Following an electoral 2025, this new year brings the return of the ‘Beyond the Headlines’ series with its professed aim of seeking out issues which are perhaps more important than urgent and thus do not appear in the week’s main headlines or the other columns. But a bit of a false start today because it becomes impossible to ignore the jumbo (or perhaps dumbo) elephant in the room: Donald Trump’s capture of Nicolás Maduro last weekend.
When the Austrian SS paratroop colonel Otto Skorzeny snatched Benito Mussolini out of his mountain captivity in 1943, it was a spectacular stunt which did almost nothing to alter the course of World War II – whisking Maduro from a heavily guarded Caracas military base to a New York courtroom was also an almost magical feat but has yet to prove a game-changer in Venezuelan history. If Bolivarian 21st-century socialism could outlive Hugo Chávez, it could also survive Maduro.
The questions vastly outnumber the answers in these early days. Did Trump’s deal-cutting with Venezuelan Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez follow or precede Maduro’s capture?
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