War Crime

At around 2am on Saturday morning, residents of Caracas awoke to the sounds of explosions and helicopters flying low over the city, as US special forces launched an unprecedented assault on the Venezuelan capital. According to later reports from senior American military officials, within 30 minutes Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, first lady Cilia Flores, were abducted from their beds and taken aboard a warship bound for the US, where they await drug-trafficking charges. “We’re going to run the country,” Donald Trump declared at a Saturday evening press conference at Mar-a-Lago. The US president also made it clear that he intended to seize control of Venezuela’s vast oil industry. “We’re in the oil business,” he said. The attack was widely condemned by world leaders as a violation of international law. And as Hugh Tomlinson and Mie Hoejris Dahl report in today’s Observer, while some Venezuelans are quietly celebrating the fall of a dictator, the streets have fallen eerily silent as the country nervously awaits its future.