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Trump claims he has cancelled second wave of attacks on Venezuela

Donald Trump has claimed that he cancelled a second wave of attacks on Venezuela because it was cooperating with the US on oil infrastructure and had released political prisoners. The US president said he had cancelled planned military action in recognition that the authorities in Caracas had released “large numbers” of prisoners and were “seeking peace”. “This is a very important and smart gesture,” Trump posted on social media. “The USA and Venezuela are working well together, especially as it pertains to rebuilding, in a much bigger, better, and more modern form, their oil and gas infrastructure. Because of this cooperation, I have cancelled the previously expected second Wave of Attacks, which looks like it will not be needed.” Trump did not elaborate on the alleged plan for fresh strikes but said the US navy armada in the Caribbean would remain, leaving Washington with the ability to attack Venezuela at short notice. “All ships will stay in place for safety and security purposes.” On Friday morning, US marines and navy sailors seized a fifth oil tanker, the Olina, which was falsely flying the flag of the small south-east Asian country of Timor-Leste, in the Caribbean near Trinidad. The assault was launched from the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R Ford, which remains positioned off Venezuela’s coast. Trump said he would meet American oil industry figures later on Friday. “At least 100 Billion Dollars will be invested by BIG OIL, all of whom I will be meeting with today at the White House,” he wrote. The Venezuelan government said it had received a “delegation of diplomatic officials from the US Department of State who will carry out technical and logistical assessments inherent to the diplomatic function”, with a view to the “restoration of diplomatic missions in both countries”. The expectation is that the assessment will lead to the gradual reopening of the US embassy, which has had no diplomats since 2019, when the US and other countries declared Nicolás Maduro’s government illegitimate and recognised Juan Guaidó as interim president. “Likewise, a delegation of Venezuelan diplomats will be sent to the US to carry out the corresponding duties,” the regime added, while insisting on framing the move as part of its efforts to “address the consequences arising from the aggression and the kidnapping of the president of the republic and the first lady, as well as to pursue a working agenda of mutual interest”. On Thursday, Venezuela announced the release of an “important number” of detainees. About 24 hours later, however, human rights organisations were able to confirm only about a dozen releases and are pressing the regime to free all political prisoners, who they estimate number between 800 and 1,000. The Committee for the Freedom of Political Prisoners posted that it was stationed outside various prisons, where “institutional indifference persists”. “In many cases, officials claim to be unaware of release orders; in others, even while acknowledging the official announcements, they point to the alleged absence of release warrants,” the NGO said in a statement. The former opposition candidate Enrique Márquez was among those released from prison, according to an opposition statement. “It’s all over now,” Márquez said in a video taken by a local journalist who accompanied him and his wife, as well as another freed opposition member, Biagio Pilieri. Spain’s foreign ministry confirmed the release of five Spanish nationals, one of them a citizen with dual nationality, who it said were “preparing to travel to Spain with assistance from our embassy in Caracas”. On Thursday, Trump said he planned soon to meet the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado. Since the US operation to capture Maduro on 3 January the future governance of the South American country has remained an open question, with Trump over the weekend dismissing the idea of working with Machado, saying “she doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country”. But in a Fox News interview on Thursday, the US president said Machado was “coming in next week sometime”, adding: “I look forward to saying hello to her.” Asked whether he would accept Machado’s Nobel peace prize if she gave it to him, Trump said: “I’ve heard that she wants to do that. That’d be a great honour.” This will be Trump’s first meeting with Machado, who said this week that she had not spoken to the US president since she won the prize in October. Trump has not publicly made the same offer to Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s interim president, although in an interview with the New York Times on Thursday Trump said the US was “getting along very well” with Rodríguez’s government and that they were “giving us everything that we feel is necessary”. The White House did not respond immediately when asked for additional details on the Machado meeting. On Friday, the retired diplomat Edmundo González, who was chose by Machado to run for president in 2024 – and who, the opposition has shown by obtaining copies of the tally sheets, did in fact win the vote – said he had spoken by phone with Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, and told him that “democratic reconstruction in Venezuela depends on the explicit recognition of the electoral result of 28 July 2024”. He has been living in exile in Spain since September. Colombia’s president, Gustavo Petro, said in an interview published on Friday by El País that during a one-hour phone call with the US president this week, “Trump told me he was thinking about doing bad things in Colombia. The message was that they were already preparing something, planning it – a military operation.” Asked whether he feared suffering the same fate as Maduro, Petro said: “Undoubtedly. Nicolás Maduro, or any president in the world, can be removed if they do not align with certain interests.” Strikes on Colombian insurgent groups in Venezuela are apparently not off the table, however. On Thursday, Colombia’s interior minister said that during a call between Trump and Petro, the Colombian leader asked for US cooperation in combating fighters of the ELN, whose troops straddle the border. Petro asked if the US could help “hit the ELN hard on the border because when we attack they always end up in Venezuela and there have been times when Venezuela helped and other times it hasn’t”, he told local radio station Blu Radio. “They agreed to conduct joint operations against the ELN.” In recent days, Colombia’s defence minister, Pedro Sánchez, has taken to calling the ELN, the Spanish acronym for the 6,000-strong National Liberation Army, a “cartel”. While the group was born as a leftist Cuba-inspired guerrilla force in the 1960s, it has since become deeply involved in Colombia’s drug trade. Trump told Fox News that it would take time for Venezuela to get to a place where it can hold elections. US strikes on alleged drug boats in the eastern Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea have killed more than 100 people since they began in September. They formed part of a concerted pressure campaign on Maduro that culminated in his dramatic abduction by US forces. As part of that campaign, the US was understood to have conducted a strike on a docking area inside Venezuela, but land strikes would mark a significant escalation, with suggestions they could target cartels in Mexico. “We are going to start now hitting land with regard to the cartels. The cartels are running Mexico,” Trump told the broadcaster Sean Hannity on Fox News. Sibylla Brodzinsky, Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report

