Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Interrupted by Matt Jones on NewsRadio 840 WHAS. Now, here's Matt Jones. Welcome to episode 27 of Interrupted by Matt Jones. We, of course, if you've been following the news, there have been a ton of... you know, national and international news stories. And one of the things we try to do on here is bring people on who know a lot more about it than I do.
And so Phil Stewart is a national security reporter for Reuters. He has covered 60 plus countries over the years and is covering the situation in Venezuela now with the capture of Maduro by the United States military slash Justice Department. And Phil, I appreciate you doing this. Nice to meet you through this.
We've never talked before, but I followed your work on social media and I appreciate you taking the time.
Well, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
All right, I'm gonna assume most people know what has happened, but let's take a step back, Phil, for people. Maduro kind of comes on the radar probably for the average American during this, but let's go back to him seizing power, taking over from Hugo Chavez. What are some of the reasons why America would have felt the need to go in?
And give us a little background on Maduro as the leader of Venezuela.
Well, he had been a very controversial leader for some time. I was on a trip to South America with the last chairman of the Joint Chiefs, not the one that's there now. And during that trip, the head of Southern Command had actually called him a dictator back then in Chile, which had a very left-leaning government, and he was seen as a dictator there too.
And so Maduro had been quite controversial there. even among the left in Latin America because of the fact that his last election victory was widely condemned by international organizations as being fraudulent. And so although there's a lot of questions about the legality of the operation, there aren't so many questions really about how the international community viewed Maduro.
Pretty much everyone suggests this was a dude who was maybe illegitimately elected, but certainly had committed a lot of, I don't want to use, maybe atrocities. What is he accused of doing outside of this drug issue that America said? Just as a leader, you always hear this is an awful person. What are some of the things he's accused of doing?
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Chapter 2: What background information is necessary to understand Maduro's leadership?
That all obviously was true. We believe that the operations, the planning for this military option began well over a month before we wrote that story. But it really kind of advanced more fulsomely after Thanksgiving and in the weeks before the operation itself.
So that would have been... So you're saying of this year, well, I guess now 2025, not 2024, 2025. That's correct, yeah. Okay, so, and see, if we, there was a lot of sort of I don't chatter from the Trump administration leading up to it about things he needed to do.
I mean, do you think the actual decision to go in was made back in October, November, or do you think it was made much more recently?
Much more recently. Yeah. They said that the decision had been made just in recent days and that, I think the president himself said that they were going to go in four days before they did, but the circumstances didn't work out and they rescheduled.
It was Christmas Day, right?
Right. And so it was one of those situations where the president as is traditional, retains the ability to kind of decide, you know, at the very last moment whether to really go forward or not because you want to have all the information available to you. You don't want to pre-decide a military operation and then maybe some other opportunity to resolve it appears.
So he did, but the military option, from what we understand, was given enough time support that you saw Delta Force soldiers training on a mock version of this compound and really where we are actually. Yeah. And so and so there they are training hard on an operation that's extraordinarily dangerous.
I mean, the ability of anyone to go into a well-guarded compound like that and come out, you know, with no casualties, no dead anyway, is really just incredible.
What do we know about the operation? I mean, a lot of my listeners probably have seen or read about Zero Dark Thirty, about the bin Laden takeover. What do we know about what actually went down? And just from afar, I mean, when I hear they went into the presidential palace, took him and had no American casualties, what do we know about how that actually occurred?
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Chapter 3: What accusations are made against Maduro regarding his actions in Venezuela?
I mean, let's say hypothetically only like, you know, one of the helicopters had gone down. One of the helicopters was shot, was shot at and took fire. And people aboard were injured, at least one person. And, you know, had there been casualties, you know, would the media have seen it as a debacle? Or hostages. Or hostages, right?
Or have you had a Black Hawk down, you know, moment kind of like, you know, the U.S. saw in Somalia? What would that have been like? And so I think we're trying to understand the risk appetite, what it was that got the president to decide that this was an operation worth pursuing.
