A secretive U.S. military unit is responsible for a stunning overnight raid that captured Venezuela’s president on Washington’s behalf.
The Army’s elite Delta Force, which dragged Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife out of their beds early Saturday, is part of the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command.
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Founded in 1977 and based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the Delta Force has for decades been rumored to be a part of high-stakes operations targeting foreign foes, from Colombian cartel leader Pablo Escobar to Mexican drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
But while details about the unit’s activity, which is often centered around counter-terrorist efforts in collaboration with the CIA, largely fly under the radar, President Donald Trump’s public remarks on the lightning strikes Saturday morning made a rare break with precedent as he appeared to confirm the Delta Force carried out the Venezuela operation that toppled Maduro’s regime.
“They’re the most highly trained soldiers in the world,” the president said during an interview on Fox and Friends in which he revealed the military practiced for he operation by building an “identical” replica of the house where Maduro and his wife were captured. The couple is headed to New York, where they have been indicted by the Justice Department on charges including narco-terrorism conspiracy charges.
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“They got taken out in a matter of seconds. I’ve never seen anything like it,” Trump said during his first remarks on television on the strikes Saturday morning. “I mean, everything was pinpoint, every single day, and everything they practiced, they actually built a house which was identical to the one they went into.”
The U.S. invasion of Venezuela this weekend bears certain uncanny resemblances to another Latin American operation that took place over three decades ago. Delta Force was among the U.S. forces involved in an operation that toppled Panamanian General Manuel Noriega from power on Jan. 3, 1990, 36 years to the day U.S. forces abducted Maduro.
A few years after Panama, the Delta Force was also rumored to have assassinated Pablo Escobar, a Colombian cartel leader believed to be smuggling at least 80% of the cocaine into the U.S. at the time.
The Delta Force was also called into action during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, including during the initial hunt for Osama bin Laden and the successful military mission that captured former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003.
In the wake of the deadly 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, Delta Force played a crucial role in securing American personnel through Operation Juniper Shield. Operation Red Dawn: Locating and capturing Saddam Hussein.
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Delta Force members also reportedly undergirded efforts to apprehend Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the infamous Mexican drug lord. A joint U.S.-Mexican operation resulted in the successful recapture of El Chapo through Operation Black Swan in January 2016, after he staged a stunning escape from a federal prison the previous year.
After Trump authorized special forces to attack Venezuela, he said the U.S. is going to “run” the country until “we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” during a Saturday press conference at Mar-a-Lago. He promised a “second wave” of “much larger” attacks on Venezuela “if we need to do so.”
“We want peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela, and that includes many from Venezuela that are now living in the United States and want to go back to their country as their homeland,” Trump told reporters. “We can’t take a chance that somebody else takes over Venezuela that doesn’t have the good of the Venezuelan people in mind … we don’t want to be involved with having somebody else get in, and we have the same situation that we had for the last long period of years.”
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The Maduros are set to stand trial in New York, “where the overwhelming evidence of their crimes will be presented in a court of law,” the president added, citing the crimes of Tren de Aragua gang members against U.S. citizens.
“The gangs that they [the Maduro regime] sent raped, tortured, and murdered Americans … they were sent by Maduro to terrorize our people, and now Maduro will never again be able to threaten an American citizen or anybody from Venezuela,” Trump said.
