Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan denied on Wednesday that Turkey had received a proposal to host deposed Venezuela‘s President Nicolas Maduro in exile before he was captured by US forces during an operation early Saturday morning in Caracas, as some media and politicians in the United States have suggested.
The controversy refers to statements made by US Senator Lindsey Graham, who told the press that Maduro “could be in Türkiye today, but he’s in New York”, in reference to the arrest and transfer of the former Venezuelan leader to the United States. Graham said that instead of accepting the offer, Maduro “chose to defy President Donald Trump and the U.S. military, and he is in jail,”. The New York Times also reported just a few days ago that Maduro was given an ultimatum to go into exile in Turkey before he was finally detained by the United States.
Maduro was captured in the early hours of 3 January in a military operation carried out by US commandos in the Venezuelan capital, in which military targets were also bombed. The action, dubbed ‘Operation Absolute Resolve’, culminated in the transfer of the former Venezuelan leader and his wife, Cilia Flores, to New York, where they appeared before a Manhattan court on 5 January on federal charges of various crimes, including drug trafficking, before which Maduro proclaimed himself “innocent” and reiterated that “I was kidnapped” and “I am still the president of Venezuela”.
Turkish media reported that, when asked about a possible offer of exile in Turkey to Maduro by the US, Erdoğan stated flatly that “There is nothing like that, we have not received any such news“, in a statement made in response to questions from journalists outside a meeting of the parliamentary group of his AKP party, thus dismissing the publications and speculations circulating in various international media.
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Pablo Gómez is a specialist in Turkey and has been editor-in-chief of Hispanatolia since 2011. He has been analysing current affairs and geopolitics in Turkey and the surrounding region since 2006.
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