Latest News

BREAKING: Venezuela’s Maduro captured after U.S strikes Caracas

By The City Paper Staff - January 3, 2026

The United States has captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro, along with his wife Cilia Flores, after a series of targeted military strikes on Caracas at 1:30 am on Saturday, January 3, 2026. In a statement posted on his Truth Social platform, U.S President Donald J. Trump said U.S. forces, working with U.S. law enforcement, conducted […]

USS Gerald R. Ford is in the Caribbean, placing U.S. naval airpower within rapid range of Venezuela. Photo: Handout/SOUTHCOM

The New Monroe Doctrine: U.S. Recasts Latin America as Security Priority

By Luis Guillermo Plata - December 18, 2025

Why such a massive U.S. military deployment off the coast of Venezuela, supposedly to combat the “Cartel of the Suns” and stop drug trafficking from Venezuela to the United States? After more than four months, the results amount to little more than a handful of small vessels destroyed – an extremely modest impact given the […]

Stain on Hay: Should María Corina Machado Refuse the Literary Festival?

By Richard Emblin - December 17, 2025

For a literary festival, silence can be more revealing than speech. The decision by three writers to withdraw from the 2026 Hay Festival in Cartagena over the presence of María Corina Machado, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the most prominent figure in Venezuela’s democratic opposition, has exposed a paradox at the heart of […]

Black-market will push Venezuela for bigger discounts following US oil tanker seizure

By The Conversation - December 15, 2025

The U.S. seizure of an oil tanker off the Venezuelan coast appears designed to further squeeze the economy of President Nicolás Maduro’s government. The Dec. 10, 2025 operation — in which American forces descended from helicopters onto the vessel — followed months of U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean and was immediately condemned by Venezuela […]

Colombia’s FM Snubs Machado’s Nobel Peace Prize After Daring Escape

By The City Paper Staff - December 11, 2025

Colombia’s Foreign Minister Rosa Villavicencio declared Thursday that the Government of President Gustavo Petro is “not in agreement” with the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado – a position that signals how Colombia remains a close ideological ally of one of the hemisphere’s most authoritarian states. In remarks that were […]

Ex-Spychief Hugo Carvajal Warns U.S of Maduro’s “Narco-Terrorist” Regime

By The City Paper Staff - December 4, 2025

Hugo Carvajal Barrios, the former Venezuelan intelligence chief known as “El Pollo,” has issued an explosive letter from a U.S. federal prison alleging that Nicolás Maduro’s government systematically used drug trafficking, criminal gangs, espionage networks, and even electoral technology as tools to undermine the United States. The 10-page statement, addressed to “President Trump and the […]

María Corina Machado Issues Post-Maduro “Freedom Manifesto”

By Richard Emblin - November 19, 2025

As the USS Gerald R. Ford navigates uncomfortably close to the Venezuelan coastline and some 15,000 U.S. Marines remain stationed across Caribbean waters, Venezuela’s political crisis has entered a volatile new phase. In Caracas, Nicolás Maduro is publicly calling for peace and dialogue — even quoting John Lennon’s “Imagine” and delivering rally slogans in English […]

USS Gerald Ford Enters the Caribbean: What Next for Venezuela?

By Richard Emblin - November 13, 2025

The arrival of the USS Gerald Ford in Caribbean waters has raised the stakes in the tense relationship between the United States and Venezuela. The aircraft carrier – the most advanced and powerful in the U.S. Navy – traveled for more than two weeks from the Mediterranean to take up position near South America, joining […]

US Hits Seventh Narco-Boat Off Colombia, Blurring Lines Between Ally and Adversary

By The City Paper Staff - November 5, 2025

The United States carried out its seventh missile strike on a suspected narco-trafficking vessel in the Eastern Pacific near Colombia on Tuesday, the latest in a rapidly expanding maritime campaign that has killed at least 67 people and is drawing Colombia into the same operational battlefield long reserved for President Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela. In a […]

Did Venezuela’s ex-spymaster Hugo Carvajal Spark OFAC Sanctions Against Petro?

By The City Paper Staff - October 27, 2025

The U.S. Treasury’s unprecedented decision to sanction Colombian President Gustavo Petro and his inner circle has sparked speculation that recent testimony by Venezuela’s former spy chief, Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal, may have cemented the move. Carvajal, once a powerful general in Hugo Chávez’s intelligence services, pleaded guilty in June 2025 to drug trafficking and narco-terrorism […]

U.S. Deploys USS Gerald Ford to Lead Military Build-Up Near Venezuela

By The City Paper Staff - October 25, 2025

The United States is deploying its largest and most advanced aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, to the Caribbean as part of the regional military buildup aimed at disrupting narcotics trafficking networks linked to the Venezuelan regime of Nicolás Maduro. The move marks a sharp escalation of U.S. counter-narcotics operations in Latin America and comes […]

U.S. Treasury Puts Colombia’s Petro and Close Circle on ‘Clinton List’

By The City Paper Staff - October 24, 2025

The U.S. Government moved aggressively against Colombian President Gustavo Petro and his inner circle on Friday, imposing sanctions that target his financial and political support network as relations between Washington and Bogotá struck a new low. The Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), also known as the Clinton List, designated Petro, First Lady […]

U.S. Destroys Drug Boat in the Pacific as Trump Expands Anti-Narco Offensive

By The City Paper Staff - October 22, 2025

The United States said it destroyed a vessel carrying narcotics in the eastern Pacific Ocean on Tuesday, killing two people it described as “narco-terrorists,” in what marks the first U.S. military strike away from Caribbean waters under President Donald Trump’s expanding campaign against drug trafficking groups. “Yesterday, at the direction of President Trump, the Department […]

Colombia Targets TdeA as U.S. Launches More Caribbean Strikes

By Richard Emblin - October 15, 2025

Colombia’s National Police captured a top Venezuelan of the Tren de Aragua criminal organization, hours after a second fugitive jumped to his death from his luxury apartment in Medellín. The recent offensive against TdeA comes as the leftist government of President Gustavo Petro also ruled out any possibility of peace talks with the transnational gang. […]

Venezuelan Activists Attacked in Bogotá During Targeted Shooting

By The City Paper Staff - October 14, 2025

Two Venezuelan human rights activists living in exile in Colombia were wounded in a targeted shooting on Monday afternoon in northern Bogotá, an attack that has renewed fears over the safety of political dissidents in the country. The assault took place just days after Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was awarded the 2025 Nobel […]

Nobel Prize: Machado “keeps the flame of democracy burning”

By Richard Emblin - October 10, 2025

Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado has been awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced on Friday, recognizing her “tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela” and her “struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” Machado, 58, is the first Venezuelan to receive […]