After almost a decade of threats against Venezuela, President Donald Trump said on Saturday that US forces had infiltrated the country and extracted the country’s authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro and his wife.
Below is the history of US relations with Venezuela from 2017, during Trump’s first term in office, onwards.
July 2017
Maduro, who succeeded the late revolutionary socialist Hugo Chávez in 2013, holds a widely criticised referendum to elect a Constituent Assembly that would sideline the opposition-led legislature.
August 2017
In response, Trump says “a military option is certainly something that we could pursue” in Venezuela. “We have troops all over the world in places that are very far away. Venezuela is not very far away and the people are suffering and they are dying.”
The White House begins to tighten sanctions on Caracas, blocking the government and state oil company from accessing US financial markets.
May 2018
Maduro is re-elected for a second six-year term in a vote described by the US as an “insult to democracy”.
Washington announces three more sets of sanctions against Venezuela between March and November 2018.
January 2019
Maduro is sworn in for his second term. Two weeks later, the US recognises Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the country’s interim president, swiftly followed by Brazil, Colombia and other Latin American countries.
The US imposes sanctions on Venezuelan state oil company Petróleos de Venezuela.
April 2019
Guaidó calls on the military to topple Maduro’s regime, telling Venezuelans to take to the streets. The effort quickly fizzles out.
John Bolton, US national security adviser, tells reporters that the US’s “primary objective was a peaceful transfer of power”. But he added: “All options remain on the table.”
August 2019
Washington freezes the Maduro government’s assets in the US and restricts Americans’ transactions with the regime.
March 2020
The US charges Maduro and allies with narco-terrorism and drug trafficking.
May 2020
Trump denies involvement in an apparent coup attempt by mercenaries, saying: “If I wanted to go into Venezuela I wouldn’t make a secret about it . . . it would be called an invasion.”
2021-2025: Joe Biden’s presidency
Biden largely maintains Trump’s sanctions on Venezuela but grants Chevron a licence to produce and export crude in November 2022.
In December 2022, Venezuela’s opposition removes Guaidó as leader. He goes into exile in Miami in April 2023.
The Biden administration temporarily relaxes sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry in the run-up to elections in 2024 in a bid to secure a “free and fair” contest from Maduro. But sanctions are reimposed after Maduro bans popular opposition leader María Corina Machado from running and harasses opposition activists.
In July 2024, Maduro is declared the winner of the election without a detailed breakdown of the results being published. The opposition, which carried out an independently verified parallel count of voting tally receipts, claims that Machado’s stand-in candidate Edmundo González is the winner by a margin of two to one. The US and several allies recognise González’s victory.
January 2025
The outgoing Biden administration, alongside the EU and UK, imposes fresh personal sanctions on Venezuelan officials, including Maduro.
Trump takes office and signs an executive order paving the way to designating drug cartels, including Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua, as “foreign terrorist organisations”.
Maduro releases six US prisoners and commits to accepting thousands of deported Venezuelan migrants following negotiations with Trump’s envoy Richard Grenell.
February 2025
The White House formally designates cartels as terrorist organisations.
Trump cancels the Chevron drilling licence granted by Biden, calling it a “concession agreement” to the regime.
March 2025
Trump threatens to impose a 25 per cent tariff on countries buying oil from Venezuela. He cancels licences that permit other western companies, such as Italy’s Eni, to work in the country.
April 2025
The White House blocks BP and Shell from projects that involve drilling liquefied natural gas in Venezuelan waters to supply Trinidad and Tobago’s energy and petrochemical industry.
May 2025
The US extracts five Venezuelan opposition members who had taken refuge in the Argentine embassy in Caracas, and brings them to US soil.
July 2025
The White House reverses curbs on Chevron’s drilling as key administration officials clash on Venezuela policy.
August 2025
The White House begins to deploy warships and thousands of sailors near Venezuela in what it calls an effort to combat drug trafficking. It doubles the bounty for Maduro’s capture to $50mn.
September 2025
The US starts to strike alleged drug-transporting vessels off Venezuela’s coast. “Anyone else trafficking in those waters who we know is a designated narco-terrorist will face the same fate,” says US defence secretary Pete Hegseth.
October 2025
As US attacks on vessels continue, Trump says he is “certainly” looking at land strikes on Venezuela. “We’ve almost totally stopped it by sea. Now we’ll stop it by land.”
The deployment grows to about 10,000 troops, eight warships, a nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine and F-35 fighter jets.
Trump says Maduro has “offered everything” to the US “because he doesn’t want to fuck around with the United States”.
November 2025
Maduro cracks down on internal opposition, deploys paramilitaries and tightens his personal security, which includes a unit of Cuban bodyguards.
The US moves to designate Venezuela’s “Cartel of the Suns” as a foreign terrorist organisation, alleging that Maduro is its leader.
Trump announces the closure of Venezuelan airspace. The US administration is alleged to have committed a war crime by killing survivors of a boat strike.
December 2025
Hegseth invokes the “fog of war” to explain the killing of boat strike survivors.
The US begins an oil blockade, intercepting three tankers. Trump calls the naval deployment the “largest armada ever assembled in the history of South America”.
Trump says the US has carried out an attack on a Venezuelan “dock area”.
“There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs,” he said. “We hit all the boats and now we hit . . . the implementation area.”
January 2026
The US imposes sanctions on four traders allegedly shipping Venezuelan oil.
The US says it has attacked Caracas, captured Maduro and extracted him from Venezuela.