\u201cIt sounded like an earthquake, like the sky was falling down,\u201d a journalist in Caracas said of the US strikes.<\/b>
\nAmy Goodman and Juan Gonz\u00e1lez host breaking news coverage on U.S. forces attacking Venezuela and seizing Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro. We speak to Venezuelan reporter Andre\u00edna Ch\u00e1vez in Caracas, as well as professors Miguel Tinker Salas and Alejandro Velasco.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I\u2019m Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonz\u00e1lez. We\u2019re breaking in with this news.
The United States has seized Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro after U.S. forces launched what President Trump called a \u201clarge-scale attack.\u201d Maduro and his wife were flown out of Venezuela, expected to be brought to New York. They\u2019ve been criminally charged.
Just before we recorded this, President Trump spoke, saying, \u201cWe are going to run the country until such time [as] we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.\u201d In an interview with Fox, Trump said the U.S. will be \u201cvery strongly involved\u201d in the Venezuelan oil industry. Venezuela has the world\u2019s largest oil reserves.
It\u2019s unclear how many Venezuelans were killed in the operation, which was carried out with the help of the CIA and U.S. Delta Force soldiers.
The U.S. attack has been widely criticized around the world. The Brazilian President Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva wrote on X, \u201cThe bombings on Venezuelan territory and the capture of its president [cross] an unacceptable line. These acts represent a grave affront to Venezuela\u2019s sovereignty and yet another extremely dangerous precedent for the entire international community,\u201d unquote.
Mexico\u2019s Ministry of Foreign Affairs condemned the attack as a \u201cclear violation of Article 2 of the Charter of the United Nations.\u201d
Congressmember Greg Casar, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, wrote, \u201cTrump has no right to take us to war with Venezuela. This is reckless and illegal. Congress should vote immediately on a War Powers Resolution to stop him,\u201d Congressmember Casar said.
We\u2019re joined right now by Miguel Tinker Salas, emeritus professor of history at Pomona College in Claremont. He is the author of The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela, as well as Venezuela: What Everyone Needs to Know. We\u2019re also joined on the ground in Caracas by Andre\u00edna Ch\u00e1vez, reporter there. Her piece earlier this week for Drop Site News, \u201c\u2019War of the entire people.\u2019\u201d
But before we go to our guests, Juan Gonz\u00e1lez, you were there in Panama. It was 35 [sic] years ago today that Manuel Noriega was seized by U.S. forces and brought to the United States. And it\u2019s a month after President Trump pardoned a man who was convicted in this country of narcotrafficking, the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hern\u00e1ndez. Your thoughts?
JUAN GONZ\u00c1LEZ: Yes, Amy. Well, this is an extraordinary moment in what is clearly, by international law, a completely illegal military action by the United States. But in listening to the press conference that President Trump and his top aides held just a little while ago, a few things stand out to me.
One is the size of this attack. And we didn\u2019t really get a sense of that until General Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had an opportunity to talk, and he mentioned over 150 of the most advanced military aircraft of the United States participated in this, in this \u2014 basically, an Air Force invasion of Venezuela. And in addition to the Delta Force and CIA operatives that were on the ground, a blackout of Caracas that the United States triggered in order to be able to operate in complete darkness, and the admission by both the general and President Trump that there was a lot of opposition of Venezuelan forces on the ground to the U.S. attack. That\u2019s one thing, the size of this attack.
The second, as you mentioned, is Trump\u2019s claim that the United States is going to run Venezuela from now on, and that this was not just a question of extracting Maduro for supposed, alleged drug crimes, but also a regime change operation, that the United States is going to directly run Venezuela.
And I thought the most interesting thing of all was Trump\u2019s claim late in the press conference that Marco Rubio has been in conversations with the current vice president, Delcy Rodr\u00edguez, and that, according to Trump, she told Rubio, quote, \u201cWe\u2019ll do whatever you need,\u201d as if implying that Delcy Rodr\u00edguez, the vice president and, clearly, the successor to Maduro, was in some way or other agreeing to this U.S. intervention, or at least acknowledging it.
