U.S. President Donald Trump said in an interview published on Saturday that the Pentagon used a new type of weapon in the operation that led to the capture and ousting of then-Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and that, according to him, it disabled Venezuela's military equipment. Trump used the term 'discombulator' to refer to this weapon in the interview he gave on Friday to The New York Post. 'The discombulator; I'm not allowed to talk about this,' Trump said, adding that the device 'made their equipment stop working.' 'They never managed to launch their rockets. We came in, pressed the buttons, and nothing worked. They were fully prepared for our arrival,' the U.S. president stated. In a press conference following Maduro's capture, which took place on January 3, Trump had already said that 'the lights in Caracas went out largely thanks to a certain expertise we possess,' without providing further details. In the interview with The New York Post, Trump also again mentioned the possibility of carrying out 'ground attacks' against Latin American cartels. When asked if these attacks could occur in Mexican, Venezuelan, or Colombian territory, the president replied: 'it could be anywhere.' The interim Venezuelan government of chavist Delcy Rodríguez announced last week that Caracas has already received some $300 million for the crude oil commercialized by Washington. Trump also commented in the interview on the operations to sell up to 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil agreed with Caracas and the plans to revive Venezuela's oil production with the entry of foreign companies and an investment that Trump himself estimates at $100 billion. 'We are managing oil production in Venezuela. They had Russian and Chinese rockets, and they didn't manage to launch a single one.'