Growing protests in Iran do not necessarily herald a return to monarchy

Supporters of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s deposed shah, were claiming the crowds out in the streets of Iran were a direct response to his call to action. They described it as a referendum on his leadership and that the response showed he had won. Yet the issue of an alternative leadership for Iran remains unresolved. Many Iranians, eager to end the 47-year-long rule of the clerics, still view a return to monarchical rule with suspicion. On the international stage, Donald Trump has yet to endorse Pahlavi. Pahlavi’s supporters, including on the foreign satellite channels, highlight the many calls for the return of the shah being heard in the crowds. However, just as Trump did not rush to back the candidacy of the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, the US president is being equally cautious about Pahlavi, apparently fearing the US may end up entangled in a civil war. The lack of a clear alternative leadership or even a single set of political demands by the protesters, apart from ending corruption, repression and inflation, has been a boon to Pahlavi since he at least has name recognition and has nurtured support for the monarchy for decades. Others inside Iran capable of leading the country to a secular future, such as Narges Mohammadi and Mostafa Tajzadeh, have been locked in jail sporadically for years. One Iranian described Iran as living in an era of no manifesto politics. Pahlavi, calling on his supporters to take to the streets again on Friday, is due at an event in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, on Tuesday, but his team stressed he had not yet been granted a meeting with Trump, and the event, a Jerusalem prayer breakfast, was unconnected with the US president’s team. In a sign of Trump’s caution, the president has also avoided acting on his unspecific pledge to come to the aid of the Iranians if they were being attacked. Trump’s caution has led to reports the president may be exploring a deal with a breakaway group inside the government. Officials from Oman, traditional mediators between the US and Iran, are due in Tehran this weekend. Although desperation is setting in, there is no sign the panic that has swept parts of the government is forcing the supreme leader to rethink his determination to retain Iran’s uranium stockpile or aspirations to enrich uranium inside the country. For him it is a symbol of national sovereignty. But Trump may also be wary of a full embrace of Pahlavi since it is possible to misinterpret the calls for his return. In an internal analysis given to the Guardian, one Iranian said: “What is heard in the slogans today is not a call [to] return to the crown; it is an escape from a dead end. A society that has no way out retreats – not out of interest, but out of compulsion. This retreat is not a choice; it is the nervous reaction of a tired political body that no longer responds to prescriptions. “For decades, society was told to ‘wait’. It waited. It was told ‘it will be fixed’. It wasn’t fixed. It was told ‘it can’t get worse, it’s enough’. It got worse. Then they said ‘we have no alternative’. And this was precisely the moment when the street created its own alternative; not with classical rationality, but with the instinct for survival. “The monarchist slogan is not a declaration of love for Pahlavi: it is a declaration of disgust for the Islamic Republic. It is a cry of ‘no’ when no ’yes’ is available … Everyone is stuck in the past or in empty promises. When the horizon is empty, society looks back because it sees nothing ahead.” The Iranian Writers’ Association also called for caution about “externally imposed solutions”. “Freedom certainly will not fall from the sky with bombs and missiles from predatory powers. Those who have risen up against the status quo while maintaining their independence from domestic and foreign exploiters,” the group said. “Neither wait for repetition of an imaginary past and its heralds, nor wait for fake reformers.” Pahlavi has long been disliked by the left in Iran. The Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company, one of the most prominent independent unions, said on Wednesday it opposed “the reproduction of old and authoritarian forms of power”. “The path to liberation of workers does not lie through the path of a leader carved above the people nor by relying on foreign powers,” it added. Either way, the current reformist Iranian leadership, struggling to understand the evaporation of the nationalism created by the 12-day war in June, has few solutions left. It can rally the people against what it claims are foreign malice and rioters. It can hope somehow the technocrats in the economics ministry and Central Bank have gathered the resources to stabilise the currency. Ahmad Naghibzadeh, emeritus professor of political science at the University of Tehran, warned the solutions may no longer be technocratic, but historic. He told Euronews: “In the end, there will be no choice but to repeat in Iran what happened in Europe, that is, they decided the dispute between religion and state in favour of the state.”

