Venezuelan airspace becomes the new front line in Trump’s Southern Spear

It took a single post on a single platform to turn a slow burning aviation crisis into a full scale political shock. On Saturday afternoon, United States President Donald Trump wrote on his social network that the airspace above and around Venezuela should now be treated as off limits. Airlines were already nervous. Within Venezuela and across the Spanish speaking world, the reaction was instant and angry.

What exactly did Trump announce

The new escalation came not in a formal decree, but in a short message on Truth Social. Trump wrote:

“To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.”

There was no further detail. No coordinates. No time limit. No legal basis. The post appeared about an hour ago, against the backdrop of Operation Southern Spear, the largest United States naval and air deployment in the Caribbean in decades, officially aimed at drug traffickers linked to the Venezuelan state.

For the aviation world, the message lands on top of an existing security advisory. Just days ago, the United States Federal Aviation Administration warned of a “potentially hazardous” situation in the flight information region controlled from Maiquetía, citing a worsening security climate and heightened military activity. That advisory alone was enough to trigger a cascade of cancellations.

How the airspace crisis began

The chain reaction began on 21 November, when the Federal Aviation Administration issued its security notice for Venezuelan skies. Airlines were told to exercise extreme caution at all altitudes, and United States operators were ordered to give special notice before entering the region. In the following days, traffic over Venezuela thinned out as carriers rerouted or pulled services altogether.

European and Latin American companies were the first visible casualties. Iberia of Spain, TAP Air Portugal, Avianca of Colombia, LATAM Colombia, Brazilian carrier Gol and Turkish Airlines all suspended flights to Caracas after the warning. Their official explanation was straightforward. The military build up, they said, created risks they could not justify to crews or passengers.

For thousands of Venezuelans and Spaniards who depend on those routes, the change was immediate. In Madrid, families arriving at Barajas airport found their flights cancelled, their tickets void, and their plans on hold. Many of those stranded are dual nationals, or Venezuelan migrants who have built lives in Spain but still move regularly between the two countries.

Caracas strikes back at the airlines

The Venezuelan government treated those cancellations not as simple responses to risk but as hostile acts. After threatening to withdraw access, it followed through on Wednesday. The civil aviation authority, INAC, revoked the operating rights of the six international airlines that had suspended flights, accusing them of “joining the actions of state terrorism promoted by the Government of the United States” by obeying the foreign advisory.

Officials did not stop there. They gave Spanish carriers Air Europa and Plus Ultra a forty eight hour deadline to resume flights or face the same fate. On state television, powerful figures in the ruling party repeated a simple message. Venezuela decides who flies and who does not. Sovereignty over the sky, they argued, belongs in Caracas, not in Washington or Madrid.

Local outlets close to the government described the move as a defence of national dignity. Independent and opposition leaning media stressed a more practical effect. Every licence pulled deepens the country’s isolation and cuts another route out of a nation already suffering from years of economic and political crisis.

Spanish passengers and Spanish politics

The most visible anger so far is among those directly affected. At Barajas, passengers who expected to board Iberia or Air Europa flights to Caracas are now on day four of waiting. Many are Venezuelan citizens with Spanish residence. Others are Spaniards living and working in Venezuela, suddenly cut off from family and medical appointments.

They describe the move as a punishment for ordinary people rather than for governments. In their words, they feel trapped in the contest between Trump and Maduro, with no control over the outcome and no clear path home.

In Spain, the government has so far taken a cautious line. The foreign ministry has backed airlines that suspended flights on safety grounds and has quietly advised citizens to avoid travel to Venezuela while the security situation remains unstable. Economic briefs in Madrid underline that the Caracas route is a small slice of Iberia’s long distance business, but they also acknowledge the human cost for the roughly six thousand passengers caught mid journey.

On the left, some voices have gone further. Enrique Santiago of Izquierda Unida has publicly described Trump’s campaign as aggression against a sister country and urged the government in Madrid to work to restore connections, rather than leave Venezuela to what he calls a creeping blockade. For him and his allies, obeying the advisory looks too much like collaborating with the United States build up in the Caribbean.

