What Maduro’s threat to ‘liberate’ Puerto Rico says about US-Venezuelan ties under Trump 2.0

The message seemed designed to reach Washington as one administration prepares to hand the baton to the next: If the United States keeps messing with Venezuela, then Caracas will retaliate by “liberating” the US territory of Puerto Rico, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro claimed last week.

The message seemed designed to reach Washington as one administration prepares to hand the baton to the next: If the United States keeps messing with Venezuela, then Caracas will retaliate by “liberating” the US territory of Puerto Rico, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro claimed last week. Notwithstanding the fact that a majority of Puerto Ricans voted in favor of becoming a US state in a nonbinding referendum, or that the last time a Venezuelan army ventured abroad was in the Independence Wars over two hundred years ago, Maduro swaggered as if he were ready to send troops across the sea to the cradle of raggaetón, an imagined not-so-welcome message to President-elect Donald Trump, just 10 days before his inauguration. Pundits in Venezuela and Latin America watchers abroad are used to this type of rhetoric and see it as a taste of a spicy relationship to come between Washington and Caracas in the years of Trump 2.0. The relationship will probably revolve around three crucial issues: oil, migration, and ideology. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world and supplies crude oil to the US, particularly to refineries on the Gulf Coast. It is the origin point of more than eight million Venezuelans who have fled the country under Maduro’s regime. Then there’s the matter of his authoritarian socialist state – on the far side of the ideological spectrum from Trump’s rightwing MAGA movement. The governor of Puerto Rico Jenniffer Gonzalez swiftly denounced Maduro’s words as “not only a blatant threat of military aggression against the US, but also an incitement against peace and stability in our region.” But Indira Urbaneja, a political consultant aligned with the Maduro government, said it was “more a provocation than anything else.”