EU states back controversial Mercosur deal with Latin American countries

European Union member states have backed the biggest ever free trade agreement with a group of Latin American countries, ending 25 years of negotiations but stoking further tensions with farmers and environmentalists around the bloc. The contentious Mercosur deal with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay prompted immediate protests in Poland, France, Greece and Belgium, with farmers blocking key roads in Paris, Brussels and Warsaw. Opposition parties in France from the far left and the far right also seized on the deal, agreed in principle on Friday, to try to topple Emmanuel Macron’s government with a motion tabled for a vote of no confidence. The member state approvals end months of wrangling in Brussels and a last-minute hitch before Christmas when Italy’s opposition threatened to collapse the deal. France, Poland, Austria, Ireland and Hungary voted against while Belgium abstained. Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, long seen as a key vote, backed it, allowing the landmark deal to be adopted under qualified majority voting rules. The European parliament must approve the deal to bring it into force, but as trade falls within the exclusive competence of the European Commission, its head, Ursula von der Leyen, is expected to travel to Paraguay on Monday to formally sign the agreement. Von der Leyen said the EU had listened to farmers, describing the deal as a “win-win agreement” yielding a €50bn opportunity to EU exporters by 2040 and €9bn growth to Mercosur countries. She also vowed to step up import controls to ensure EU standards on meat and other farm produce imports were upheld. Supporters of the deal say it will help deepen the EU’s economic cooperation with the global south, where China is already seeking alliances in the wake of the disruption Donald Trump has caused to the international trade order. It will also help the EU wean itself off China for critical minerals and rare earths vital for the auto and tech sectors as these elements are abundant in the Mercosur countries. Brazil accounts for about 20% of the world’s reserves of graphite, nickel, manganese and rare earths. But it also holds 94% of global reserves of niobium, a metal used in the aerospace industry, while Argentina is the third largest producer of lithium, a material used in batteries in electric vehicles. “The deal is not only about economics. Latin America is a region of intense competition for influence between western countries and China. Failing to sign the EU-Mercosur free trade agreement risked pushing Latin American economies closer to Beijing’s orbit. “The conclusion of the deal also signals that Europeans are serious about diversifying their export markets away from the US,” said Agathe Demarais, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, a leading thinktank. Farmers in beef, poultry and grain sectors claim they are collateral damage. “This will kill our agriculture in Poland,” Janusz Sampolski, a Polish farmer, told Agence France-Presse. “We will be dependent on supply chains from other countries,” he said, adding that it could threaten Poland’s food security “in the event of the threat of war”. The Climate Action Network said the deal was not only about tariffs and quotas but would “drive deforestation” and “worsen human rights conditions in some of the world’s most sensitive ecosystems” with incentives to farm more beef and soy and timber for paper in deforestation-prone areas.

