent.

Rodríguez was sworn in as Venezuela’s interim president Monday in a ceremony attended by diplomats from Russia, China and Iran. Publicly, the leader has offered mixed messages, at once vowing to prevent Venezuela from becoming a colonial outpost of an American empire, while also offering to forge a newly collaborative relationship with Washington.

“Of course, for political reasons, Delcy Rodríguez can’t say, ‘I’ve cut a deal with Trump, and we’re going to stop the revolution now and start working with the U.S.,” Ellis said.

“It’s not about the democracy,” he said. “It’s about him not wanting to work with Maduro.”

In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Machado said she had yet to speak with Trump since the U.S. operation over the weekend, but hoped to do so soon, offering to share her Nobel Peace Prize with him as a gesture of gratitude. Trump has repeatedly touted himself as a worthy recipient of the award.

“What he has done is historic,” Machado said, vowing to return to the country from hiding abroad since accepting the prize in Oslo last month.

“It’s a huge step,” she added, “towards a democratic transition.”

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Michael Wilner

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January 6, 2026
J. D. Vance’s Notable Absence on Venezuela

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In this vacuum of meaning, the key Administration personalities have taken to network television and social media, offering their own post-facto theories of the case. They have been like the sweepers in curling, trying to coax a runaway stone onto an advantageous track. The runaway stone, in this case, being Trump’s decision to attack, and everything that will come after.

Among Trump’s advisers, Rubio’s vision is the clearest. His intent is anti-Communist. Cuban officials, Rubio told NBC, “are the ones that were propping up Maduro. His entire, like, internal security force, his internal security apparatus is entirely controlled by Cubans.” The previous day, at Mar-a-Lago, Rubio had said, “If I lived in Havana and I was in the government, I’d be concerned.” Was that a war plan for Havana? If so, the President didn’t exactly sound persuaded. On Sunday night, Trump told reporters on Air Force One that, when it came to Cuba, “I don’t think we need any action,” because the country was already “ready to fall.” Trump also made some critical comments about the Presidents of Colombia (“a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States”) and Mexico (“has to get their act together”), which suggested that his gaze might be less methodically trained on the region’s Communist regimes.

Stephen Miller, meanwhile, indulged a grander historical view, of a renewed imperial program. “Not long after World War II the West dissolved its empires and colonies and began sending colossal sums of taxpayer-funded aid to these former territories,” he wrote on social media. “The West opened its borders, a kind of reverse colonization, providing welfare and thus remittances, while extending to those newcomers and their families not only the full franchise but preferential legal and financial treatment over the native citizenry. The neoliberal experiment, at its core, has been a long self-punishment of the places and peoples that built the modern world.” Speaking with Jake Tapper on CNN on Monday, he declared that the U.S. could seize Greenland if it wanted. “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Are the President’s intentions actually colonial, or more simply a hostage-taking kind of gunboat diplomacy? According to the Financial Times, the brother of Rodríguez, Venezuela’s interim leader, had held talks last year with officials in Washington, a detail which offered a whiff of Cold War client-statism and raised the question of what Rodríguez might have promised them. Trump himself kept talking not about anti-Communism or narco-trafficking but about oil. On Air Force One, he said that “oil companies are going to go in and rebuild this system.” (The companies themselves said that they hadn’t been consulted; flooding the market with new supply would not be in the interests of corporate profits.) The President told the public that the rebuilding of Venezuela’s oil industry would take “billions” in infrastructure investment—in Venezuela, not the U.S. Curt Mills, editor of The American Conservative, observed, “Democratic talking points writing themselves right now.”

Vance’s general absence from the Venezuela initiative has been taken as an expression of his ideological identity. He is a dove, at least in the relative terms of Trumpworld, and this has been an operation for the hawks. But his more salient position may be as Trump’s political heir, and the Venezuela adventure is beginning to look like a very hard political sell. A CBS/YouGov poll taken before the attack found that seventy per cent of Americans opposed military action in Venezuela; a snap poll taken by YouGov just after Maduro’s capture showed that only thirty-six per cent of respondents “strongly or somewhat” supported the operation. If Trump means to persuade the American people of the wisdom of the attack by trying to bring them cheaper Venezuelan oil, then that will mean a far deeper entanglement in a conflict that he might prefer to treat as a hit-and-run. And then there’s the tricky international question of why, exactly, the U.S. is entitled to just take oil reserves off of Caracas in the first place. Rubio may have achieved a long-standing anti-Communist goal. Miller can celebrate a blow struck against the liberal order. But the likeliest person to inherit the Trump mantle was the one staying out of the frame. Vance had noted that there is a national anxiety “over the use of military force.” Grant that there is a moral dimension to that anxiety. There is also a political one. ♦

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Benjamin Wallace-Wells

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January 6, 2026