But I would say the success of both those operations probably will lead the president to think this is a valid way of accomplishing foreign policy goals.
Well, I want to get to that because I think that is obviously the next question is, does it embolden them? But if you, okay, so now as of this moment, who is in charge? I know the vice president is in charge, but we've also seen the president say something like we're running the country.
So how would you describe to the average person listening here, the status of who is running, what is happening on the ground in Venezuela today?
Today, you've seen the extraction of President Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela, but Maduro's government is still very much intact. According to President Trump, it is very responsive to Washington and its interests and its plans, but
This is a government that has been fiercely anti-American for many years, fiercely concerned about the United States, and a lot of its supporters are very skeptical of the United States. So it really remains to be seen how long the cooperation will last, if there will be a breaking point, if there will be a request that it just goes too far for them. And then also this sort of, you know,
There are a lot of private discussions, we understand, between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the acting interim president. And it remains to be seen whether the kind of goodwill that's been described to the media, the goodwill in private, will become something public that the Venezuelan government would talk about.
But you would say, would you say that Venezuela as a country still runs their country and still has like, I mean, again, part of it is the president uses language that sometimes we don't know what the meaning is. But would you still say at this moment, Venezuela runs the country, even if you would say that America has a strong impact on their decisions?
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Chapter 4: How did the U.S. plan the operation to capture Maduro?
And so if anyone in the region should be really watching this, it's certainly the Cubans, because also they depended so much on the relationship with Venezuela, which the United States almost certainly seems to be moving to sever.
So if the Venezuelans can no longer provide any kind of oil, aid, support, cash, anything to the Cubans, that's going to have a real impact on an island that's already struggling economically.
But what is, I guess this is a basic question, but I actually think it matters. What is the goal of all this? At the end of the day, at the end of the day, I mean, there are bad people that run lots of countries, or at least people we think are bad in all these places. We don't seek to take them all over.
At the end of the day, if you were to try to describe what the American interest is in who the Venezuela leader is, who the Cuban leader is, who the Colombian leader is, What is that interest?
So I think that as journalists, what we're trying to do is we're trying to make sense of this, too, because nobody's seen anything quite like this, right? And so the closest thing is Noriega, and that's actually a different situation for a lot of reasons that we don't have to get into.
So what we're doing is we're looking at the national security strategy that the White House issued, which says basically that the Monroe Doctrine, this idea that the hemisphere is kind of America's backyard and that the U.S. will look after it as such and protect its interests there, really is the best way, I think, to understand.
But to do what?
Well, I think that in the case of Venezuela, you're going to see a lot of pressure on them to cut ties with countries the U.S. sees as adversaries.
Okay, so like China and Russia.
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Chapter 5: What details are known about the operation that led to Maduro's capture?
And that's the big question we all have.
Let me finish with this. A lot of reports that the administration is going to meet with the folks in Greenland and Denmark about whatever happens with Greenland. I understand, at least me, I feel like I understand why that matters to them, but it seems like it matters, like we have military bases there. It feels like we get along with Greenland pretty well.
What do you think motivates Trump's fascination with Greenland?
That's a great question. I don't know that there is an easy answer for that. There is a lot of potential security implications for Greenland falling under the Let me start again. I mean, I guess a lot of journalists are kind of trying to understand what the United States would gain militarily, diplomatically, economically by acquiring Greenland, given the treaty arrangements and the U.S.
military relationship with Denmark, which is a close NATO ally.
I mean, what else do we need from them? We already are there. We already use it as a military base. What have you heard that we want?
Right. Well, I think the answer the administration gives is that Denmark simply can't defend the island by itself. Denmark just isn't the U.S. and doesn't have the reach of the U.S. military. And if you really want to make sure that Greenland is secure and that its assets in the Arctic are available to Americans, then you need to have it be American.
And that's the argument they're putting forward.
But are we worried that someone's coming after Greenland?
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