Dare Babalola
The United States President, Donald Trump, has announced that the U.S. struck Venezuela and captured its President, Nicolas Maduro, who has been taken out of the country.
Trump announced this in a statement in his Truth Social account on Saturday morning.
“The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the country,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.
The U.S. has not made such a direct intervention in Latin American since the invasion of Panama in 1989 to depose military leader Manuel Noriega.
Earlier, the U.S. accused Maduro of running a “narco-state” and rigging an election. The Venezuelan leader, who succeeded Hugo Chavez to take power in 2013, has said Washington wants to take control of its oil reserves, the largest in the world.
The State Department warned U.S. citizens in Venezuela to shelter in place early Saturday morning.
In a notice posted on its website, the department said the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, Colombia, was “aware of reports of explosions in and around Caracas, Venezuela”.
The U.S. had also warned its citizens against traveling to Venezuela for months, citing the risk of “wrongful detention, torture in detention, terrorism, kidnapping, arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest, and poor health infrastructure”.