What the Venezuelan government is saying tonight

President Nicolás Maduro has spent the past week painting Operation Southern Spear as the latest chapter in a long story of attempts to topple his government. At rallies in Caracas he has promised to defend every inch of Venezuelan territory, and he has denounced the designations of Venezuelan officers as narco terrorists as fabrications used to justify force.

On the specific question of airspace, the government is sending a double message. Outwardly, ministers insist that Venezuela is not the party closing its skies, and that the only unacceptable step is the decision by foreign airlines to abandon their routes. At the same time, the authorities have now removed the legal right of those airlines to return, even if security advisories are lifted.

In official communications, the language is charged. The decision to cancel flights after the United States notice, INAC says, was based on a notice to airmen issued “by an aeronautical authority without competence” in Venezuelan airspace. By that logic, the real violation is not the threat of land strikes from United States forces, but the willingness of European and Latin American carriers to act on a foreign warning.

South American leaders warn of a wider danger

Beyond Venezuela and Spain, the first regional reactions focus less on the wording of Trump’s post and more on the wider military logic behind it. Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has spent weeks warning that the presence of large United States forces in the Caribbean is a source of tension that undermines the region’s claim to be a peaceful zone. He has said in public that problems in Venezuela should be resolved through dialogue, not through land invasions.

Colombian president Gustavo Petro has also criticised the growing deployment, arguing that a war around Venezuela would destabilise migration routes, trade and security across the continent. In his view, a campaign aimed at narco gangs that ends with warplanes and warships on Venezuela’s doorstep is a dangerous mismatch between rhetoric and reality.

None of these leaders have yet responded directly to the new phrase “airspace closed in its entirety.” But their earlier warnings matter, because they show a clear fear that aviation rules and drug narratives are being pulled into a larger project to isolate the Venezuelan state and reshape the politics of the region.

What Venezuelans and Spaniards are living through on the ground

For now, the most concrete effect of the announcement is not a line in a legal code but a series of very mundane problems. Elderly relatives stuck on the wrong continent for Christmas. Patients unable to travel for specialist treatment. Students who hoped to fly home for the first time in years watching their booking pages fill with red notices.

Spanish residents in Venezuela are expressing anger in the same terms as their Venezuelan neighbours. They talk about a sky weaponised by two governments at once. On one side, a United States president who uses the language of a total closure that he cannot legally enforce. On the other, a Venezuelan government that slams the door on airlines which say they are protecting passengers from risk.

Inside the country, anger sits alongside fear. Venezuelans remember the costs of past sanctions and diplomatic ruptures in concrete detail. Shortages, queues, currency shocks. The idea that their skies now sit between a carrier group at sea and a government in Caracas that sees isolation as a badge of resistance is hardly comforting.

Early days in a developing crisis

This is, in the most literal sense, early. The post has been live for barely an hour. The Pentagon has not yet published rules of engagement that would explain what “closed” means for military operations. The Venezuelan government has not yet issued any new formal decree about its own airspace beyond the revocation of airline concessions. Airlines are still recalculating routes and risks.

Yet the pattern is visible. A security advisory becomes a cascade of cancellations. A cascade of cancellations becomes a political confrontation over sovereignty. A single sentence on a social platform threatens to turn that confrontation into something closer to a blockade.

Behind that pattern sit the people who never signed up for any of it. Venezuelan citizens who want neither Maduro’s rule nor Trump’s war. Spanish citizens in Venezuela who thought they were flying between two friendly states and now find that they live on the front line of someone else’s campaign. Latin American neighbours who have spent decades trying to put distance between their region and the logic of gunboat diplomacy.

The statement that Venezuelan airspace should be considered closed is only a sentence. What matters now is whether it becomes practice in the air, policy on the ground, and accepted fact in the rest of the world. In the coming days, the answers from airlines, regional leaders and ordinary Venezuelans will tell us whether this is a passing gesture or the start of something much more serious.

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