On Saturday morning, President Donald Trump declared on social media that “the airspace above and surrounding Venezuela” should be considered closed “in its entirety.”
The seemingly abrupt announcement followed a Friday report in The New York Times that Trump had spoken by phone with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro last week. Secretary of State Marco Rubio also joined the call.
The call came after months of U.S. efforts to ratchet up pressure on Maduro. The strikes on Venezuelan drug boats, which began on September 2, have continued as the military has expanded its presence in the region. Additionally, the State Department formally designated Venezuela’s Cartel de los Soles, or Cartel of the Suns, as a foreign terrorist organization last week.
A Sunday report in The Miami Herald shed some light on what was discussed during the call. According to “sources familiar with the exchange,” Trump demanded that Maduro leave the country right away. He “offered guaranteed evacuation for Maduro, his wife Cilia Flores, and their son” on the condition that he step down immediately.
The sources told the Herald that the sides were too far apart to reach an agreement.
It’s become increasingly clear that the Trump administration is gearing up for a more aggressive phase of operations against Cartel de los Soles, which Washington alleges is led by Maduro and other senior government officials.
The Herald noted that, in 2020, the Justice Department indicted Maduro and more than a dozen others, “calling the regime a narco-terrorist enterprise. … The U.S. has placed a $50 million bounty on Maduro —the largest reward ever offered for a sitting head of state — and $25 million for ruling-party strongman Diosdado Cabello.”
During a virtual address to service members on Thursday, Trump signaled that land operations against the drug cartels would begin “very soon.” He said, “You probably noticed that people aren’t wanting to be delivering by sea, and we’ll be starting to stop them by land also. The land is easier, but that’s going to start very soon.”
The sources described the call “as a last-ditch effort to avoid a direct confrontation” and cited three reasons for its failure.
First, Maduro asked for global amnesty for any crimes he and his group had committed, and that was rejected:Second, they asked to retain control of the armed forces — similar to what happened in Nicaragua in ’91 with Violeta Chamorro. In return, they would allow free elections. The arrangement resembled a “Cuban model” that left the Ortega brothers as the real power behind the scenes and ultimately helped pave their return to government. The administration rejected that proposal as well.The third sticking point was timing: Washington insisted Maduro resign immediately, and Caracas refused.The call — initially brokered by Brazil, Qatar, and Turkey — has not been repeated. After Trump’s announcement on Saturday that Venezuelan airspace should be considered “closed in its entirety,” the Maduro government attempted to place another call to Washington but received no response.
Fox News spoke with defense expert and former Venezuelan diplomat Vanessa Neumann on Sunday, who believes that military action on land is imminent. I’ve included most of her comments here, as they offer valuable context for understanding the situation:
The clearing of the airspace is an indication and a very clear public warning that missiles might be coming to take out command and control infrastructure or retaliatory infrastructure. This will not be like breaking a jar into a thousand pieces, this is where you can lift the concentration of power, and it’s easier to manage.The targets have been identified through covert operations over the last several years by people on the ground. So they’re well-mapped. This is a capture-or-kill scenario, but there’s a limit to how many people you can remove quickly.Maduro also doesn’t have that many options, and his military is very weak. You can’t go after 30 people simultaneously, who are spread all around, but certainly high on the list would be Maduro himself.Their material [military equipment] is extremely old, decayed, and has not been serviced.They’ve got junk from the Russians. The stuff they originally had from the Americans is decades old and has not been serviced.So, they have neither the personnel, foreign support, nor the material.Ahead of shuttering the airspace, the U.S. also officially designated the cartel allegedly linked with Venezuela’s government, the Cartel de los Soles, as a foreign terrorist organization.This cartel turned Venezuela’s main oil company into a narcotics trafficking money laundering operation, using the company’s access to international finance, until it was sanctioned.They were using Venezuelan military jets to bring in cocaine from Colombia, process it in Venezuela, and then move it into Central America and then into Europe.Jet pilots were making a lot of money off that, and they’ve tortured people. They target people, anybody who tells on them, they’re disappeared. They’re now one of the prime drug trafficking networks into the United States and Europe, and use their military positions, including their military-to-military relations, to grow and accelerate those movements.The Cartel de Los Soles is also a key collaborator and financier of Hezbollah and some of the drug money has been used to fund terrorist attacks that have killed American citizens, even in the Middle East.The decision is President Trump’s because when he says, ‘Go’, we go. And nobody knows when he’ll say that. He has mobilized so many assets down there now. But what President Trump is doing now is long overdue.The timing is right now. Because even Maduro’s biggest backers, Russia and Iran, are both on the back foot, and China will not go that far in backing Maduro as it has bigger and broader interests throughout the region.Maduro is also weakened because his partners are weakened and have their own issues to deal with. We also now have a concentration of power and deep repression within the country that’s quite unified, which means it’s easy to flip….It’s because of the brutality of the counter-intelligence that they do to their own military, and hundreds of soldiers are tortured. That said, the Venezuelan people have made it clear that they wanted Maduro out and fought democratically but lost.They voted in elections, protested peacefully, lobbied for sanctions, and lobbied for international support.
For some additional perspective:
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY