https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-03/trump-says-venezuela-s-maduro-captured-and-flown-out-of-country-mjy3kziv?leadSource=reddit_wall

Nicolas Maduro has been flown out of the country overnight. How will this affect oil and the market in general? This may be the big dip in the stock market many have been waiting for.

Hopefully, action like this won’t ruffle China’s feathers too much. But this can be a very interesting time for the market as we’ve not had anything like this happen before.

What locations make sense to protest at? What organizations are likely organizing protests that I could join?

Thanks folks

Edit: I do not support Maduro

Edit: well there has been some good discussion (and even an actual link to protests!) but this post has gotten to the point where new commenters aren't engaging in the discussion and are just commenting directly to the post to berate me while ignoring the clarifications that we've made together in the comments. I am not going to be responding to new comments. Thank you everyone who engaged civilly with this! I will not be attending a protest and will instead pursue things like contacting reps/senators and more intimate discussions than public protest.

The Venezuelans seem to celebrating this morning and not a lot civilian deaths seem to be reported . This is a huge win for the U . S and the world too. Why is everyone against this ? Also why is everyone saying we are going to start a war , when this ended in 3 hours ? To be a war , the other country has to have a fighting military which they don’t .

The United States captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and flew him out of the country in an extraordinary nighttime operation that was accompanied by a flurry of strikes.

Here is a link to more on the developing story, from AP News: https://apnews.com/article/venezuela-us-explosions-caracas-ca712a67aaefc30b1831f5bf0b50665e

If you wish to discuss this news item, please do so under this post. While this is not a news item directly related to Christianity, it is likely to be of interest to a large number of our community members so we wanted to provide a centralized post for related discussion.

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Starter: After the kindnapping(?) of Venezuela’s president, Madura, the country was in celebration as the dictator and alleged drug dealer was out of office and now the people were finally free and could start making their country better for everyone. Well in theory, in actuality Maduro’s old regime was still in place, including the person who’s running the country now,at least on paper, the former VP for Maduro. This has lead to a huge crackdown by the government, with people being arrested for supporting the US actions. Also, many citizens are being forced to protest to release Maduro. If there’s one lesson we should take away from all this is, don’t celebrate too early.

The abduction of Maduro doesn’t achieve anything by itself, so we're yet to see:

• whether it will result in a democratic revolution in Venezuela or conversely in a strengthening of the Venezuelan dictatorship;

• and whether the shift of Venezuela’s politics will be beneficial or harmful to the US, its allies, and its adversaries;

But Trump’s arbitrary-whimsical lawless actions already certainly:

• united previously rather neutral to the USA South American and other countries against the now perceived as a threat United States, meaning they will try to obtain nukes and avoid strengthening the US, consequently may prioritize cooperation and trade with Russia and China instead of the USA;

• made the US allies wary of the US, meaning they will try to obtain nukes and avoid strengthening the US, consequently may prioritize cooperation and trade among themselves over the USA;

• provided diplomatic and propagandistic excuses for China, Russia, and other the US adversaries to lawlessly invade other countries without the UN approval similarly to the USA, so if China invades Taiwan, or Russia invades even more of its neighbors, Chinese and Russians will always have an excuse: "The USA did it, so why can’t we?" with the only difference that unlike utterly incompetent Trump China and Russia may actually gain something from their military operations;

Meaning the US has already paid and will continue to pay substantially for decades to come for this Trump’s lawless careless recklessness, but whether this current Trump’s costly gigantic failure will bring any positive consequences we’re yet to see.

Also, the increasing lawlessness of the US military is an increasingly gigantic threat to the US democracy — either Americans swiftly end the US dictatorship politically via elections and implement the institutional preventive measures-mechanisms-procedures or the probability of lawless abuse of the US military against the US population to cement the US dictatorship will continue to grow steadily, increasing the risk of America following the descending trajectory of many other former democracies, including Venezuela under Maduro or Germany under Hitler. … :(

Of course, I’m asking this question after a few hours it happened and aware that most people have very limited information on how this operation was put together. But considering that Caracas is located at Venezuela’s coast, a few hundred miles from Porto Rico, it feels that this geographic position played a major role in the decision to kidnap Maduro.

For comparison to a close neighbor, if Brazil were the target, US military would have to travel thousands of miles in land to reach Brasilia (assuming the president would be there, of course), and this could spark a bunch of variables that would make such operation impossible.

Does this thinking make any sense?