Syrian army says it will renew Aleppo attacks after Kurds reject ceasefire terms

Syria’s army says it will renew attacks against a Kurdish-majority district of Aleppo where clashes have raged this week, after Kurdish groups rejected Damascus’s ceasefire terms that demanded their fighters withdraw from the city. The army said it would target military sites used by Kurdish fighters in the Sheikh Maqsoud district, announcing the opening of a humanitarian corridor from 4pm (1300 GMT) to 6pm on Friday for civilians to leave. The government and Kurdish forces have traded blame over who started the fighting on Tuesday, which came as they struggled to implement a deal reached last March to merge the Kurds’ administration and military into Syria’s new government. Tens of thousands of people have fled the fighting, which was the most intense in the country for more than six months and killed at least 21 people. Earlier on Friday, Syria’s government had announced a ceasefire that came into effect at 3am local time. Under the terms of the ceasefire, Kurdish militants were to leave the three contested neighbourhoods of Sheikh Maqsoud, Ashrafieh and Bani Zaid, where clashes were happening. They would be provided safe passage to the north-east of the country, which is controlled by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and be allowed to take light arms with them. In a statement, Kurdish councils that run the Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafieh districts of Aleppo said calls to leave were “a call to surrender” and that Kurdish forces would “defend their neighbourhoods”, accusing government forces of intense shelling. A resident of Aleppo said the fighting appeared to cease overnight and footage from within the contested neighbourhoods showed that gunfire, which was constant over the last few days, had stopped. Members of the government security forces posted videos showing clearing operations being conducted in some of the neighbourhoods, as well as videos of underground tunnels being inspected that the SDF have used to transport fighters and weapons beneath Aleppo. Relations between the Syrian government and the SDF, which holds about a third of Syria’s territory, have worsened in recent months. The two sides signed a deal for the SDF to be integrated into Syria’s new army by the end of last year, but negotiations to implement the agreement ground to a halt. The government in Damascus has styled the SDF as a separatist entity undermining the unity of the Syrian state, while the SDF has described the new government as “jihadists” and expressed fears about the safety of ethnic and religious minorities under its rule. Aleppo, where the SDF controlled a pocket of Kurdish-majority neighbourhoods otherwise surrounded by the Syrian government, had been a flashpoint for months. The latest round of fighting has deepened divisions between the two sides, with the SDF leader, Mazloum Abdi, saying that the last few days of conflict had undermined “the chances of reaching understandings”. The Syrian government also said in a statement that government control needed to be extended over the entirety of Syria, and the monopoly of violence remain with the state, to “preserve the unity of Syria”. Both sides have accused the other of committing war crimes over the past three days, with the SDF saying Damascus was guilty of ethnic cleansing and the crime of forced displacement by ordering civilians to leave their homes ahead of shelling. The government in Damascus claimed the SDF was using civilians as human shields and of sniping at people who attempted to leave the neighbourhoods via the humanitarian passages set up by the government. The SDF is backed by the US, which for years equipped and armed the Kurdish force in its fight against Islamic State in Syria. The US has tried to mediate a merger between the SDF and the new government in Damascus for months, but little has changed on the ground since the fall of President Bashar al-Assad last year. Turkey, one of Damascus’s key backers, views the SDF as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), a Kurdish separatist group with which it has fought a gruelling 40-year insurgency. Turkey has said it is ready to assist the Syrian government if it requests it. “The SDF’s insistence on protecting what it has at all costs is the biggest obstacle to achieving peace and stability in Syria,” the Turkish foreign minister, Hakan Fidan, said in a press conference on Thursday. The status of the SDF and the swathes of the country it holds remains a sticking point with Damascus, which is seeking to fully consolidate its control over Syria. Agence France-Presse and Reuters contributed to this report

Le Constellation bar co-owner arrested as Switzerland honours victims of Crans-Montana fire – as it happened