So, I think that those are the three things that stuck out to me. We\u2019ll have to see in the next few hours and days to what degree some of these claims of Trump are actually factual.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, these developments of the last hours have been stunning. We want to go first to Caracas to Andre\u00edna Ch\u00e1vez. If you can talk about how people are responding? What we have seen, the images of different cities of Venezuela being bombed, attacked, a \u201clarge-scale attack,\u201d as President Trump put it, by the United States.
ANDRE\u00cdNA CH\u00c1VEZ: Yes. First of all, I just want to say that President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro, he wasn\u2019t captured. He wasn\u2019t seized. He wasn\u2019t arrested. He was kidnapped. This is a kidnapping. The United States has just kidnapped a constitutionally elected president. So, this is something that it goes beyond our wildest imagination. This is something terribly against international law, against all principles of sovereignty, of self-determination of the people. So, this is something that we need to clarify.
Second, these comments that President Trump and his government are saying, that they are negotiating with the government of Venezuela, we should not believe those claims. None of that has been confirmed. Vice President Delcy Rodr\u00edguez, she has very clearly stated that the message right now is to resist. The message right now is to go to the streets, is to fight against this imperialist aggression, is to denounce this imperialist aggression. And there is no such thing, such transition or vacuum power happening right now. Right now we are fighting against this aggression. So, we need to treat these claims by the Trump administration mostly as psychological operations to try to debilitate even more the Venezuelan government, that is still standing, that is still here. We need to remember that we still have a Venezuelan government, even though President Maduro has just been kidnapped.
Second, as you said, we just experienced a quite horrifying night. We woke up around 2 a.m. to the sound of extremely loud explosions. Of course, at the moment, we didn\u2019t know what was happening. Everybody knew it was something terrible, because it sounded like an earthquake, like the sky was falling down. I could hear the planes. I couldn\u2019t see them, but I could hear the planes. I live very close to Miraflores, so I imagine that is why I could actually hear all this military operation happening around me. And we immediately got confirmation from the Venezuelan government that at least seven points of Caracas had been attacked, at least seven places, between civilian places and military complex. There were also attacks in places like Estado La Guaira, Aragua, Miranda. All these places were attacked.
After that, we got even more confirmation from the defense minister, Vladimir Padrino L\u00f3pez, who said that, indeed, we were under an imperialist military aggression from the United States, and that the call right now for the Venezuelan people was to just remain calm, but also to remember that we need to fight back against this regime change, because at the end of the day, we need to remember that this is regime change. We have to remember that the U.S. has been peddling a lie about Venezuela, about the Venezuelan government being a drug cartel, about the Venezuelan government being involved in drug trafficking, using evidence that is not credible at all, using \u2014 not even using evidence. At the most, they\u2019re just using a court in New York to say that President Maduro is involved in narcotrafficking, without actually presenting evidence that he is doing that. There is actually no credible evidence that there is a Venezuelan state that is involved in a high-structured drug-trafficking corporation. That is not true. They have been using that lie, first to kill people in small vessels in the Caribbean, and now to bomb Venezuela and to kidnap the Venezuelan president.
So, right now we\u2019re facing a regime change. And I think that is something \u2014 that is the first thing that people need to have in mind, that Venezuela is being bombed. We are facing a regime change. President Trump just said it. He said that right now he\u2019s going to run Venezuela. The United States has decided that they are going to control Venezuela from now on. They\u2019re going to control Venezuela\u2019s oil business from now on. So, if this was actually something about capturing a supposed narcotrafficking person, then why wouldn\u2019t that just mean that the Venezuelan government continues? We have a vice president who constitutionally is mandated to now take power. But no, he\u2019s not saying that. He is saying that anybody who remains loyal to the Bolivarian process is going to go down. He is saying that there might be more military operations. And he\u2019s saying that now the United States is going to assign people to control the Venezuelan government, and the first thing that he\u2019s going to do is take power over the Venezuelan oil industry. And remember that he says the Venezuelan oil industry wasn\u2019t working right, that he was going to make it finally work right. We need to remember that the Venezuelan oil industry has been under U.S. sanctions for almost a decade.
