By Attah Ede with Agency
U.S. President, Donald Trump has declared that Washington will assume temporary power in Caracas, until there is a safe transition in Venezuelan.
Trump spoke during a Press Conference Saturday morning from his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida.
“We are going to run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition,”
The US Strong man was briefing the press on the capture of the President of Venuzuela, Mr Nicola Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, by American forces on Saturday.
Trump revealed that Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez has made herself available to Washington and announced that U.S. companies will take over the Latin American country’s oil industry, as she’s essentially willing to do what American think is necessary to make Venezuela great again.
He also claimed that opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado lacks the “support or respect” in Venezuela necessary to drive a political transition.
” Machado has promised that Maduro will answer for his “atrocious” crimes and that Washington has “fulfilled its promise to enforce the law” in the face of Maduro’s refusal to “accept a negotiated solution.” “We are prepared to take power,” the opposition leader wrote on her social media accounts.
Maduro was captured Saturday along with his wife, Cilia Flores, in a joint operation involving the U.S. military and branches of law enforcement. Speaking 10 hours after the launch of Operation Absolute Resolution, Trump said Maduro and Flores will be transferred to New York “in the near future” to stand trial for drug trafficking.
Regarding the political future of the Latin American country, Trump stated that the United States will lead Venezuela until there is a “safe, proper and judicious transition.”
“We don’t want to be involved with having someone else get in, and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years. So we are going to run the country,” he said.
“We were prepared to do a second wave if we needed to do so — we actually assumed that a second wave would be necessary, but now it’s probably not. The first wave, if you’d like to call it that, the first attack was so successful, we probably don’t have to do a second, but we’re prepared to do a second wave, a much bigger wave, actually,” the U.S. president continued during his press conference, stressing that there were no U.S. fatalities during the operation.
“No nation in the world could achieve what America achieved yesterday, or frankly, in just a short period of time, all Venezuelan military capacities were rendered powerless as the men and women of our military, working with us, law enforcement, successfully captured Maduro in the dead of night”, Trump said.
The U.S. president also said Washington will assume control of the petroleum business in Venezuela, which holds the largest crude oil reserves in the world.
““As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust for a long period of time.
“We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.”
Trump recalled the nationalization of several oil concessions in Venezuela during the Hugo Chávez era. “We built Venezuela’s oil industry with American talent, drive, skill, and the socialist regime stole it from us,” he asserted.
