The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived: Maduro Gone, Venezuela’s Future Begins Today

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Today is a great day for Venezuela. Maduro is gone.

The Historic Operation

The U.S. military carried out a “large-scale strike” in Venezuela early Saturday morning and took Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife into custody, President Donald Trump confirmed.

The president wrote on Truth Social that the operation was successful and Maduro and his wife were “captured and flown out of the country.” Trump said the operation was conducted with U.S. law enforcement and added that a news conference will take place at Mar-a-Lago at 11 a.m. on Saturday.

Why It Was Legal and Necessary

Make no mistake. This was a remarkable action- a remarkable legal action.

This operation will be justified as executing the criminal warrant and responding to an international drug cartel, a very similar legal framework to the one used against Noriega. There is precedent supporting that earlier operation, which will now be used to defend the actions in Venezuela.

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Democratic members quickly denounced the operation as unlawful. They may want to review past cases, particularly the decision related to the Noriega prosecution after his capture by President George H.W. Bush in 1989.

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Trump does not need congressional approval for this type of operation. Presidents, including Democratic presidents, have launched lethal attacks regularly against individuals. President Barack Obama killed an American citizen under this “kill list” policy. If Obama can vaporize an American citizen without even a criminal charge, Trump can capture a foreign citizen with a pending criminal indictment without prior congressional approval.

There has been an outstanding warrant for Maduro since 2020:

 

Maduro will be tried in the Southern District of NY.

Venezuelans Rejoice: Machado’s Message

Nobel Peace Prize opposition leader Maria Machado is ecstatic:

Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado celebrated the US capture of dictator Nicolás Maduro Saturday, saying in her first public comment the “hour of freedom has arrived.”

“The time has come for popular sovereignty and national sovereignty to govern our country. We will restore order, free the political prisoners, build an exceptional country, and bring our children back home,” Machado said in her first public statement since the historic arrest.

“We have fought for years, we have given everything, and it has been worth it. What had to happen is happening.”

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“Today we are prepared to enforce our mandate and take power,” Machado continued. “We are going to restore order, release the political prisoners, build an exceptional country, and bring our children back home.”

From Chavez’s Ruin to Today’s Dawn

Maduro just obliterated elections.

 

Predictably, democrats have lost their minds over this success. They keep posting lies about the legality of the operation and whine about their being left in the dark. But let’s let people who know tell you about what they see:

 

Trump said that the US would run the country until there was a stable transition of power.

A Personal Note: I Saw This Coming in 2013

This event also brings me great personal pleasure. I lectured in Caracas in 2013 just after Chavez died and wrote about it here. Readers may find something eerily familiar in it.

Venezuela was once an economic dynamo. Chavez “seized the means of production” in Venezuela. He nationalized foreign businesses, especially oil, and deported all the foreign experts. Without the knowledge of how the oil industry is run and maintained, rigs and towers eventually went still and Venezuela spiraled into poverty and hyperinflation.

He got rid of rugged individualism and replaced it with warm collectivism. He redistributed the wealth, but that was a short lived joy:

A spending spree that almost tripled the fiscal deficit last year helped Chavez, 58, win a third six-year term. The devaluation can help narrow the budget deficit by increasing the amount of bolivars the government receives from oil exports. Yet the move also threatens to accelerate annual inflation that reached 22 percent in January.

“There is surely going to be a political cost, which may weigh against the Chavistas and hence be viewed favorably from the markets if it shifts protest votes to the opposition,” Siobhan Morden, the head of Latin America fixed income strategy at Jefferies Group Inc. in New York, said in a note to clients.

Heavy government spending has fueled rampant inflation, which averaged an annual 22% during Mr. Chávez’s tenure. Its anticapitalist rhetoric and broad state intervention into the economy have led to a dearth of investment. Gross fixed capital formation declined to 18% of gross domestic product in 2011, from 24% in 1999, according to the World Bank. Net inflows of foreign direct investment stood at 2.9% of GDP during that same year, his first in office, nearly double the 1.7% in 2011. Capital flight from Venezuela intensified as Mr. Chávez pursued more interventionist policies, including capital controls and a fixed official exchange rate that — if you can get it — offers dollars at a quarter of the exchange rate that the greenback fetches in the black market. Stock market capitalization of companies listed on the Caracas Stock Exchange has gone from a paltry 7.6% of GDP in 1999 to a minuscule 1.6%.

