President Donald Trump slapped Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro with a blunt, take-it-or-leave-it exit deal before shutting down the country’s skies, the Miami Herald reported — a high-stakes gambit that’s now rattling Caracas and signaling the regime’s most dangerous moment yet.
According to the outlet, Washington delivered its warning in a tense phone call offering safe evacuation for Maduro, his wife Cilia Flores, and their son. The catch: he had to step down immediately.
Talks fizzled fast. U.S. officials said Maduro tried to haggle for “global amnesty for any crimes he and his group had committed, and that was rejected.” He also pushed to keep control of the armed forces, mirroring the deal struck in Nicaragua in 1991 with Violeta Chamorro.
Washington said no, and demanded Maduro resign on the spot. He refused.
Within hours, the Trump administration escalated. On Saturday, the president declared Venezuelan airspace “closed in its entirety,” a move that hit Caracas like a thunderclap. The Herald reported that Maduro’s government attempted to schedule another call with Washington, but got radio silence.
Now, experts say the regime is staring down its most serious threat yet.
“I think the operations will start imminently,” former Venezuelan diplomat Vanessa Neumann told Fox News Digital. She called the airspace shutdown “a very clear public warning that missiles might be coming to take out command and control infrastructure or retaliatory infrastructure.”
“This will not be like breaking a jar into a thousand pieces, this is where you can lift the concentration of power, and it’s easier to manage,” she said.
Neumann added that U.S. operatives have spent years mapping targets. “So they’re well-mapped. This is a capture-or-kill scenario, but there’s a limit to how many people you can remove quickly.”
Still, when pressed Sunday aboard Air Force One, Trump told reporters not to “read anything into” the declaration of closed airspace when asked if a strike was imminent.
Neumann warned that the regime is in no shape to withstand a fight. “Maduro also doesn’t have that many options, and his military is very weak,” she said. “You can’t go after 30 people simultaneously, who are spread all around, but certainly high on the list would be Maduro himself.”
Venezuela’s armed forces, once feared across the region, are now a hollow shell after years of graft, defections, sanctions, and rotting hardware.
“Their material is extremely old, decayed, and has not been serviced,” Neumann said. “They’ve got junk from the Russians. The stuff they originally had from the Americans is decades old and has not been serviced. So, they have neither the personnel, foreign support, nor the material.”
Just before sealing the country’s skies, Washington officially designated the Cartel de los Soles — the shadowy network allegedly tied to Maduro’s government — as a foreign terrorist organization.