AMY GOODMAN: Let us bring professor Tinker Salas into this conversation. You were born in Venezuela. Your books are about Venezuela. You woke up to this news, as well. You\u2019re based right now in California. If you can respond to these points, and especially what Andre\u00edna is talking about? The U.S. will now run Venezuela, until such time as there is a just transition. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, calling \u2014 saying that Maduro was given plenty of chances to step down, but, in fact, he\u2019s a wild man, he said.
MIGUEL TINKER SALAS: Yeah, the spectacle of that press conference is amazing. It looked like something out of a Hollywood movie set, a B movie set. This is the Pirates of the Caribbean. This is Marco Rubio now the viceroy of Venezuela. This is an effort to run Venezuela with 15,000 troops. That\u2019s utterly impossible. There is a government in Venezuela. There\u2019s a people in Venezuela. This was a kidnapping of a government in Venezuela. The reality is that we\u2019ve seen this before. We\u2019ve seen this in Panama. We\u2019ve seen this throughout the history of Latin America, whether Nicaragua, whether Haiti, whether Mexico. The reality here is, very clearly, Trump made this about oil. He says that what they do want to run is not the country; what they do want to run is the oil fields. And that\u2019s the central part of this discussion. I think we need to keep an eye on that ball.
And I think the other part of this is it\u2019s clearly a message internally for U.S. politics with a view towards midterm elections. The U.S. can impose its will. We saw that clearly in the national security strategy documents that were revealed a couple of weeks ago, where the U.S. will control the Western Hemisphere. The U.S. will impose its will. The message is clear for Mexico. The message is clear for Brazil. The message is clear for everywhere in Latin America. What we\u2019ve seen here is an effort at regime change.
And we heard this before. We heard this in Iraq, when Bush said that the oil production in Iraq will pay for the intervention. Well, that didn\u2019t happen in Iraq, and it won\u2019t happen in Venezuela. This is about regime change. This is about establishing U.S. dominance. This is about the U.S. regaining control and excluding China and Russia. And imagine what Putin must be thinking, or Xi Jinping, about zones of influence. Well, if the U.S. can exert its role in the Caribbean, well, why shouldn\u2019t Russia exert its role in Ukraine? Why shouldn\u2019t China exert its role in Taiwan? The dimensions of this are incredible. And I think this is not \u2014 this is an unreal act at a time where the countries of Latin America now will be threatened.
JUAN GONZ\u00c1LEZ: And, Miguel, I wanted to ask you \u2014 repeatedly during the press conference, President Trump talked about \u2014 and he has said so now for weeks \u2014 that Venezuela stole our oil, stole the U.S. oil, and that the United States is getting it back. Could you talk about some of this history? Because this is a complete fabrication of what \u2014 the historical record. The main nationalization of Venezuelan oil occurred not under Maduro, not under Ch\u00e1vez or any of the Bolivarian Revolution, socialist revolution, but occurred in 1976 under Carlos Andr\u00e9s P\u00e9rez. And It was only Ch\u00e1vez that then further moved forward on the nationalization. Can you talk about that history and how this is a complete misrepresentation of what has happened with Venezuela?
MIGUEL TINKER SALAS: Venezuela knew of the existence of oil before the Europeans or the Americans arrived. The very first oil industry was 1870s in La Alquitrana in the state of T\u00e1chira, where Venezuelans ran their own oil operation. They exploited it. They developed it. Having no infrastructure, they really couldn\u2019t promote it. And the lack of internal combustion engines meant that they couldn\u2019t really develop it. Oil was discovered profusely in 1922 in Cabimas in La Rosa. It was run by, at that time, British and Dutch companies.