… and on that note, it’s a wrap for today! The co-owner of the Swiss bar Constellation which saw a fire kill 40 during a New Year’s celebration, Jacques Moretti, was arrested and is held in custody after being questioned by prosecutors on Friday morning (15:33, 15:43, 16:16). Switzerland held a national day of mourning on Friday, commemorating the victims of the fire with church bells ringing across the country for five minutes, and a minute of silence (16:04). The Swiss media reported that the decision to detain Moretti was taken after a six-hour hearing, with prosecutors worried about him posing a flight risk (16:42). In other news, Russia’s military has fired its new hypersonic Oreshnik missile at a target in Ukraine during a massive overnight strike, leaving hundreds of thousands without energy and heat as temperatures plummet in the country (9:30, 9:38). Ukrainian prime minister Yulia Svyrydenko accused Russia of “energy terror,” as the effects of the attack caused widespread disruption (9:53) and prompted Kyiv mayor to urge people to temporarily evacuate from the capital (11:19, 14:37). European leaders condemned the attack, calling Russian strikes ‘escalatory and unacceptable,’ with Kremlin “using fabricated allegations to justify the attack” (12:05, 14:16, 14:57, 15:13). And in Brussels, European Union member states have backed the biggest ever free trade agreement with a group of Latin American countries (12:15), ending 25 years of negotiations but stoking further tensions with farmers and environmentalists around the bloc (13:10, 13:57). France (15:28) and Poland were among the most prominent critics of the deal, but Italy’s change of heart was enough to unblock the agreement (15:27). But Germany led the line of countries happy with the end of the 25-year negotiation process (12:45). And that’s all from me, Jakub Krupa, for today. If you have any tips, comments or suggestions, email me at jakub.krupa@theguardian.com. I am also on Bluesky at @jakubkrupa.bsky.social and on X at @jakubkrupa.

‘An incomprehensible nightmare’: grief turns to anger over Swiss bar fire as Le Constellation owner arrested

Like many young people across Switzerland, Kenzo Ronnow, a university student in Lausanne, slept in on 1 January after celebrating the new year. But as he scrolled through his phone soon after waking, he saw the lead story of a foreign news website was about Switzerland. A fire had ripped through Le Constellation, a bar in Crans-Montana, an Alpine ski resort in Switzerland’s Valais canton and a customary haunt for New Year’s Eve revellers. One of the two bar owners was on Friday taken into custody. At first, the 19-year-old struggled to grasp what was happening. “They were talking about lots of people being dead,” he said. “I was really surprised, also because Switzerland isn’t often in the news.” He was with his flatmate, who asked Ronnow to read the story aloud to her. “That’s when she said her little brother was in Crans-Montana for New Year’s Eve.” A frantic call was made to her sibling, who had celebrated the new year in Le Constellation but left at about 1.15am, just 15 minutes before the fire broke out. Similar scrambles for the whereabouts of family and friends played out across Switzerland as the horror of the tragedy, one of the worst in the country’s recent history, began to sink in. Eight days have passed and the country is still struggling to process the scale of the event. A national day of mourning was observed on Friday and a memorial ceremony attended by top European officials, including the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and his Italian counterpart, Sergio Mattarella, was held in a town close to Crans-Montana. Swiss authorities have confirmed the total death toll at 40, the majority in their teens and 20s – the youngest 14 – and mostly from Switzerland, France and Italy. A further 116 were injured, 83 of whom are still being treated in hospital for severe burns. Anger and dismay have meanwhile mounted as details on the cause of the fire and staggering lapses in safety procedures emerged. Jacques and Jessica Moretti, the owners of the bar, are under investigation for manslaughter through negligence. Mr Moretti was arrested and held in custody after the couple were questioned by prosecutors in Sion on Friday morning, a source told the Guardian. The couple, who bought the bar in 2015 before renovating it, have denied any wrongdoing and in a statement this week said they were “devastated and overwhelmed with grief” while promising “full cooperation” with the investigation. Authorities said the fire started in the bar’s crammed basement room after sparklers attached to champagne bottles were held too close to a ceiling believed to have been clad with soundproofing foam. A haunting image shared on social media showed a female server sitting on the shoulders of a male colleague holding a bottle with sparklers in each hand before the flames caught the ceiling. The woman was among those who died. The investigation is focusing on renovations made to the bar, the fire-extinguishing systems and escape routes, as well as the number of people in the building when the fire started. In an astonishing admission on Tuesday, Nicolas Féraud, the mayor of Crans-Montana, said no safety inspections had been made on the premises since 2019. He could not explain why the annual inspections were not done despite the procedure being required by local law. “We’re profoundly sorry, and I know how hard that will be for the families,” Féraud said, adding that his administration wanted to show “full transparency”. Lawyers representing the families of those who died or were injured in the tragedy have accused investigators of not moving quickly enough to secure crucial evidence. As firefighters worked to extinguish the blaze, Romain Jordan and Ronald Asmar, lawyers with the Geneva-based firm Merkt, claimed that the bar’s owners appeared to have deactivated its Instagram and Facebook accounts, in the process “deleting pictures and videos that could have been useful to the investigation”. The Guardian has contacted the couple’s lawyers for comment. “This attitude should have alerted the prosecutors immediately,” added Jordan, who alongside Asmar was present during the Morettis’ questioning on Friday. He claimed authorities initially tried to keep lawyers representing families out of the hearing. “The authorities are only now starting to take the full measure of the investigation.” Jordan said that everyone, especially those living in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, had been “personally affected [by the tragedy] at some level or another”. “The first tier of this tragedy is seeing young lives ending in this way, or being hurt and bearing scars for ever,” he said. “Then you quickly understand that it perhaps happened because of human mistakes … and the worst thing is that the authorities were perhaps complacent. So all of these layers add up to an incomprehensible nightmare, making it difficult to accept.” He added: “The whole world is looking at us because, if it can happen in Switzerland, one of the richest countries in the world, where could it not happen? What led to this tragedy and how can we make sure that that it never happens anywhere else?” Authorities are already taking heed. As thousands of bars, restaurants and nightspots were checked in Crans-Montana and surrounding towns, new safety measures were announced in Vaud canton, where Lausanne is located. As normal life resumes after the Christmas and New Year holiday, the tragedy is still dominating conversations. “It’s definitely on everyone’s minds, and with all the other stuff happening all of a sudden in the world, people are overwhelmed,” said Ronnow. “But what has been super shocking for me and a lot of others is that, even though the attention has been on Le Constellation, it could easily have happened elsewhere. When I go to a nightclub it is really common to see bottles with sparklers. There’s now a big push to check safety regulations, but people are thinking: ‘It could have been me.’”

