Donald Trump has warned Nicolás Maduro he can “do things the easy way … or the hard way” as Venezuela’s authoritarian leader responded to the growing US pressure campaign by urging followers to prepare to defend “every inch” of the South American country.
Clad in woodland camouflage fatigues, Maduro told a rally in the capital, Caracas, it was their historic duty to fight foreign aggressors, just as the Venezuelan liberation hero Simón Bolívar did two centuries ago.
“We have to be capable of defending every inch of this blessed land from any sort of imperialist threat or aggression, wherever it comes from,” Maduro declared in his Tuesday address to “the revolutionary people of Caracas”.
“I swear before our Lord Jesus Christ, that I will give my all for the victory of Venezuela,” Maduro said, vowing to protect the skies, mountains and plains of his country.
Speaking on Air Force One as he flew to Florida, Trump declined to explain the precise purpose of his four-month campaign against Venezuela, although many suspect it is designed to overthrow Maduro, who is widely believed to have stolen last year’s presidential election.
Officially, the huge US military deployment in the Caribbean Sea is part of a crackdown on Latin American drug traffickers “flooding” the US with drugs. Washington has accused Maduro of leading one narco “cartel” – the “Cartel of the Suns”, which was this week designated a foreign terrorist organization – although many experts say the group does not actually exist.
“I’m not going to tell you what the goal is. You should probably know what the goal is,” Trump said of his crusade, indicating he “might” talk to Maduro.
“If we can save lives, if we can do things the easy way, that’s fine. And if we have to do it the hard way, that’s fine too,” the US president told reporters.
Trump’s future plans for South America’s sixth-largest country – and the nation with the world’s largest proven oil reserves – remain shrouded in mystery.
“Maduro and most of his cohorts view the US military threats as a bluff,” a source with regular contact with top Venezuela officials told the Wall Street Journal this week.
“Maduro believes that the only way the US can oust him is by sending troops to Caracas,” that person added.
Given Trump’s reluctance to send US troops into combat overseas, that looks highly unlikely. But many observers suspect that, after conducting more than 10 deadly airstrikes targeting supposed drug-smuggling boats in the Caribbean Sea, Trump’s next step will be US strikes on Venezuelan soil.
“I think that we’re going to start blowing things up. I think we have to do something because there’s too big a force there [in the Caribbean] to not do something,” said Douglas Farah, a national security consultant and Latin America expert who advised the US government on Venezuela during Trump’s first term.
Farah said his biggest fear was that – even if the US did launch some kind of attack, perhaps targeting a major Caribbean port out of which cocaine was smuggled – that would fail to topple Maduro, just as Trump failed to topple him in 2019.
“[If that happens] Maduro will feel empowered. He’ll say: ‘Yeah, I defeated the United States,’” Farah said. And any chance of the Venezuelan dictator leaving power “in some sort of orderly fashion will be gone again for another 10 years”.