Venezuela eventually nationalized its oil industry in 1975, taking effect in 1976. It was controlled by Venezuelans. It was run by Venezuelans. And it was fully compensated. The American companies and the Dutch companies and the American companies and the British were fully compensated, much above and beyond what they had already extracted out of the ground, in huge amounts of profits for ExxonMobil, for example. Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, Creole Petroleum was its most profitable subsidiary. It maintained that entire operation of Standard Oil, which is today ExxonMobil.
What Ch\u00e1vez did in 2006 and \u201907 was to close the back door that was left open in Article 5 of the reform for nationalization in 1976, which had allowed the existing oil companies to proceed in Venezuela as partners and operating with PDVSA. He imposed on those companies joint ventures, but they had to include PDVSA, which is the Venezuelan Petroleum Corporation.
So, Trump is utterly wrong, utterly lying when he says that the oil companies were stolen from the Americans. They were fully compensated. They had received compensation over and over and over, in addition to what they had extracted in profits out of Venezuela previously. But we go back to the old Juan Pablo P\u00e9rez Alfonzo, the minister of the petroleum in Venezuela in the 1960s, that said oil is the excrement of the devil. And once again, Trump has proven that.
AMY GOODMAN: Andre\u00edna, I can see that you\u2019ve been nodding your head from Caracas. If you can talk about what President Trump said, that the oil companies will be funding this, and also the Nobel Peace laureate, Machado, who is outside the country right now, what this means, where she is \u2014 they said they are not bringing her back right now \u2014 and that Marco Rubio, Andre\u00edna, has been talking with Delcy Rodr\u00edguez, as you pointed out?
ANDRE\u00cdNA CH\u00c1VEZ: Yes. So, there\u2019s this claim that Marco Rubio has been talking with Delcy Rodr\u00edguez. And as I said before, we don\u2019t have actual confirmation that that is happening. They have also claimed that they were negotiating with President Maduro. They have made a lot of claims, and we know now those are not true. If there was any kind of negotiation with President Maduro, then they wouldn\u2019t have kidnapped him in the middle of the night, while bombing the entire country. So, we know that the United States government lies, either because they want to create this psychological operation against the people or because it is convenient for them to lie so people don\u2019t actually figure out what it is that they\u2019re doing. So, there\u2019s no confirmation that there\u2019s any kind of negotiation happening, either with Delcy Rodr\u00edguez, who\u2019s the vice president, or other key figures in the government.
All we know right now is that the government figures that are still standing, they are calling the people to resist and to go to the streets and to fight back against this regime change operation. And, of course, there are also \u2014 I just came from near Miraflores. I was in a protest. People were there taking turns to speak on the microphone. And every single person was saying, \u201cWe are not giving up. We\u2019re not giving up. We are going to demand that President Maduro is brought back. We\u2019re going to demand that we have proof of life of President Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.\u201d So, people are not just waiting to see what plans the United States has for Venezuela. People are actually fighting against and denouncing very publicly in the streets, saying, \u201cThis is not acceptable. We do not accept this,\u201d because we elected a president, and the United States doesn\u2019t have any kind of authority to decide that Maduro has to be kidnapped and that now they\u2019re going to appoint some kind of junta, like the dictatorships from the past, to now run Venezuela.
When it comes to Mar\u00eda Corina Machado, we don\u2019t really \u2014 they have been very careful not to mention her. And I think that that proves that, in a lot of ways, they were actually sort of inflating her figure, trying to \u2014 trying to pose her as this kind of natural opposition figure who needed to take power in Venezuela eventually. But I don\u2019t think they were actually that committed to Mar\u00eda Corina Machado, because, ultimately, they don\u2019t care. They just care about whoever, even if it\u2019s just a bunch of Venezuelans living in the United States running the country. They don\u2019t care if it\u2019s Mar\u00eda Corina Machado. They just care that it\u2019s someone that is friendly to U.S. interests. So, Mar\u00eda Corina Machado might as well not be that involved in the whole equation, or she might be in the future. As we all know, Mar\u00eda Corina Machado has been very vocal about wanting the United States to invade Venezuela, to attack Venezuela. She has been very vocal about being available to run Venezuela herself and treat Venezuela as some kind of \u2014 and she said it herself. She has \u2014 this is her actual words. She said that Venezuela is a sexy woman, and she\u2019s ready to just give this sexy woman to the world, meaning that she\u2019s willing to open up Venezuela\u2019s oil industry, oil reserves, all our natural resources to U.S. corporations.
