![\"Smoke](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/1767457399_646_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nCARACAS, Venezuela\u00a0\u2014\u00a0The United States captured Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro and flew him out of the country in an extraordinary nighttime operation that was accompanied by a flurry of strikes following months of escalating Trump administration pressure on the oil-rich South American nation.<\/p>\n
The U.S. is now deciding next steps for Venezuela, President Donald Trump said Saturday on Fox News, adding, \u201cWe\u2019ll be involved in it very much.\u201d<\/p>\n
The legal authority for the attack was not immediately clear. The stunning American military action, which plucked a nation\u2019s sitting leader from office, echoed the U.S. invasion of Panama that led to the surrender and seizure of its leader, Manuel Antonio Noriega, in 1990 \u2014 exactly 36 years ago Saturday.<\/p>\n
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, would face charges after an indictment in New York. Bondi vowed in a social media post that the couple would \u201csoon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Maduro and other Venezuelan officials were indicted in 2020 on \u201cnarco-terrorism\u201d conspiracy charges. The Justice Department released a new indictment Saturday of Maduro and his wife for alleged role in narco-terrorism conspiracy.<\/p>\n
Trump said the couple were aboard the U.S. warship Iwo Jima and headed to New York, where they will face prosecution.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Smoke rises from the La Carlota military base after several detonations in Caracas, Venezuela, before sunrise Saturday.<\/p>\n
(Andrea Hernandez Briceno \/ For The Times)<\/p>\n
Venezuelan ruling party leader Nahum Fern\u00e1ndez told The Associated Press that Maduro and Flores were at their home within the Ft. Tiuna military installation when they were captured.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s where they bombed,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd, there, they carried out what we could call a kidnapping of the president and the first lady of the country.\u201d<\/p>\n
Early Saturday, multiple explosions rang out and low-flying aircraft swept through the Venezuelan capital. Maduro\u2019s government accused the United States of attacking civilian and military installations, calling it an \u201cimperialist attack\u201d and urging citizens to take to the streets.<\/p>\n
With the Venezuelan leader\u2019s whereabouts not known, the vice president, Delcy Rodr\u00edguez, would take power under Venezuelan law. There was no confirmation that had happened, though she did issue a statement after the strike, demanding proof of life for Maduro and his wife.<\/p>\n
Maduro, Trump said, \u201chas been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country. This operation was done in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement.\u201d He set a news conference for Saturday morning.<\/p>\n
The attack itself lasted less than 30 minutes and the explosions \u2014 at least seven blasts \u2014 sent people rushing into the streets, while others took to social media to report what they\u2019d seen and heard.<\/p>\n
Some Venezuelan civilians and members of the military were killed, said Rodr\u00edguez, the vice president, without giving a number. Trump said some U.S. forces were injured in the strikes but that he believed \u201cwe had nobody killed.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was not known if more actions lie ahead, though Trump said in his post that the strikes were carried out \u201csuccessfully.\u201d<\/p>\n
The White House did not immediately respond to queries on where Maduro and his wife were being flown to.<\/p>\n
Maduro last appeared on state television Friday while meeting with a delegation of Chinese officials in Caracas.<\/p>\n
The strike followed a months-long Trump administration pressure campaign on the Venezuelan leader, including a major buildup of American forces in the waters off South America and attacks on boats in the eastern Pacific and Caribbean accused of carrying drugs. Last week, the CIA was behind a drone strike at a docking area believed to have been used by Venezuelan drug cartels \u2014 the first known direct operation on Venezuelan soil since the U.S. began strikes in September.<\/p>\n
As of Friday, the number of known boat strikes was 35 and the number of people killed at least 115, according to the Trump administration. Trump said that the U.S. is engaged in an \u201carmed conflict\u201d with drug cartels and has justified the boat strikes as a necessary to stem the flow of drugs into the U.S.<\/p>\n
Maduro has decried the U.S. military operations as a thinly veiled effort to oust him from power.<\/p>\n
Some streets in Caracas fill up<\/p>\n
Venezuela\u2019s government responded to the attack with a call to action: \u201cPeople to the streets!\u201d<\/p>\n
Armed people and uniformed members of a civilian militia headed into the streets of a Caracas neighborhood long considered a stronghold of the ruling party.<\/p>\n
