Venezuela’s left-wing dictator accused Donald Trump of a naked attempt to grab his country’s vast oil reserves after the U.S. president ordered American special forces to hit targets in Caracas and other cities early Saturday morning.
Trump and his henchmen have framed an increasingly violent campaign against Venezuelan targets over the past few months as a new “war on drugs,” with air strikes against 30 alleged drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, as well as a CIA drone strike this week on a docking facility in Venezuela itself.
Just hours before Trump claimed on Truth Social that U.S. authorities had captured President Nicolás Maduro in Saturday’s raids, the Maduro government issued a defiant statement about Trump’s aims.
In an angry communiqué, it said the U.S. attack was a “flagrant violation” of the U.N. Charter, especially Articles 1 and 2, guaranteeing respect for sovereignty and prohibiting the use of force.
“The objective of this attack is none other than to seize Venezuela’s strategic resources, particularly its oil and minerals, by attempting to forcibly break the political independence of the Nation,” it said. “They will not succeed.”
It went on: “After more than two hundred years of independence, the people and their legitimate Government remain firm in defense of sovereignty and of the inalienable right to decide their own destiny. The attempt to impose a colonial war to destroy the republican form of government and force a ‘regime change,’ in alliance with the fascist oligarchy, will fail like all previous attempts.”
The extraordinary attacks came just two days after Maduro said for the first time that he was open to talks with the U.S. on the issue of drug trafficking.
But the Venezuelan leader has long portrayed Trump’s anti-drugs campaign as an excuse to get America’s hands on the country’s vast, and under-exploited, oil reserves in a 21st-century neocolonial adventure. The country has estimated crude oil reserves of around 300 billion barrels, the world’s largest.
Narcotics experts say Venezuela is in fact a relatively minor player in the Latin American drugs trade—virtually no coca is grown in the country and it serves as a secondary transit route for just 5 percent of the cocaine produced in neighboring Colombia, the world’s largest producer.
Trump’s claim to be waging a new war on drugs was blown up by his decision to give a presidential pardon to a former president of Honduras who once bragged that he would “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.”
Juan Orlando Hernandez, 57, is thought to have smuggled hundreds of tons of cocaine into the United States and was convicted of drug trafficking and firearms offenses last year, and sentenced to 45 years in prison.
But Trump granted Hernandez a “full and complete pardon,” explaining that he’d been told that the former president had been victim of a “Biden set-up.”
The pardon came as a shock to many, including Liz Oyer, who served as the Biden-era Justice Department’s pardon attorney. “The pardoning of drug kingpins is virtually unheard of,” she told The Washington Post, which reported that Trump had pardoned nearly 100 people convicted of drug-related crimes.
Reacting to the American attacks, the government said Maduro had ordered a state of “external emergency” across Venezuela “in order to protect the rights of the population, ensure the full functioning of republican institutions, and immediately move to armed struggle. The entire country must mobilize to defeat this imperialist aggression.”
