Latin American leaders aligned with the White House’s pro-freedom stance celebrated the arrest and extradition of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro on Saturday morning, extended support to the exiled winner of the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election, Edmundo González.
Leftist leaders in the region, meanwhile, expressed alarm and accused the United States of illicit military action in conducting airstrikes to ensure the safety of U.S. military personnel acting to detain Maduro and his wife, “first combatant” Cilia Flores. Remaining Venezuelan authorities at press time have stated that they do not know Maduro and Flores’s whereabouts and it is not clear who is acting as head of state in that country.
Among the first to react was libertarian Argentine President Javier Milei, who reposted a speech he had delivered recently on the status of the Venezuelan socialist dictatorship with slogans he commonly uses in support of things he posts: “Liberty Advances,” the name of his political party, and “long live liberty, damn it!” his official campaign slogan.
In the speech President Milei shared, he described Maduro’s regime as “atrocious and inhuman” and called for its demise, celebrating President Donald Trump for taking action to stop Maduro’s drug trafficking and other illicit activities.
“The atrocious and inhuman dictatorship of narco-terrorist Nicolás Maduro extends a dark shadow over our region,” Milei says in the speech. “This danger and this shame cannot continue to exist on the continent or it will end up dragging us all with it. Argentina salutes the pressure of the United States and Donald Trump to liberate the Venezuelan people. The time for a timid approach to this matter has been exhausted.”
Appearing on the Argentine network La Nación on Saturday morning, Milei listed the many reasons his government considered Maduro a massive international security threat.
“He is a narco-terrorist who has deep connections with, for example, with the Spanish socialist party, with Podemos, he has interfered electorally in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and Bolivia. He also receives funding from drug trafficking through the Cartel of the Suns,” Milei explained. “He has infiltration strategies through mass migration linked to cartels, he has alliances with woke NGOs to impulse radical leftism around the world, he has links with Iran, with Hezbollah, he has offered logistical support to Hamas.”
President Daniel Noboa of Ecuador also published a message remarking on the extraction of Maduro from the country, extending support to the rightful winner of the 2024 presidential election, former diplomat Edmundo González. Maduro staged a sham election that year in which he banned all other opposition candidates — including the country’s most popular politician, conservative former lawmaker María Corina Machado — and declared himself the winner without publishing any vote tallies. Machado and González used teams on the ground locally to collect the true vote tallies and prove that González won, publishing the tallies online. Maduro’s regime never contradicted the results, but forced González into exile in Spain; Machado has also since escaped to Norway after winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
“The time comes for every narco-Chavista criminal,” Ecuadorian President Noboa wrote. “Their structure will fall in all the continent. To [Machado], [González], and the Venezuelan people: It is the moment to recover your country. You have an ally in Ecuador.”
In Paraguay, the administration of conservative President Santiago Peña issued a statement through its foreign ministry reiterating Maduro’s status as the “head of the Cartel of the Suns,” a multicontinental drug trafficking operation.
“Our country had alerted about the unsustainable deviation of Venezuela under the rule of Nicolás Maduro, head of the Cartel of the Suns. In this sense, given that this is a criminal structure officially declared as terrorist by national authorities, its persistence in power represented a threat to the region,” the statement read, concluding that Maduro’s demise should lead to a return of rule of law in the country.
The comments from the South American leaders is consistent with past comments from other officials in the region.
In one of the more prominent recent comments, the conservative president-elect of Chile, José Antonio Kast, stated in December that he would support American action to oust Maduro and, furthermore, fellow South American leaders agreed.
“They all are fully conscious that the situation being lived through in Venezuela is unacceptable,” he said of other South American presidents.
Fellow leftist rulers who have supported the socialist disaster in Venezuela were less celebratory on Saturday morning. The government of Cuba, a designated state sponsor of terrorism, issued a statement accusing the United States of “terrorism against the brave Venezuelan people and Our America,” a term communists use for territory they command in the Western Hemisphere.
The figurehead “president” of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel, published a statement condemning America but failing to name Nicolás Maduro or defend him in any way, ending it with the official slogan of Fidel Castro’s 1959 coup d’etat, “Fatherland or Death.”
The leftist government of President Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico explicitly condemned the capture of Maduro, again without referring to him by name.
“The government of Mexico condemns and energetically rejects the military actions executed unilaterally in the last few hours by United States of America armed forces,” the Mexican Foreign Ministry declared, accusing Washington of violating the United Nations Charter. Outside of this statement, the Mexican government has not indicated at press time that it will take any action in defense of the Venezuelan narco-state.
In Brazil, socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, one of the few ardent defenders of Maduro who was elected to office, called the “bombing” of Venezuela “unacceptable.”
“These acts represent a most serious affront to Venezuela’s sovereignty and yet another extremely dangerous precedent for the entire international community,” Lula wrote in a message published to social media.
“Attacking countries, in flagrant violation of international law, is the first step toward a world of violence, chaos, and instability, where the law of the strongest prevails over multilateralism,” Lula declared, demanding unspecified United Nations action. Lula also failed to express any personal concern for Maduro.
President Trump announced on Saturday morning — the anniversary of the 2020 airstrike that killed allied Iranian terror chief Qasem Soleimani, that the United States had engaged in a “large scale strike” in Venezuela and removed Maduro. Reports subsequently indicated that Maduro was captured along with his wife and is facing charges in the United States for drug trafficking linked to the Cartel of the Suns, which he is believed to lead.
President Trump is expected to speak at 11 a.m. local time at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
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