Celebrating one month since Maduro’s removal and the hope for a free Venezuela.
Well, it’s officially been one month since Operation Absolute Resolve successfully removed narco-terrorist Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela and put him in a Brooklyn detention center. In some ways, it feels like yesterday, and in others, it feels like a year. I was debating even commemorating the occasion, but I saw the joy of thousands of Venezuelans doing it, and I wanted to share their excitement with all of you.
Plus, I ran across an article earlier with a headline that said something like « One month later, Donald Trump still has no plan for Venezuela. »
I clicked on it, and I realized instantly that it was just anti-Trump propaganda, and though I wasn’t overly familiar with the website where I found it, our managing editor, Chris Queen, let me know that it is definitely a « Never Trump » kind of place, so I’m not even going to link it here.
Propaganda is exactly what it was. First of all, the headline was a lie. Trump has no plan? Do you think he just woke up one day and was like, « Hey, Pete Hegseth, let’s go drop down in Venezuela and take out Maduro! » While the specifics of how it would happen weren’t always there, getting Maduro out of Venezuela has been in the works for a long, long time. Heck, I think Marco Rubio has been planning it himself for years, so I have no doubt that it’s been in the works since at least January 20, 2025.
You don’t embark on that sort of mission with no plan for the aftermath — unless maybe you’re Barack Obama in Libya or Joe Biden in Afghanistan —and Rubio, who is largely in charge, had a plan all along. I have no doubt. He’s also laid it out for us multiple times and did so extensively when he testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations last week. There are three phases:
Phase One: Stability. No one knew how the Venezuelan people would respond to this.
« In the aftermath of the removal of Maduro, the concern was what happens in Venezuela. Is there civil war? Do the different factions start going at each other? Are a million people crossing the border into Colombia? All of that has been avoided. And one of the primary ways that it has been avoided is the ability to establish direct, honest – respectful but very direct and honest conversations with the people who today control the elements of that nation, meaning the law enforcement, the government apparatus, etc. » Rubio said.
Phase Two: Recovery. That nation’s oil is its lifeline. The regime ran it into the ground. The only way to Make Venezuela Great Again is to take steps to fix it.
« Their natural resources are going to allow Venezuela to be stable and prosperous moving forward. And so we created the – what we hope to do is transition to a mechanism that allows that to be sold in a normal way, a normal oil industry – not one dominated by cronies, not one dominated by graft and corruption », he said.
Phase Three: Democracy.
« .we want to reach a phase of transition where we are left with a friendly, stable, prosperous Venezuela, and democratic, in which all elements of society are represented. By the way, you can have elections. You can have elections all day. But if the opposition has no access to the media, if opposition candidates are routinely dismissed and unable to be on the ballot because of the government, those aren’t free and fair elections.
