Government ministers told the Dutch parliament this week that the Netherlands refused to allow the U.S. military to use Dutch bases in the Caribbean for its operations against Venezuela, including the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. “We were very clear to the United States that we absolutely did not want any involvement in this operation,” said Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs David van Weel, reported the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). “We did so from the very beginning of the troop buildup.”
“We never contributed, never to the boats, and never to the operation in Venezuela,” van Weel told the Dutch parliament. He said he was “shocked” by the U.S. operation, which involved aerial bombardment that began Jan. 3 at around 2 a.m., while soldiers swept in and “snatched” Maduro from his residence in Caracas.
However, he added about Maduro’s capture that “I didn’t shed any tears over it.”
Dutch Minister of Defense Ruben Brekelmans said this week that the Netherlands had halted joint anti-drug operations with the U.S. in the Caribbean, and would instead focus on protecting its territorial waters surrounding the islands of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao.
These “ABC” islands are part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and lie less than 80 km off the coast of Venezuela. Van Weel said the U.S. incursion had raised security concerns in the islands, with “a number of minor incidents, such as military air traffic passing through airspace unannounced, interruptions in air traffic.”
“People couldn’t leave the islands,” he said, but now the “situation is normal.”
However, he added, “defense equipment” in the Netherlands has been put on a “notice to move” in the event of any security crisis. “That will remain the case for the time being, until we are absolutely certain that the situation will remain stable,” van Weel said.
Van Weel’s statement is in contrast to reports of French and British involvement in the U.S. operations against Venezuela.