And as Miguel was saying, it is indeed completely false that the Venezuelan government, the Hugo \u2014 the Ch\u00e1vez government back then, ever took away these sites from U.S. corporations. That\u2019s not true. They were compensated. There were some corporations, like ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, who simply decided that they didn\u2019t want to respect Venezuelan sovereignty. They didn\u2019t want to respect the fact that the Venezuelan state wanted to have a majority control in our own oil reserves, in our oil joint ventures. So they decided to leave Venezuela. They abandoned their oil projects. And now they are trying to fabricate this narrative that somehow that means that they were stolen. And they were not. These are just corporations that are greedy, that they were used to exploit in Venezuela whatever they wanted, without actually giving anything back to the Venezuelan people, and now they want to do the same. And that\u2019s what, before, Trump just said.
JUAN GONZ\u00c1LEZ: Andre\u00edna, I wanted to ask you in terms of what you have heard there in Venezuela from the other key leaders of the country around Maduro, specifically Vladimir Padrino L\u00f3pez, the defense minister; Jorge Rodr\u00edguez, the president of the National Assembly and the brother of the vice president, Delcy Rodr\u00edguez; and also Diosdado Cabello, the interior minister. These are considered the key figures around Maduro. Have any of them made announcements, other than Delcy Rodr\u00edguez, the interview she did on a radio program by phone, where she called for people to resist?
ANDRE\u00cdNA CH\u00c1VEZ: Yes, so, Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino L\u00f3pez, he was the first one to actually give a live statement, a video statement, in which he told the people that indeed we were being attacked by the U.S. He said that not only military sites were being strike, but also civilian population. He said that the army was ready to fight back, that they were mobilized, that they were outside, that they were taking charge, that they were monitoring the entire country. He called people to remain calm, to not believe any of these wild claims and psychological operations that are going around. And, of course, he advised that we need to stick to the truth. We need to stick to the source, which is the Venezuelan government. Right now there are a lot of mainstream media outlets and just people on social media claiming a lot of things, publishing photos that are edited, that are AI. So we need to try to focus on who are the people who actually can give us information, and those are the Venezuelan government.
Besides Padrino L\u00f3pez, we also have Diosdado Cabello. He was on the streets. From the moment this began, this started happening, Diosdado Cabello and his group of people, they went to the streets. And he gave a declaration from the streets, telling to people that, indeed, we just were victims of this horrifying attack. And he asked people to trust the Venezuelan government. He said, \u201cTrust your authorities. Trust your leaders when weighing this. We\u2019re handling the situation. We know this is terrible. We know this is bad. But we\u2019re going to fight back.\u201d
So, these key figures in the Venezuelan government, they have stated very clearly that they are not giving up. There is no chance that they are actually negotiating anything with the U.S. government. They are on the streets. They are fighting back. And they\u2019re advising people to do the same.
AMY GOODMAN: Juan, I\u2019m wondering if you can talk about \u2014 this was not limited to a discussion about Venezuela, Trump\u2019s news conference. They also talked about Cuba. If you could summarize, as well as Miguel Tinker Salas, about what exactly President Trump is saying what his designs are?
