Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: 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.
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Chapter 3: 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
you know, preemptively deal with so that when they got in the ground, they had to deal with Maduro's personal security, you know, the security of the compound. And that was quite deadly.
You know, when they when they landed, they flew in at about 100 feet off the off the water in the darkness of night with the city blacked out and they landed and they and they piled out of the of the of the helicopters. You're talking about a team of, you know, less than 200, probably. And and they and they came in.
And from what we understand, I think the Cubans have said there were 32 Cuban nationals who are protecting Maduro who were killed. And I think at least a couple dozen more, if not more than that, of Venezuelans who are who are killed in that operation.
So they black out the city. So first of all, were these helicopters, et cetera, stationed on some of those ships that we had heard were being surrounding the country? Do we know where they came from?
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Chapter 4: What details are known about the military operation to capture Maduro?
But they haven't said.
So they black out part of the city. I've seen a couple videos where people are like filming themselves when the city goes black. They go in and so they recreated a mock-up of his residence. Do you know like how big are we talking about the place being? Is it a palace? Is it a house? I mean, do you know?
I couldn't tell you. I wouldn't want to venture a guess about the size and scope of the compound itself, just not knowing it well enough.
Okay, so Venezuela is a country. How much do you as a reporter or do Western journalists know about what happened on a day-to-day basis there? Were people from the West allowed in to sort of see what was going on? How much is known about sort of the day-to-day life of people in Caracas and in Venezuela?
International organizations for press freedom have said that there needs to be less restrictions on foreign access to reporting inside Venezuela. That said, you see foreign journalists who are on the ground there and take risk to report on what's going on, even in these recent days. And that includes reporters who are going to the aftermath of these strikes.
interviewing survivors, going to hospitals, speaking to soldiers who survived, who are wounded. And so there is very vibrant reporting, but not as you might see in neighboring countries like Colombia.
The day the decision is to go ahead and go in, there's obviously a lot of danger there. Donald Trump said in a New York Times interview yesterday that he was worried it could be his own Jimmy Carter Iran situation. What is it that made what is it you think that made it to where the administration or from what you've heard with your reporting finally decide, OK, yes, we're going to do this?
You know, that is a great question. I'm glad you asked that. We are trying to understand the risk appetite of this administration because you've seen now since the summer, you know, two major operations that are hard to, you know, imagine have happened, you know, really when you sit back. One is the bombing of Iran's nuclear program. People have talked about that for years and years and years.
And the risks... of carrying out that operation and the blowback afterwards were, you know, enough to make a lot of people quite nervous. And then an operation like this, as we've discussed, you know, there are enormous risks.
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Chapter 5: What challenges do journalists face when reporting from 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 with the United States or hostages? Right.
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? 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?
So today, you know, you've seen the extraction of President Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela. But Maduro's government is still very much intact. And it is, you know, according to President Trump, is very responsive to Washington and its interests and its plans. But this is a government that has been fiercely isolated. 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, you know, how long the cooperation will last, if there'll be a breaking point, if there'll 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 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 what 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 6: How does the international community view the U.S. intervention in Venezuela?
Well, no, I was going to ask you when you say the Venezuelan government would be concerned. I mean, I know there are questions about whether the election last time was legitimate. Is there any sense beyond, I guess, those election results, how popular, like what the stance of Venezuelans in Venezuela is?
I know a lot of the Venezuelans in America are for it, but a lot of those people left probably for a reason. So what do we know about the people there now?
Well, I mean, if the international organizations that judged the last election are correct, there are a lot of people that do not support the government and voted a different way. Do we know what the numbers of those were?
Because I'm not sure I've ever read them.
Yeah, yeah. They're deaf. They're public. And the international organizations had what they thought were the correct vote tallies, and they did not correspond with the official tallies. And they were very public about that at the time of the election. And so the question is, today, there is no real dissent in the streets.
The Maduro government still is very much in charge, and as we discussed earlier, According to local media reports, they've arrested people who had social media criticized Maduro or celebrated his capture. And so I would say that the Maduro government is still very much in charge, it would seem, from the outside.
So let's talk about the arrest from the American standpoint. What is specifically Maduro charged with?
So he's charged with different kinds of crimes related to narcotics trafficking.
Cocaine mostly?
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Chapter 7: What are the implications of Maduro's capture for Venezuela's government?
Yeah, I can't speak to the ins and outs of the case.
I haven't read the whole case yet, what's been submitted to the courts, but I would tell you that the argument politically has been exactly that, that the United States has suffered as a result of what Maduro has done, and they're drawing parallels to Noriega, the Panamanian president who was also extradited to the United States and died here in jail.
The reason I ask is that I'm As a former lawyer, I'm just curious as to jurisdictional arguments, and that's why I wondered if they had said that. Okay, so as I understand it's been described, the military helped aid and abet a DOJ arrest. Is that kind of the official explanation?
Oh, the DOJ was with the military and executed the arrest?
Well, but I mean, to be very clear, this was not a military regime. Normally you can't just go into a foreign country and arrest somebody just because you have an arrest warrant in America. They did this. Talk about the international law aspect of that, because I mean, there are criminals America has arrest warrants with all around the world.
We don't just go into those countries and take the person. So explain to me the international law component of this.
Well, I think that the administration has been seeking to create a legal framework by having DOJ folks on the mission, reading him his rights, bringing him to a courthouse immediately after his seizure in Venezuela.
So he just read his rights. I didn't read that.
That's what they said.
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Chapter 8: How could the situation in Venezuela affect the average American?
You could go on and on. I mean, there's the U.S. occupier. Nicaragua for a period of time. There's a long history of US military activity in Latin America. This meeting happens and there was some expectation they might come to a consensus, but there was no consensus on whether to condemn the operation.
Internationally, you saw the same thing play out at the UN where there wasn't a consensus there either. There are countries that are condemning it, including US adversaries like China and Russia, clearly. And there are countries that are trying to not get involved and not take a side. And there are some countries that support it. So it is a real mixed bag there.
You mentioned, I am curious about the sort of thought in the rest of the world. Obviously the president has brought up, well, we could go into Colombia, we could go into Cuba, he's even mentioned Iran. Okay, Colombia and Cuba strike at least me as the two in our hemisphere, two most likely. I know you don't give opinion in the sense of this is what I think will happen, but in Colombia and Cuba,
Do you think there is a real concern that that's next?
Well, listen, I am actually, you know, I'm a former Latin America correspondent, right? So I used to be based in Colombia. And, you know, I'm one of the people, I actually spoke to Fidel Castro once. Oh, really? Yeah. And so, like, I'm very interested in, you know, Cuba and very interested in Colombia. And I watched, it was funny, I was watching a rally last night in Colombia, right?
where their president, who President Trump does not like, Gustavo Petro, he was about to give this big rally and he was late. And it looks like he was late because he was speaking to President Trump.
Because he talked during the New York Times interview, right?
Right, right.
The journalists were in the room, which is crazy.
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