Trump Gave Maduro Ultimatum To Leave Power By 28 November — And He Refused

Donald Trump’s phone call to Nicolás Maduro sounded less like diplomacy and more like a final warning.

The US president told the Venezuelan leader on 21 November that he had until Friday 28 November to leave power in exchange for safe passage to a third country and personal security guarantees.

When the deadline passed and Maduro was still in Caracas, the offer was withdrawn and Trump urged airlines to treat Venezuelan airspace as “completely closed”.

Maduro’s counter-proposal was a plan to keep his circle protected while reshaping the regime on his own terms.

He wanted amnesty for himself and his family, the lifting of sanctions on around a hundred officials, the shelving of cases at the International Criminal Court and a transitional government led by his vice-president Delcy Rodríguez.

For a US administration that already considers his 2023 re-election illegitimate and links his inner circle to large-scale drug trafficking, that package looked less like compromise and more like self-amnesty.

Trump Gave Maduro Ultimatum To Leave Power By 28 November — And He Refused

Behind the phone call lies a brutal reality at sea. Since 2 September, US forces have been running “Operation Southern Spear”, a campaign against suspected drug-running speedboats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.

At least 21 strikes have destroyed alleged “narcolanchas”, killing more than 80 people. The first attack is now under investigation.

After a boat with 11 people on board was blown up, two survivors seen clinging to debris were killed in a second strike minutes later, prompting accusations of a war crime.

The Pentagon insists the second strike was ordered by Admiral Frank Bradley, a special-operations commander, acting in self-defence and within the laws of war.

Critics point out that the US military’s own law-of-war manual uses the killing of shipwreck survivors as an example of an order that must be refused. Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth has denied ever telling subordinates to “kill them all”.

This confrontation matters beyond Venezuela because it links the drug war, migration routes and air safety with the question of how far a democracy can go when confronting an authoritarian regime it accuses of running a state-backed cartel.

What happens next will shape both Venezuela’s future and the way power is exercised across the Americas.