‘A more convenient dictatorship’: fear and uncertainty in Venezuela after fall of Maduro

Freddy Guevara will never forget the 34 excruciating days he spent inside Venezuela’s most notorious political prison after being snatched by masked men from Nicolás Maduro’s intelligence agency. The black hood, the interrogations, the stress positions, the salsa music his captors blasted at him in an attempt to make him crack. “It was horrible … You don’t know what is going to happen,” recalled the 39-year-old opposition leader who was forced into exile after eventually being released. “It was the Covid era and they told me that if I didn’t give them the passwords [to my phone] they’d go to my grandma’s house and give her Covid and she would die,” Guevara said. Nearly five years after winning back his freedom, Guevara had hoped the approximately 1,000 political prisoners still languishing behind bars in Venezuela – some in overcrowded, rat-infested cells – might also be released after Maduro’s dramatic capture by US troops last weekend. On Tuesday, Donald Trump hinted that El Helicoide – the spectacular brutalist shopping mall turned jailhouse where Guevara was held – was entering its final days. “They have a torture chamber in the middle of Caracas that they are closing up,” the US president claimed as Maduro found himself behind bars after being abducted from a military base. Two days later, Venezuelan authorities announced the release of a “significant number” of Venezuelan and foreign prisoners and several prominent figures emerged from El Helicoide, including the Spanish-Venezuelan activist Rocío San Miguel and the former presidential candidate, Enrique Márquez. “This is a very important and smart gesture,” Trump said. But a week after the US’s audacious – and, to many experts, illegal night-time raid – there were few other signs of a major political thaw. Instead, many detected an even more draconian atmosphere as the South American country’s “new” regime – led by Maduro’s vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez – sought to assert its authority and deter unrest after the operation, which Venezuela’s interior minister said left 100 people dead. Kalashnikov-carrying masked civilians roamed the disconcertingly quiet streets of Venezuela’s capital on motorbikes. Security forces set up checkpoints and scoured citizens’ phones for compromising, anti-regime material. Journalists were detained, deported and barred from entering Venezuela to witness the latest moment of upheaval for a country reeling from years of hyperinflation, hunger, political instability and a refugee crisis that has driven eight million people to flee abroad. In 23 de Enero, a working-class area in Caracas long considered a bastion of regime support, members of paramilitary groups called colectivos imposed an informal curfew. “After 6pm you don’t see anyone in the streets,” said one local describing how those groups were recruiting and arming homeless people and drug addicts to join their patrols. “People are afraid something else might happen and their kids might be out on the street,” the woman added. The fear stretched right across Venezuela, from Caracas near the Caribbean to the western border with Colombia, in the foothills of the Andes. There, a 57-year-old entrepreneur implored the Guardian not to broadcast an audio recording of his voice lest it lead to his identification and arrest. “We’re happy about the news [of Maduro’s capture] but we can’t show it because it’s dangerous … You can’t even publish anything [on social media],” the man confided as he crossed from the Venezuelan border town of San Antonio del Táchira into Cúcuta in Colombia on foot. The man complained that while US special forces had decapitated the monster by seizing Maduro, its body remained in the form of Venezuela’s new rulers. “Our hope is that they come back for the rest of the body,” he added, although he was unsure that would happen. When news of Maduro’s capture broke early last Saturday, government opponents were euphoric, believing Venezuela was finally entering the “new era” of democracy and reconstruction promised by the opposition leader María Corina Machado, the Nobel laureate they expected to lead that change. But those hopes were soon dashed as Trump announced he would recognise Rodríguez, one of Maduro’s closest allies, and work with the remnants of his regime to “stabilise” the country. Machado, whose movement is