Caracas.- US President Donald Trump assured that the days of his Venezuelan counterpart, Nicolás Maduro, are "
numbered", and did not rule out a possible ground invasion of the South American country, where high figures of Chavismo, for their part, reiterated this Tuesday that the nation is willing to "
fight".
The Republican leader, in an interview with Politico published this Tuesday, was asked about how far he would be willing to go to remove Maduro from power, which he has held since 2013, to which he replied: "His days are numbered."
However, he did not want to confirm or rule out a ground intervention with US troops: "I don't want to talk about that. Why would I talk about that with Politico, a publication so hostile to me?".
These words from Trump, who does not recognize Maduro as president, were made public one day before the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado receives her Nobel Peace Prize in Norway, still with the uncertainty of whether she will actually participate in the ceremony in Oslo, which has become in these days the global epicenter of the Latin American right and anti-Chavism.
In addition, this same Tuesday two U.S. F-18 fighter jets flew over the waters of the Gulf of Venezuela for about 40 minutes, in a new gesture that contributes to raising Washington's pressure on the government of the Chavista leader.
According to the aviation tracking service Flightradar24, the flyover occurred in an area of the gulf about 160 kilometers northeast of Maracaibo, the capital of Zulia state.
While Venezuelan authorities did not refer to that event, they did reiterate during the day that the Caribbean country remains willing to "fight" in case of an "aggression", at a time when the U.S. maintains a military deployment in the waters of the Caribbean Sea near the South American nation, seen by the Maduro government as a "threat" to promote a change of regime.
Spanish
