US President Donald Trump said on Sunday that the United States might launch a second military strike on Venezuela following the capture of President Nicolas Maduro if remaining members of the administration do not cooperate with his efforts to get the country fixed.
Trump's comments to reporters aboard Air Force One raised the possibility of further US military interventions in Latin America, and suggested Colombia and Mexico could also face military action if they do not reduce the flow of illicit drugs to the United States.
"Operation Colombia sounds good to me," Trump said. He also said that Cuba, a close ally of Venezuela, "looks like it's ready to fall" on its own without US military action.
Maduro is in a New York detention center awaiting a Monday court appearance on drug charges.
Trump said his administration will work with remaining members of the Maduro regime to clamp down on drug trafficking and overhaul its oil industry, rather than push for immediate elections to install a new government.
Top officials in Maduro's government are still in charge and have called the detentions of Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores a kidnapping.
But Trump also said US oil companies need "total access" to the country's vast reserves and suggested that an influx of Venezuelans emigrating to the United States also factored into the decision to capture Maduro.
"What really played (into the decision to capture Maduro) is the fact that he sent millions of people into our country from prisons and from mental institutions, drug dealers, every drug addict in his country was sent into our country," Trump said.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Venezuela's next leader should keep Venezuela's oil industry out of the hands of US adversaries and stop drug trafficking and cited an ongoing US blockade on tankers.
(Reporting by Reuters bureaux worldwide; Writing by Andy Sullivan, John Kruzel, Lincoln Feast, Andrew Cawthorne and Julia Symmes Cobb; Editing by Andrew Heavens, Cynthia Osterman, Sergio Non, Chizu Nomiyama and Diane Craft)