widely believed to have won the 2024 presidential election, was sidelined. “It’s the same regime – [this was] just a leadership change. But instead of being a palace coup, it was an external coup,” said Tom Shannon, a veteran US diplomat who has worked with Venezuela since the 90s and was ambassador to Brazil. “We removed a leader and then chose the next one – but it’s the same gang.” Andrés Izarra, a minister under Maduro’s late mentor, Hugo Chávez, who now lives in exile, agreed. “Trump rewrote regime change. Now it’s regime capture,” he said, describing how the White House had simply delegated control of Venezuela to Maduro’s main allies, led by Rodríguez and her brother Jorge, the powerful president of the national assembly. The US emphasised its hostile takeover of Venezuela’s government this week, with the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, telling reporters: “Their decisions are going to continue to be dictated by the United States of America.” “Trump conquered an oil hacienda … and hired the Rodríguez siblings to run it for him,” Izarra said, pointing to Trump’s admission that he sought “total access” to Venezuela’s oil reserves, the world’s largest. “This has nothing to do with democracy or a transition to democracy,” Izarra added. “That’s all bullshit. This is all about power and enrichment.” On Wednesday, the US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, outlined a three-phase strategy for Venezuela’s future under Washington’s tutelage: stabilisation, recovery and reconciliation, and political transition. “We feel like we are moving forward here in a very positive way,” Rubio said. But observers see a treacherous road ahead as Maduro’s successors jockey for power and struggle to understand who betrayed their leader. CIA agents had infiltrated Maduro’s regime to such a degree that the US was reportedly able to pinpoint “how he moved, where he lived, where he travelled, what he ate, what he wore [and] what were his pets”. “My guess is that the Cubans are hard at work on that,” Shannon said of the counterintelligence hunt for culprits. Izarra suspected Maduro’s capture had plunged his former government colleagues into a maelstrom of distrust. “If they were paranoid and untrusting of each other before, I can’t imagine how it is now … These guys [must be] sitting around a table with their daggers behind their backs.” The disorientation was underlined on Monday night when gunfire rang out near the presidential palace, leading many to speculate that a secondary coup to remove Rodríguez was afoot. Later, it emerged that police and paramilitaries had exchanged fire after being spooked by the presence of government drones. Moisés Naím, a former minister from the early 90s who lives in exile, said predicting how long Rodríguez’s reign would last was impossible. “She can be out as we speak or she can stay for 10 years,” he said, lamenting how Trump had “essentially thrown María Corina Machado under the bus” to embrace members of the old regime. “At the beginning, I was exhilarated, overjoyed [at the possibility of being] able to go back to my country,” said Naím, who has not returned for 15 years. But almost immediately, as the focus turned to the US’s thirst for oil rather than democracy, Naím realised it had merely been “a hiccup of happiness”. “The situation today is almost indistinguishable [from before]. You really have to use a magnifying glass to try to find differences,” said Benjamin Gedan, the director of the Latin America Program at Washington’s Stimson Center and the national security council’s former South America chief. “This is just a more convenient dictatorship … It was an unfriendly dictatorship and now it’s a friendly one … It would be like picking a different crown prince in Saudi Arabia.” This week’s prisoner release provided some encouragement to Venezuelans yearning for genuine change, although by Friday lunchtime, only a tiny fraction of those incarcerated had been freed. As he crossed into Cúcuta from Venezuela, passing three armoured personnel carriers guarding against unrest, Ricardo Alcalá voiced optimism over his country’s new direction. “We’re into the last season of the series,” predicted the 42-year-old journalist who had driven for two days across the country from the city of Barcelona to collect a relative returning home from Chile. How would the series end? “We don’t know,” Alcalá replied. “The truth is, nobody knows anything.”