The prospect of the United States seizing direct control of Venezuela appeared to recede on Sunday after the shocking seizure of President Nicolás Maduro – but US officials said Washington was keeping a 15,000-strong force in the Caribbean and might make a fresh military intervention if Venezuela’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, did not accommodate their demands.
While Rodríguez kept up a defiant tone in public, the substance of conversations she had had in private with US officials was not clear.
In the aftermath of Maduro’s abduction on Saturday, Donald Trump said the US would “run” the South American country of 30 million people. On Sunday he warned Rodríguez to heed US wishes. “If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro,” he told the Atlantic.
Rodríguez, 56, had on Saturday pledged fealty to Maduro and condemned his capture as an “atrocity” but the New York Times reported that Trump officials several weeks ago identified the technocrat as a potential successor and business partner partly on the basis of her relationship with Wall Street and oil companies.
A TV and telephone tower destroyed in the US raid on Caracas on Saturday. Photograph: Maxwell Briceno/Reuters
The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, spoke to Rodríguez, who told him “‘we’ll do whatever you need’”, Trump told reporters. “She, I think, was quite gracious, but she really doesn’t have a choice.”
In the capital, Caracas, senior government and military figures demanded the return of Maduro but pledged support for Rodríguez as a stand-in leader and called for a return to normality.
“I call on the people of Venezuela to resume their activities of all kinds, economic, work and education, in the coming days,” Vladimir Padrino López, the defence minister, said in a televised address.
Maduro’s son, Nicolás Ernesto Maduro Guerra, said his father’s supporters are more resolved than ever to support the ousted president, according to an audio shared on social media.
“They will not see us weak,” Maduro Guerra said. “The president, Nicolás Maduro, will return. He will return. It’s been a day of shock, of course, we’re all in shock.
“But we will take to the streets, we will convene the people, we will unite, we will form a nucleus around our highest political-military command with maximum unity.”
Venezuelan opposition figure Edmundo González Urrutia said Maduro’s ousting was “an important step, but not enough” to return the crisis-hit nation to normal.
“This moment represents an important step, but it is not enough,” he said in a post on Instagram from exile in Spain.
Trump said the US may intervene in other countries. “We do need Greenland, absolutely.” Katie Miller, the wife of Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, posted a social media picture of Greenland painted in the colours of the US flag, and the word “soon”, prompting a protest from Greenland’s prime minister.
In a round of TV interviews Rubio downplayed the possibility of invasion or occupation of Venezuela. “There’s not a war. I mean, we are at war against drug trafficking organisations, not a war against Venezuela. We don’t have US forces on the ground,” he told NBC.
Troops were in Caracas for two hours in a “law enforcement function” that did not require congressional approval, he said. “This was not an invasion. This was not an extended military operation.”
The US will keep a “quarantine” around Venezuela to block the entry and exit of oil tankers under American sanctions to sustain “leverage” over Maduro’s successor, said Rubio. “We are going to make our assessment on the basis of what they do, not what they say publicly.”
The US had “multiple levers of influence” to respond if Venezuela’s leaders did not make the “right” decisions, said Rubio. He said the Cuban government – Venezuela’s main ally – was a “huge problem” and in a “lot of trouble” but declined to elaborate.
Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas and the chair of the Senate intelligence committee, also rowed back on Trump’s vow to run Venezuela, saying there were “still a lot of questions to be answered” about what happens next.
The governments of Spain, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay said in a joint statement that US actions “constitute an extremely dangerous precedent for peace and regional security and endanger the civilian population”. Keir Starmer said Britain was not involved in the attack but refused to condemn it.
All EU countries except Hungary issued a statement calling for restraint by “all actors” and respect for the will of the Venezuelan people in order to “restore democracy”.
In Caracas some shops and cafes reopened in a semblance of normality while authorities counted the cost of Saturday’s raid.
Large queues formed outside stores in Venezuela’s capital as anxious residents stocked up on basic supplies, apprehensive about what the future might bring and the possibility – suggested by Trump – that there could be a “second wave” of attacks.
