President Donald Trump said the U.S. “successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela” early Saturday and that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife were “captured and flown out of the Country.”
The stunning announcement came a few hours after explosions rocked the Venezuelan capital Caracas.
Read more: Details of the operation emerge
President Donald Trump said the U.S. “successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela” and said Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife were “captured and flown out of the Country.”
The announcement on Trump’s social media platform came shortly before 4:30 a.m. Saturday a few hours after several explosions were heard in Venezuela’s capital city of Caracas, witnesses said, and photos and videos showed plumes of smoke and a large fireball in the night sky.
Trump said the operation was carried out in conjunction with U.S. law enforcement and said he would hold a news conference at 11 a.m. from Mar-a-Lago.
In a brief phone interview with The New York Times, President Trump celebrated the success of the mission to capture Maduro.
Trump implies he could go after Colombia’s president next, says Cuba ‘looks like it’s ready to fall’
President Donald Trump, who has said the operation against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro should serve as a warning to the rest of the world, doubled down on his threats, implying that Colombian President Gustavo Petro could face U.S. action soon.
“Colombia is very sick too, run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States. And he’s not going to be doing it very long. Let me tell you,” Trump claimed while speaking to reporters on Sunday.
Earlier on Sunday, Petro released a statement on the operation and Trump’s previous comments about him, saying, “I deeply reject Trump speaking without knowing; my name does not appear in the judicial files on drug trafficking over 50 years, neither from before nor from the present.”
“Stop slandering me, Mr. Trump. That’s not how you threaten a Latin American president who emerged from the armed struggle and then from the people’s struggle for Peace in Colombia,” he added.
Reporters asked Trump if the U.S. has a similar plan to deal with Cuba as they did for Venezuela, to which he said that Cuba only survived because of Venezuela.
“Now, they won’t have that money coming in. They won’t have the income coming in. You know, a lot of Cubans were killed yesterday, you know that a lot of Cubans were killed,” Trump said.
Trump said those Cubans were trying to protect Maduro.
Later, the president said that Cuba is “ready to fall.”
“Cuba looks like it’s ready to fall. I don’t know how they — if they’re going to hold out, but Cuba now has no income,” Trump said. “They got all of their income from Venezuela, from the Venezuelan oil. They’re not getting any of it. And Cuba literally is ready to fall. And you have a lot of great Cuban Americans that are going to be very happy about this.”
Asked again if the U.S. is considering action in Cuba, the president said he doesn’t think there needs to be any because “it looks like it’s going down.”
