Episode 27 - Phil Stewart
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What recent events in Venezuela are 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.
How did Maduro come to power in Venezuela?
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.
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, you know, 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. And so and so it was 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.
What prompted the U.S. decision to intervene in Venezuela?
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 but the but the military option, from what we understand, was was given enough. that you saw Delta Force soldiers training on a mock version of this compound and really- In Kentucky, where we are actually. Yeah, 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 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?
Well, I mean, it was a very... it was a massive operation. I mean, I've heard someone describe it as, as an operation that was even more complicated than the bin Laden operation. Um, Partly due to the weather and the fact that you're coming off the sea and there's a lot of unstable air. So you're coming in with helos off the sea. Around 150 aircraft were involved in this thing because they didn't just come in. They used all kinds of effects beforehand to black out part of the city and kill comms and knock out air defenses and knock out all the kind of threats that they could possibly
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What recent events in Venezuela are discussed in this episode?
0:01–1:05
2
How did Maduro come to power in Venezuela?
1:05–3:02
3
What prompted the U.S. decision to intervene in Venezuela?
3:02–5:52
4
What details are known about the military operation to capture Maduro?
5:52–8:28
5
What challenges do journalists face when reporting from Venezuela?
8:28–11:43
6
How does the international community view the U.S. intervention in Venezuela?
11:43–14:19
7
What are the implications of Maduro's capture for Venezuela's government?
14:19–16:55
8
How could the situation in Venezuela affect the average American?
16:55–50:11