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Donald Trump says US forces have captured the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro following large-scale strikes in Venezuela.

The US president wrote on social media that Maduro and his wife, First Lady Cilia Flores, had been flown out of the country. He later told Fox and Friends that they were on a ship on their way to New York.

The Venezuelan defence minister, Vladimir Padrino, has said that the armed forces would defend the country’s sovereignty.

The strikes inside Venezuela come after a US pressure campaign against the Maduro government, which the Trump administration accuses of flooding the US with drugs and gang members.

Trump blames Nicolás Maduro for the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants in the US.

They are among close to eight million Venezuelans estimated to have fled the country’s economic crisis and repression since 2013.

Without providing evidence, Trump has accused Maduro of “emptying his prisons and insane asylums” and “forcing” its inmates to migrate to the US.

Trump has also focused on fighting the influx of drugs – especially fentanyl and cocaine – into the US.

He has designated two Venezuelan criminal groups – Tren de Aragua and Cartel de los Soles – as Foreign Terrorist Organisations (FTOs) and has alleged that the latter is led by Maduro himself.

Analysts have pointed out that Cartel de los Soles is not a hierarchical group but a term used to describe corrupt officials who have allowed cocaine to transit through Venezuela.

Trump had also doubled the reward for information leading to Maduro’s capture and has announced that he would designate the Maduro government as an FTO.

Maduro has vehemently denied being a cartel leader and has accused the US of using its “war on drugs” as an excuse to try to depose him and get its hands on Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.

There has been a build up of pressure on the Maduro government since Trump began his second term in office last January.

First, the Trump administration doubled the reward it offered for information leading to the capture of Maduro.

In September, US forces began targeting vessels it accused of carrying drugs from South America to the US.

There have been more than 30 strikes on such vessels in the Caribbean and the Pacific since then, killing more than 110 people.

The Trump administration argues that it is involved in a non-international armed conflict with the alleged drug traffickers, whom it accuses of conducting irregular warfare against the US.

Many legal experts say the strikes are not against “lawful military targets”. The first attack – on 2 September – has drawn particular scrutiny as there was not one but two strikes, with survivors of the first hit killed in the second.

A former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court told the BBC that the US military campaign more generally fell into the category of a planned, systematic attack against civilians during peacetime.

In response, the White House said it had acted in line with the laws of armed conflict to protect the US from cartels “trying to bring poison to our shores… destroying American lives”.

Back in October, Trump said he had authorised the CIA to conduct covert operations inside Venezuela.

He also threatened strikes on land against what he described as “narco-terrorists”.

He said that the first of such strikes had been carried out on 24 December, though he gave little detail, just stating that it had targeted a “dock area” where boats alleged to carry drugs where being loaded.

Prior to Maduro’s capture, Trump repeatedly said that Maduro “is no friend of the US” and that it would be “smart for him to go”.

He also increased the financial pressure on Maduro by declaring a “total naval blockade” on all sanctioned oil tankers entering and leaving Venezuela. Oil is the main source of foreign revenue for the Maduro government.

The US has also deployed a huge military force in the Caribbean, whose stated aim is to stop the flow of fentanyl and cocaine to the US.

As well as targeting vessels they accuse of smuggling drugs, the force has also played a key role in the US naval blockade.

Counternarcotic experts say that Venezuela is a relatively minor player in global drug trafficking, acting as a transit country through which drugs produced elsewhere are smuggled.

Its neighbour, Colombia, is the world’s largest producer of cocaine but most of it is thought to enter the US by other routes, not via Venezuela.

According to a US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) report from 2020, almost three quarters of the cocaine reaching the US is estimated to be trafficked via the Pacific with just a small percentage coming via fast boats in the Caribbean.

While most of the early strikes the US has carried out were in the Caribbean, more recent ones have focused on the Pacific.

In September, Trump told US military leaders that the boats targeted “are stacked up with bags of white powder that’s mostly fentanyl and other drugs, too”.

Fentanyl is a synthetic drug which is 50 times more potent than heroin and has become the main drug responsible for opioid overdose deaths in the US.

On 15 December, Trump signed an executive order designating fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction”, arguing that it was “closer to a chemical weapon than a narcotic”.

However, fentanyl is produced mainly in Mexico and reaches the US almost exclusively via land through its southern border.

Venezuela is not mentioned as a country of origin for fentanyl smuggled into the US in the DEA’s 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment.

Nicolás Maduro rose to prominence under the leadership of left-wing President Hugo Chávez and his United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV).

Maduro, a former bus driver and union leader, succeeded Chávez and has been president since 2013.

During the 26 years that Chávez and Maduro have been in power, their party has gained control of key institutions including the National Assembly, much of the judiciary, and the electoral council.

In 2024, Maduro was declared winner of the presidential election, even though voting tallies collected by the opposition suggested that its candidate, Edmundo González, had won by a landslide.

González had replaced the main opposition leader, María Corina Machado, on the ballot after she was barred from running for office.

She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in October for “her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy”.

Machado defied a travel ban and made her way to Oslo in December to collect the award after months in hiding.

She said that she planned to return to Venezuela, a move which would put her at risk of arrest by the Venezuelan authorities, who have declared her a “fugitive”.