“It’s the same everywhere, there are queues in the supermarkets, there are queues in the bakeries, queues at the pharmacy,” said one 71-year-old pensioner who was one of 20 people lined up outside a small family grocery market in north-east Caracas on Sunday morning.
“There’s so much uncertainty because people don’t know what might happen in the coming days and nobody wants to see another situation like the early hours of Saturday or to be caught with their pants down and an empty fridge,” added the man, who asked not to be named.
His 68-year-old wife, who also declined to give her name, fought back tears as she pondered Venezuela’s latest crisis. “I just hope things return to normal. That there can be dialogue. That we can have peaceful lives. That there is no big disaster and that nobody dies,” she said.
Outside one of Venezuela’s largest supermarket chains in Petare, on the east side of Caracas, a young couple waited in a 100-person-long line outside a supermarket in order to stock up on milk, butter and flour. So many people had flocked there that supermarket workers were letting in shoppers in groups.
“[I feel] angry,” said the 23-year-old woman, who gave only her first name, Sauriany. “They don’t have the right to meddle like this in another country and to do whatever they like,” she said of the US raid.
Her 24-year-old partner, a lineworker called Leandro, said the streets near their house were deserted as parents kept their children at home for fear of what might happen over the coming days. “There are so many rumours – that they [the Americans] might return … It was terrible on Saturday. All those explosions. The planes,” he said.
In neighbouring Colombia there was deep unease too, with its president, Gustavo Petro, ordering 30,000 troops to its eastern border with Venezuela in case there was violence or a sudden influx of refugees.
Padrino López said “a large part” of Maduro’s security team, as well as soldiers and civilians, died. One unverified report estimated the number killed at 40. The minister said the armed forces will resist “imperial aggression” and ensure independence and sovereignty despite the “cowardly kidnapping” of Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.
The White House shared footage of the deposed dictator handcuffed and doing a “perp walk” to Drug Enforcement Administration offices in New York before being taken to the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal facility in Brooklyn.
Nicolás Maduro at the offices of the Drug Enforcement Administration in New York on Saturday. Photograph: @RapidResponse47/Reuters
Authorities unsealed a four-count indictment that charges Maduro with narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine. It also charges Flores, their son and two Venezuelan officials and an alleged leader of Tren de Aragua, a gang the Trump administration has designed a terrorist organisation. Maduro is due to appear in a Manhattan federal court on Monday for arraignment.
The prosecution will deepen the humiliation felt by Maduro loyalists and complicate the balancing act faced by his successor.
Rodríguez, who served as vice-president and oil minister until her boss’s removal, must juggle Washington’s demands for oil and security guarantees with a regime that retains vestiges of the socialism and anti-imperialism of its late founder, Hugo Chávez.
The powerful interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, pledged loyalty to Maduro but tacitly backed the interim president. “Here, the unity of the revolutionary force is more than guaranteed,” he said in an audio clip released by the ruling PSUV party.
The Trump administration’s apparent satisfaction with regime tweak, rather than regime change, has dismayed those Venezuelans who hoped Maduro’s downfall would usher in democracy.
Trump was dismissive about the opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, the Nobel peace prize winner who mobilised Edmundo González’s winning presidential campaign last year, and said she lacked “support” in Venezuela. Millions of Venezuelans revere Machado but she is loathed by the military hierarchy that props up the regime.
Chavistas march in Caracas on Sunday to protest against the capture of President Maduro. Photograph: Ronald Pena R/EPA
Rubio said the US wanted a transition to democracy but ruled out elections in the short term and said those in charge of Venezuela’s military and police apparatus needed to decide in which direction they go. “We hope they will chose a different direction than the one Nicolás Maduro picked. Ultimately we hope this leads to a holistic transition.”
In Caracas joggers and cyclists reappeared on streets but residents expressed nervousness and uncertainty about the future.