Venezuela, 2026 — military coup

Important framing caveat: the Cline Center dataset entry codes this event as a 'Military coup,' but every independently verified source found this session describes it as a US-led external military strike and capture/abduction operation targeting a sitting head of state, not an internal Venezuelan military coup carried out by domestic coup plotters. Analysts (Chatham House, CFR, Brookings) frame it as a US military intervention/regime-change operation. This is flagged here rather than silently reconciled, since it affects how the record should be described. Source disagreement: CFR reporting states VP Delcy Rodríguez was 'reported to be out of the country, in Moscow' while nominally asserting authority as acting president; other secondary summaries (via a Congressional Research Service product I could not access directly due to robots.txt blocking congress.gov, and only saw filtered through a Wikipedia-mediated summary that is not used as a citation here) suggested she was sworn in in Caracas and the government apparatus 'remained intact.' I could not independently resolve which account is correct with directly-verified sources this session, so both are not asserted as fact - only the CFR-sourced claim is included as a VERIFIED fact. Casualty figures also evolved over time in reporting (early estimates of 23-47 Venezuelan troops killed vs. the later, more complete Jan 17 Defense Ministry figure of 83 total dead used here). Wikipedia's '2026 United States intervention in Venezuela' article was used only as a map to identify candidate sources/dates, not cited as a source itself; all facts above were confirmed against independently fetched CNN, CFR, Chatham House, and Al Jazeera reporting. | Fetched all four cited source_urls directly (CFR fetched twice — one timeout, one success; CNN once; Chatham House twice; Al Jazeera once), covering all 8 VERIFIED facts and the target_leader claim. Every quote in the entry was confirmed to appear on its cited page, near-verbatim, and each fact's substance is fairly supported: (1) CFR confirms the Maduro/Flores capture, USS Iwo Jima transport, and (via a separate sentence attributing the specifics to AG Pam Bondi) that the charges were drug and weapons charges — the entry's quote field paraphrases this correctly even though 'drug and weapons charges' comes from an adjacent sentence rather than the exact quoted span; (2) CNN confirms the Metropolitan Detention Center detail, the Supreme Court ruling language on Delcy Rodríguez, and the China statement verbatim; (3) Chatham House confirms the Trump 'run Venezuela' quote and the 'no UN Security Council mandate'/'significant violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and the UN Charter' language verbatim, and separately corroborates that the operation involved strikes in and around Caracas and Delta Force involvement; (4) Al Jazeera confirms the 83 dead / 47 Venezuelan troops (9 women) / 32 Cuban soldiers / 112+ injured figures verbatim. No fabricated URLs or invented quotes were found. No CHAIN-labeled facts were present to check. One correction made: the summary's opening clause claimed 'U.S. special operations forces conducted a military strike on Caracas,' a specific operational detail that, while independently confirmable via the Chatham House source, is not represented by any discrete fact entry in the facts array (no enumerated fact states this). Per the strict 'no summary claim without a corresponding sourced fact' rule, this phrase was trimmed back to align with fact #1's language. Also softened 'China condemned the operation' to track the actual quoted language ('called on the US to ensure...safety...immediately release') rather than the more interpretive verb 'condemned.' All facts, labels, and the target_leader were left unchanged as fully supported. The entry's own caveat about the Cline Center dataset labeling this a 'military coup' versus sourced reporting describing a US-led external capture/intervention is accurate and appropriately flagged rather than silently resolved.