At a pro-Maduro protest in the capital, Caracas Mayor Carmen Mel\u00e9ndez joined a crowd demanding Maduro\u2019s return.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaduro, hold on, the people are rising up!\u201d the crowd chanted. They also said: \u201cWe are here Nicol\u00e1s Maduro. If you can hear us, we are here!\u201d<\/p>\n
In other parts of the city, the streets remained empty hours after the attack, as residents absorbed events. Some areas remained without power, but vehicles moved freely.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow do I feel? Scared, like everyone,\u201d said Caracas resident Noris Prada, who sat on an empty avenue looking down at his phone. \u201cVenezuelans woke up scared, many families couldn\u2019t sleep.\u201d<\/p>\n
Video obtained from Caracas and an unidentified coastal city showed tracers and smoke clouding the landscape as repeated muted explosions illuminated the night sky. Other footage showed cars passing on a highway as blasts illuminated the hills behind them. The videos were verified by The Associated Press.<\/p>\n
Smoke was seen rising from the hangar of a military base in Caracas, while another military installation in the capital was without power.<\/p>\n
The Venezuelan government\u2019s statement said Maduro had \u201cordered all national defense plans to be implemented\u201d and declared a state of emergency that gives him the power to suspend people\u2019s rights and expand the role of the armed forces.<\/p>\n
The website of the U.S. Embassy in Venezuela, a post that has been closed since 2019, urged American citizens to shelter in place.<\/p>\n
Reaction emerges slowly<\/p>\n
The FAA warned all commercial and private U.S. pilots that the airspace over Venezuela and the small island nation of Curacao, just off the coast of the country, was off limits \u201cdue to safety-of-flight risks associated with ongoing military activity.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Armed Services committees in both houses of Congress, which have jurisdiction over military matters, have not been notified by the administration of any actions, according to a person familiar with the matter and granted anonymity to discuss it.<\/p>\n
Lawmakers from both political parties in Congress have raised deep reservations and flat-out objections to the U.S. attacks on boats suspected of drug smuggling near the Venezuelan coast and Congress has not specifically approved an authorization for the use of military force for such operations in the region.<\/p>\n
Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said he had seen no evidence that would justify Trump striking Venezuela without approval from Congress and demanded an immediate briefing by the administration on \u201cits plan to ensure stability in the region and its legal justification for this decision.\u201d<\/p>\n
Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said the military action and seizure of Maduro marks \u201ca new dawn for Venezuela,\u201d saying that \u201cthe tyrant is gone.\u201d He posted on X hours after the strike. His boss, Rubio, reposted a post from July that said Maduro \u201cis NOT the President of Venezuela and his regime is NOT the legitimate government.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cuba, a supporter of the Maduro government and a longtime adversary of the United States, called for the international community to respond to what President Miguel D\u00edaz-Canel Berm\u00fadez called \u201cthe criminal attack.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOur zone of peace is being brutally assaulted,\u201d he said on X. Iran\u2019s Foreign Ministry also condemned the strikes.<\/p>\n
President Javier Milei of Argentina praised the claim by his close ally, Trump, that Maduro had been captured with a political slogan he often deploys to celebrate right-wing advances: \u201cLong live freedom, dammit!\u201d<\/p>\n
Cano and Toropin write for the Associated Press. Toropin and AP journalist Lisa Mascaro reported from Washington. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CARACAS, Venezuela\u00a0\u2014\u00a0The United States captured Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro and flew him out of the country in an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":385738,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,8212,16179,46584,83190,1340,16470,187757,48638,8208,187758,3,5568,10091,3479,187759,21,19,22,20,25,24,18232],"class_list":["post-385737","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-attack","tag-boat","tag-capital","tag-caracas","tag-congress","tag-country","tag-large-scale-strike","tag-maduro","tag-month","tag-multiple-explosion","tag-news","tag-power","tag-street","tag-trump","tag-u-s-personnel","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa","tag-venezuela"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385737\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/385738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=385737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=385737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}