MIGUEL TINKER SALAS: Well, I think it\u2019s very clear. We saw that in the national security document earlier on. We saw it clearly in the Western Hemisphere approach. That is, the U.S. wants to reimpose itself. It talked about a new Monroe Doctrine. To me, it\u2019s more like the \u201cbig stick\u201d diplomacy, which is the U.S. will replace whatever government it wants to in the region, whenever it wants to. The message is clear to any progressive forces in Latin America. The message is clear to Brazil. The message is clear to Mexico and Claudia Sheinbaum. The message is clear to Cuba, that it will be in the crosshairs next. This is about reimposing U.S. military and economic dominance in Latin America, starting in the Caribbean, starting with Venezuela. But the message is very clearly sent to Cuba, to Mexico, to Nicaragua, to any progressive government.
And it\u2019s also a message of support for the conservative, right-wing governments of the region. It\u2019s a support for the president of Chile. It\u2019s support for the president of Ecuador, for El Salvador, for the president of Argentina, when Trump talked about that presidents that he has endorsed have won. So, what he\u2019s trying to create is a new \u201ccoalition of the willing,\u201d or in this case, of the countries of right in Latin America, that have gone to the right, and impose the U.S. will, but underscoring again national hegemony of the internal \u2014 international hegemony of the U.S., economic supremacy, being able to extract all its minerals from the region, talking about oil. So, dominating oil is central to what Trump is talking about. And he very clearly, as you pointed out, threw Mar\u00eda Corina Machado under the bus, saying she doesn\u2019t have the support, she will not govern. They will govern. So, she was being manipulated the same way that Venezuela is being manipulated right now.
JUAN GONZ\u00c1LEZ: Yeah, and, Amy, I think one quote from Trump\u2019s press conference summed it up for me pretty concisely. He said at one point \u2014 and I\u2019m quoting his words \u2014 \u201cAmerican dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be doubted again.\u201d This reminds me of the infamous George Bush proclamation, \u201cMission accomplished,\u201d in the invasion of Iraq. It\u2019s very easy for the U.S. military to invade or intervene in a country. It is a lot harder to actually force people to do \u2014 masses of people, millions of people, to do what you want. And so, this is not a \u2014 this is not the climax of the long-running struggle between oppression and resistance in Latin America. This is actually just another chapter in what will be a long-running saga that we\u2019re going to \u2014 that\u2019s going to unfold over the next months and possibly years.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Juan, before we wrap up, you were in Panama as a reporter 35 [sic] years ago. It was 35 [sic] years ago today, January 3rd, that the U.S. took Manuel Noriega forcibly from his country and brought him to the United States. If you can talk about those comparisons? And then, again, we cannot forget it\u2019s been a month since President Trump pardoned a man who was convicted of narcotrafficking, the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hern\u00e1ndez, sentenced to 45 years in prison. His brother, Tony Hern\u00e1ndez, is already serving a life sentence in the United States.
JUAN GONZ\u00c1LEZ: Yeah, well, I think it\u2019s clear. I remember spending both Christmas and New Year\u2019s of 19 \u2014 of that period, 1990, in Panama and watching the U.S. invasion. But there was a difference there, in that the U.S. was already in Panama. It had military bases in the Panama Canal Zone. So, the invasion was really \u2014 was a lot easier for the United States to accomplish then. Here, we\u2019ve seen the buildup now for months of military forces in the Caribbean and all of the attacks on boats, and the blockades before, and the ordering of all aircraft not to fly into Venezuela. So this was a much bigger buildup. Venezuela is a far larger country. The people of Venezuela are much more politically conscious and organized than were the people of Panama. And so, as I said earlier, this is not going to be a repetition of the Panama invasion, that it ends pretty quickly. We\u2019re going to see a long, drawn-out struggle in Venezuela. And the rest of Latin America, in one way or another, will have to become involved and take sides in this, in these actions, for or against the actions of the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank everyone for spending this time. And a correction: It was 36 years ago today that Manuel Noriega was taken by the United States from Panama to the United States. I want to thank all our guests for being with us: Miguel Tinker Salas, emeritus professor of history at Pomona College in Claremont, California, author of The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela and Venezuela: What Everyone Needs to Know, and from the streets of \u2014 or, in Caracas, just from the streets of Caracas, Venezuela, Andre\u00edna Ch\u00e1vez, reporter who just came from the streets, who just recently wrote a piece for Drop Site News.
