Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez has said that 83 people, including at least 47 service members, were killed in the US military operations.
“As you know, 32 Cuban comrades, who were with us, were among those 83 killed, and we provided assistance to more than 112 wounded,” he was quoted as saying by the Primicia portal.
Updating the toll from an initial 23, the ministry said 47 soldiers, of whom nine were women, lost their lives in the attack.
The total number of deaths stood at 83, according to Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez. They included 32 Cuban soldiers, some of whom had been assigned to Maduro’s protection team.
The total was revised downward from the figure of 100 fatalities released on January 7 by the interior ministry.
More than 112 people were injured in the assault that began with bombing raids on military targets and culminated with US special forces swooping in by helicopter to seize Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, from a compound.
“What have the men and women of our Bolivarian National Armed Forces done in the face of military aggression? They have given their lives, they have honored history and the homeland,” Padrino said at a ceremony Friday in honor of the fallen soldiers.
Interim president Delcy Rodriguez, a staunch defender of Maduro who took over after his ouster, decreed seven days of mourning for those killed in the January 3 attack.
Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello said this week that experts were using DNA to identify victims, some of whom had been blown to “little pieces” in the US strike.
During ‘Operation Absolute Resolve,’ the US employed a range of assets across land, air, sea, space, and cyber domains.
Sharing details about the military operation, Trump said, “It was dark. The lights of Caracas were largely turned off due to a certain expertise that we have.”
“It was dark, and it was deadly,” Trump said during a press conference at Mar-a-Lago detailing the operation.
According to an interview with one of President Maduro’s guards by the New York Post, the US soldiers also used a weapon far more advanced than anything used by Venezuelan soldiers.
A former US intelligence source said the description bore resemblances to directed-energy weapons. “The military has had versions of these for decades,” the source said. “Some of those systems can cause bleeding, pain, burning, and the inability to function.”
Did Trump float a Venezuela invasion in 2017?
Trump first floated the idea of an “invasion” of Venezuela as far back as 2017, Colombian ex-president Juan Manuel Santos told the Financial Times in an interview.
Santos told the FT that Trump made the suggestion in September 2017, during his first term as president.
According to Santos’s account, Trump asked him to convene a meeting of Latin American leaders at a New York hotel.
“When Trump arrived, he said half-jokingly, half-seriously, ‘Look at Venezuela, I think it could be fixed quickly with an invasion.'”
Santos, Colombia’s president from 2010 to 2018, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a peace deal with his country’s rebel army FARC, said he and his fellow Latin American leaders “were rather surprised.”
He said he told Trump an invasion was the “worst possible solution” to Venezuela’s woes because of the anti-American sentiment it would generate in the region.
More than eight years later, after a months-long pressure campaign, Trump sent special forces to snatch Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro in Caracas and whisk him to the United States to face trial on drug trafficking charges.
Santos said his reaction to the US attack was “positive that Maduro had gone, but negative on the consequences for the region and the world.”
Santos noted that Trump has sidelined Venezuela’s opposition from the country’s transition and is instead working with Maduro’s former deputy, Delcy Rodriguez, who is now the interim president.
Calling Maduro’s rule “illegitimate,” he argued that Rodriguez “is also illegitimate.”
“There is no logic there at all,” Santos added.
Via: Agence France-Presse
