The Capture
The Capture
The Capture
US Special Forces entered Caracas on Saturday night and seized Nicolás Maduro at the door of a safe room inside a military base. Thirty-two Cuban military and intelligence personnel died in the operation. Maduro was flown to Brooklyn and placed in the Metropolitan Detention Center, where Sean Combs and Ghislaine Maxwell had both been held before him. He was due in Manhattan federal court at noon on Monday to face charges of narco-terrorism, conspiracy, and drug trafficking. His wife Cilia Flores was taken with him.
The operation was the first US military action against a nation in South America. The invasion of Panama in 1989 was the last comparable event and that was in Central America. The distinction matters because it did not matter. Washington seized a sitting head of state from his capital and removed him to face American justice and the legal arguments would follow the helicopters, not precede them.
Delcy Rodríguez became acting president. She is fifty-six years old and the daughter of a leftist guerrilla fighter. On Saturday she called the capture a colonial oil-grab and a kidnapping. On Sunday she invited Washington to work together on an agenda of cooperation. The pivot took less than twenty-four hours.
Trump made no secret of the prize. Venezuela holds 303 billion barrels of crude reserves, the largest in the world. Production averages 1.1 million barrels per day, a third of its peak in the 1970s. The decline came from mismanagement, underinvestment, and American sanctions. Trump said US oil companies would return. He said the United States was taking back what Venezuela had stolen. He said Washington was in charge.
The economics are less simple than the rhetoric. Doubling output to two million barrels would cost 115 billion dollars by Rystad's estimate — three times what Exxon and Chevron spent last year combined. The oil is heavy and sits in the Orinoco Belt. Extracting it requires drilling many short-lived wells. The crude must be diluted before it can move through pipelines. Even then it sells at a discount of ten to fifteen percent because it is difficult to refine.
Trump wants American companies to drill in Venezuela and he wants American companies to drill more at home. The two ambitions pull against each other. More Venezuelan barrels without more demand means lower prices and lower prices hurt American shale producers who already face costs higher than current benchmarks. The gain abroad becomes a loss at home.
Inside Venezuela the streets were quiet. Caracas residents stocked up on food and medicine and stayed indoors. María Corina Machado, the opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner, told her supporters to be ready but did not call them into the streets. Trump dismissed her in his Saturday press conference and said she lacked support. He did not mention elections or the release of political prisoners. He talked about oil.
The government that remains in Caracas is the same government minus one man. Interior minister Diosdado Cabello controls the colectivos, the motorcycle paramilitaries who enforce order in the streets. Defence minister Vladimir Padrino controls the armed forces. Both are under American sanctions. Both profit from the illicit economy that flourishes under isolation. Rodríguez must satisfy Trump without alienating the men who hold the guns. If she complies too fully she risks being called a traitor. If she resists she has been promised a fate worse than Maduro's.
Venezuelan bonds surged on Monday. Oil prices edged higher. Defence stocks rose in Asia and Europe. The UN Security Council prepared to debate the legality of an action whose consequences had already begun to unfold.
The year is six days old. The United States has seized a foreign head of state, threatened further strikes, and claimed dominion over another nation's natural resources. The helicopters landed and lifted off and the world that existed before Saturday does not exist anymore.