And right before we go, I believe we\u2019ve just been joined by Alejandro Velasco, who is an associate professor at NYU, historian of modern Latin America, former executive director of NACLA Report on the Americas and author of Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela. He was born and raised in Venezuela. Juan and I would like to ask you \u2014 and welcome you, Alejandro Velasco, to this conversation \u2014 your response to this news that has developed over these last hours, through the night, the U.S. bombing of Venezuela and then the dragging of the Venezuelan president, Maduro, and his wife from their beds, and now, as we speak, apparently, according to President Trump and those around him, is being taken to New York to be brought up on narcotrafficking charges. Your thoughts as we wrap up this discussion?
ALEJANDRO VELASCO: I mean, there are so many strands to this that are shocking. And first, of course, it was just waking me up at 2:30 in the morning with frantic messages from family and friends about what\u2019s going on, then trying throughout the morning to piece together whether this was a boots-on-the-ground, large-scale invasion or something else, then finally realizing that there was a snatch-and-go operation, and then asking the question: Well, what are the larger intents of the Trump administration, if it\u2019s not to actually effect regime change, leaving the entire apparatus of the Chavista-Madurista government in place? And then, of course, the Trump press conference, which basically just highlighted the extent to which the primary interest here is oil and Venezuela\u2019s resources. But then also Marco Rubio coming in and saying, \u201cNo, no, no. It\u2019s not about that. It\u2019s about legality and, you know, indictments,\u201d right? And so, you know, right now my primary reaction is anxiety and stress and concern about the next few days and hours and what it\u2019s going to mean.
I will say one quick thing, which is that, you know, if somebody is, presumably, very unhappy right now, at least after the Trump press conference, it\u2019s Mar\u00eda Corina Machado, the Nobel Prize winner, who Trump seems to have basically just thrown under the bus and said, like, \u201cNo, we\u2019re willing to work with the structure that\u2019s in power right now, as long as they play ball. And Mar\u00eda Corina Machado doesn\u2019t really have the respect of the Venezuelan\u201d \u2014 you know, I think he probably meant the Venezuelan state. And so, you know, that is a big question: What\u2019s going to happen to that hard-line Venezuelan opposition?
AMY GOODMAN: Alejandro, what are you going to be looking for right now, as people across the world, world leaders \u2014 we just read comments, for example, from Brazil, from Mexico \u2014 are condemning this move? What is most important, do you feel, right now?
ALEJANDRO VELASCO: Right, two things. The first one is: What\u2019s happening with the rest of the Venezuelan government and its high officials? Are they, in fact, in place? Are they speaking, negotiating back channel with the Trump administration to stay in place, to safeguard some kind of transition? Or is the next move on the part of the Trump administration to pressure them, as well, to leave the country and to cede path to something else? So, that\u2019s on the one thing \u2014 on the one hand.
On the other hand, the big question is: What\u2019s the U.S. government \u2014 the U.S. Congress going to do? This was such an explicitly anti-constitutional, illegal operation that they\u2019re masquerading as a legal, you know, process, law enforcement, but it\u2019s clearly a military operation, for which there was no authority. And so, those are the two major things. Is Congress going to respond? And how is the Venezuelan \u2014 what remains of the Venezuelan government going to respond?
AMY GOODMAN: Well, thank you so much for being with us at the end of this conversation, Alejandro Velasco, associate professor of NYU, historian of modern Latin America, and former executive editor of NACLA Report on the Americas, author of the book Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela. This is Democracy Now! Tune in on Monday for our regular broadcast on internet, on TV, on radio, on social media. I\u2019m Amy Goodman, with Juan Gonz\u00e1lez, with this breaking news.<\/p>\n