Above photo: US President Donald Trump speaks to reporters on board Air Force One en route from Florida to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, on January 4, 2026. Jonathan Ernst/Reuters.
US president says a military operation in Colombia ‘sounds good’ to him.
And warns Mexico ‘to get their act together’.
NOTE: Antiwar reports that the Trump administration is threatening the interim president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodriguez: President Trump on Sunday threatened that Venezuela’s new acting president, Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, would have a fate worse than Nicolas Maduro’s if she doesn’t do the bidding of the US. “If she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro,” Trump told The Atlantic a day after his military abducted Ma duro from the Venezuelan capital of Caracas and flew him to New York, where he is now in a jail cell in Brooklyn.
Trump claimed on Saturday that Rodriguez was willing to work with the US and outlined his plan to “run” Venezuela to ensure US companies get access to the country’s oil. But later in the day, Rodriguez strongly denounced the US attack on her country, calling it “an atrocity that violates international law” and vowing that Venezuela “will never again be a colony of any empire.”
United States President Donald Trump has threatened military action against his Colombian counterpart, Gustavo Petro, following Washington’s abduction of Venezuela’s leader, and said he believed the government in Cuba, too, was likely to fall soon.
Trump’s comments on Sunday came amid a growing outcry over the brazen abduction of Nicolas Maduro, with Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay and Spain condemning the US action as a “dangerous precedent for peace and regional security”.
Trump told reporters on board Air Force One that Venezuela and Colombia were “very sick” and that the government in Bogota was run by “a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States”.
“And he’s not going to be doing it very long. Let me tell you,” Trump said, referring to Petro.
When asked if he meant a US operation against Colombia, Trump said, “Sounds good to me.”
The remarks prompted a sharp rebuke from Petro, who told Trump to “stop slandering” him while also calling on Latin American countries to unite or risk being “treated as a servant and slave”.
In a series of lengthy posts on X, Petro noted that “the US is the first country in the world to bomb a South American capital in all of human history”. But he said revenge was not the answer.
Instead, Latin America must unite, Petro said, and become a region “with the capacity to understand, trade, and join together with the whole world”.
“We do not look only to the north, but in all directions,” he said.
Warnings to Venezuela, Mexico, Cuba
US forces seized Maduro in Caracas early on Saturday in what Washington described as a law enforcement operation to bring him to trial on “narcoterrorism” charges.
Maduro denies the allegations, and critics say the US’s toppling of the Venezuelan leader was aimed at taking control of the country’s vast oil reserves.
Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump insisted that the US remains “in charge” of Venezuela, even though the country’s Supreme Court has appointed Vice President Delcy Rodriguez as interim leader.
He also reiterated threats to send the US military back to Venezuela if it “doesn’t behave”.
Trump said a lot of Cubans were killed in the US raid on Caracas, adding that an American military intervention in Cuba was unnecessary because the island appears ready to fall on its own.
“Cuba is ready to fall,” he said. “Cuba now has no income. They got all of their income from Venezuela, from the Venezuelan oil. They’re not getting any of it. Cuba literally is ready to fall.”
The US and Cuba have had strained relations since Fidel Castro overthrew a Washington-backed government in Havana in 1959 and established a socialist state allied with the former Soviet Union.
Trump went on to warn Mexico, saying the country “has to get their act together because they’re [drugs] pouring through Mexico and we’re going to have to do something”.
He described Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum as a “terrific person” and said he has offered to send US troops to Mexico every time he spoke to her.
The Mexican government is capable of addressing the issue, “but unfortunately, the cartels are very strong in Mexico”, he said.
Trump has made no secret of his ambitions to expand the US presence in the Western Hemisphere and revive the 19th-century Monroe Doctrine, which claims that Latin America falls under Washington’s sphere of influence.
Trump has called his 21st-century version the “Don-roe Doctrine”.
His comments on Sunday were not his first warnings to Latin American nations.
In the immediate aftermath of Maduro’s abduction, Trump said Petro has to “watch his a**” and that the political situation in Cuba was “something we’ll end up talking about, because Cuba is a failing nation”.
‘Dangerous precedent’
The US attack on Venezuela meanwhile continued to draw international condemnation.
The governments of Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay and Spain expressed their “profound concern” in a joint statement and said they “firmly reject the military actions undertaken unilaterally in Venezuelan territory”.
“These actions contravene fundamental principles of international law, particularly the prohibition on the use or threat of force. They constitute an extremely dangerous precedent for peace and regional security and endanger the civilian population,” they said.
Analysts said it remained unclear whether Trump would act on his threats or whether he was aiming to coerce the Latin American nations into cooperating with Washington.
“It’s very hard to predict. If you look at the way Trump operates, what he always hopes is other countries will do what he wants them to do without him having to use very much force. That these short, spectacular displays of force, like the bombing in Iran, this operation in Venezuela, will scare other countries into doing what Trump wants them to do,” said David Smith, an associate professor at the University of Sydney’s US Studies Centre.
Trump is “trying to pressure regime change” across Latin America in other ways as well, Smith said, noting that the US president has previously sparred with Petro over deportation flights and sanctioned a Brazilian judge who oversaw the prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro – a Trump ally – for an attempted insurrection.
Trump has also backed the right-wing government of Argentina’s Javier Milei and pardoned ex-Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez of drug trafficking charges.
“We’ve seen in this first year of his administration in general a far more concerted agenda to promote right-wing governments in Latin America and to damage left-wing governments in Latin America,” Smith said.
Matthew Wilson, a political scientist at Southern Methodist University in the US, said Cuba would be the top priority if further action occurred, given longstanding US grievances against the country.
“I would be more concerned if I were in Cuba than if I were in Colombia,” Wilson said. “Because there’s a longstanding US grievance against Cuba, and definitely a mobilised constituency of Cuban Americans who are very hostile to the regime there.”