Then he veered into price caps:

Rather than pursue policies that might stimulate investment, the government’s response to shrinking productive capacity and high inflation has been price caps. The result? Shortages of food and other basic necessities, periodic electric brown- and blackouts, and far fewer jobs: the labor force participation rate has dropped from 52% to 46% in the Chávez era.

The country suffered:

It’s well known that inflation and basic necessity shortages hit the poor the hardest, as does crime, which has skyrocketed in Venezuela. According to InSight Crime, an American University-sponsored think tank in Washington DC, the country has seen a sharp rise in violence, “with murder rates doubling or tripling over a decade, according to different figures.” For the first time in several years, the government reported homicide data, noting over 16,000 murders last year. But the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, a local non-government organization that tracks crime, put the number at nearly 21,700, for a national homicide rate of 73 per 100,000, more than double the 31 per 100,000 in Colombia, which is fighting two guerilla insurgencies.

What I saw:

Communities are gated- some are even double-gated. Federales park their vehicles and maintain a 24 hour presence at every food and rest stop along the highway between downtown and the airport.

But then there were the people. They were delightful:

I really didn’t know what to expect from the working people and I left with nothing but admiration. They proved to be very warm, kind and generous. And each person with whom I spoke shared the same sentiment:

Hope

They are hoping that the demise of Chavez means a return to a meritocracy. They are hoping that once again one can do well by working hard. One cannot help but respect their spirit given Venezuela’s economic morass and their continued fear for their lives and the lives of their families. It’s very difficult to conduct business in Venezuela given the upheaval government regularly visits upon industries.

They were warm. They were great. But they were fatalistic, hoping against hope. They didn’t really know what the future would bring with the bus driver Maduro. It only brought more misery. Inside, they knew.

A few more memories from that trip:

During the official two week mourning period the sale and consumption of alcohol was prohibited. Gratefully that ended 6 am on the day I arrived.

Each time Chavez’ body is moved all businesses in the city are ordered closed so as not to impede travel of the remains and allow for more outpouring of grief.

All for a guy who managed to divert a reported $2 billion of the country’s money into his own pocket.

It can be good to be a socialist.

And this:

On my day of departure I arrived at the airport at 5 am. I was given a pass by the Delta staff to enter the VIP lounge prior to the flight. The lounge never opened.

It was Sunday morning. There was a TV in the waiting area and the satellite signal was interrupted very few seconds, almost making it seem like a stop action movie. Playing on the screen before the gente asleep in their chairs was Sunday mass. Mercifully the sound was off. The priest seemed to split his worship service. He walked back and forth several times between the altar and a poster of Chavez. Jesus and Hugo shared the attention.

Chavez’ human rights record was miserable. He hid the growing disaster by expropriating foreign corporations and devaluing the currency. He made the poor somewhat better off by making making the rich poorer. He villified the wealthy. (Sound familiar?) Inflation is a red hot 22%. A recession is possible in 2013 another currency devaluation is likely in the offing. The Bolivar dollar has already been devalued five times in nine years. Replacing oil professionals with Chavez stooges has caused the production of Venezuela’s life blood to fall from 3.2 million barrels per day to 2.5 million.

The people of Venezuela have esperanza, but they’re also going to need some suerte.

Well, they finally got it and I could not be happier for them.

This brings tears to my eyes:

 

 

 

What a great day.

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The US should put the rightly elected President Guaido the face in charge of setting up the new Government and new elections and restoration of stolen property.
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Leave it to President Trump to get dems to go from their “No Kings,” protests to their Pro-Maduro protests.
I guess you have to have brains to suffer headaches from such cognitive dissonance.

Also loving the way the Maduro’s are being driven all over New York City after Mayor Mamdani made a public statement about how abhorrent his arrest was.

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Sorry leftists Bottom Feeders and Sewer Dwellers but this was Perfectly Legal unlike when Clinton(Bill)had the Cuban Boy(Elin Gonzalas) taken from Relatives in Florida and returned him to Cuba so Clinton could do a favor his good friend Castro

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This hasn’t aged well…

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Indeed!

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Hugo Chavez just turned over in his Grave and now he cant rest way too nervous

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