The US has deployed 15,000 troops and a range of aircraft carriers, guided-missile destroyers, and amphibious assault ships to the Caribbean.

Among the US flotilla is the USS Gerald Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier.

US helicopters reportedly took off from it before US forces seized an oil tanker off Venezuela on 10 December.

The US said the tanker had been “used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran”. Venezuela described the action as an act of “international piracy”.

Since then, the US has targeted two more tankers in waters off Venezuela.

Maduro has long accused the Trump administration of attempting to depose him so the US could gain control of Venezuela’s oil riches, pointing to a remark Trump made after the US seized the first oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast.

When quizzed by reporters as to what would happen with the tanker and its cargo, he said: “I assume we’re going to keep the oil.”

However, US officials have previously denied Venezuela’s allegations that moves against Maduro’s government were an attempt to secure access to the country’s untapped reserves.

Venezuela has the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves and profits from the oil sector finance more than half of the its government budget.

However, its exports have been hit by sanctions and a lack of investment and mismanagement within Venezuela’s state-ruin oil company.

In 2023, Venezuela produced only 0.8% of global crude oil, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).

It currently exports about 900,000 barrels per day and China is by far its biggest buyer.

The US may want many of its foes gone from power. It doesn’t usually send in the military and physically remove them.

Venezuela’s abrupt awakening took two forms.

Its residents were woken abruptly to the sound of deafening booms: the sound of its capital Caracas under attack from US strikes targeting military infrastructure.

Its government has now woken up from any illusion that US military intervention or regime change was just a distant threat.

US President Donald Trump has announced its leader, Nicolás Maduro, has been captured and flown out of the country. He now faces a US trial over weapons and drugs charges.

The US has not carried out direct military intervention in Latin America like this since its 1989 invasion of Panama to depose the then-military ruler, Manuel Noriega.

Back then, like now, Washington framed this as part of wider crackdown on drug trafficking and criminality.

The US has long accused Maduro, too, of leading a criminal trafficking organisation, something he strongly denies. It designated as a foreign terrorist group the ‘Cartel de los Soles’ – a name the US uses to describe a group of elites in Venezuela who it alleges orchestrate illegal activities like drug trafficking and illegal mining.

For years, Maduro’s government has been accused of human rights abuses.

In 2020, United Nations investigators said its government had committed “egregious violations” amounting to crimes against humanity such as extrajudicial killings, torture, violence and disappearances – and that Maduro and other top officials were implicated.

Human rights organisations have recorded hundreds of political prisoners in the country, including some detained after anti-government protests.

This latest operation, striking inside a sovereign capital directly, marks a dramatic escalation in US engagement in the region.

The forcible removal of Maduro will be hailed a major victory by some of the more hawkish figures within the US administration, many of whom have argued that only direct intervention could force Maduro from power.

Washington has not recognised him as the country’s president since the 2024 elections. The opposition published electronic voting tallies after the vote which it said proved it, not Maduro, won the election.

The result was deemed neither free nor fair by international election observers. The opposition leader Maria Corina Machado was barred from running in it.

But for Venezuela’s government, this intervention confirms what it has long claimed – that Washington’s ultimate goal is regime change.

Venezuela has also accused the US of wanting to “steal” its oil reserves, the largest in the world, and other resources – an allegation it felt was vindicated after the US seized at least two oil tankers off the coast.

The strikes and capture come after months of US military escalation in the region.

The US has sent its biggest military deployment in decades to the region, comprising warplanes, thousands of troops, helicopters and the world’s largest warship. It has carried out dozens of strikes on alleged small drug trafficking vessels in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, killing at least 110 people.

Any doubts that remained that those operations were at least in part about regime change too have now been dashed by today’s actions.

What remains deeply unclear is what comes next inside Venezuela itself.

The US would clearly like the Venezuelan opposition, who it is allied with, to take power – potentially either led by opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, or the opposition candidate from the 2024 elections Edmundo Gonzalez.

However, even some strong critics of Maduro warn this would not be simple given the government’s grip on power in the country.

It controls the judiciary, the Supreme Court, the military – and is aligned with powerfully armed paramilitaries known as “colectivos”.

Some fear US intervention could trigger violent fragmentation and a prolonged power struggle. Even some who dislike Maduro and want to see him gone are wary of US intervention being the means – remembering decades of US-backed coups and regime change in Latin America in the 20th century.

The opposition itself is also divided in parts – not all back a transition to Machado or her support for Trump.

It’s not clear what the US’s next move is.

Will it try to push for fresh elections? Will it try to depose further senior members of the government or the military and force them to face justice in the US?

As for Trump, his administration has become increasingly muscular in the region what with a financial bailout for Argentina, tariffs whacked on Brazil to try to influence the coup trial of Trump’s ally and former right-wing Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, and now the military intervention in Venezuela.

He benefits from having more allies in the region now – with the continent shifting Right in recent elections such as in Ecuador, Argentina and Chile. But while Maduro has few allies in the region, there are still big powers like Brazil and Colombia who do not support US military intervention.

And some of Trump’s own MAGA base in the US are also not happy at his growing interventionism after promising to put “America First”.

For Maduro’s closest allies, Saturday’s events raise urgent questions and fears about their own futures.

Many may not want to give up the fight or allow a transition unless they feel they could receive some kind of protection or reassurance from persecution themselves.