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after Deploying Navy’s most advanced aircraft carrier strike group In the Caribbean, Donald Trump’s administration is reportedly considering a military operation inside Venezuela to take out cocaine facilities and routes used by drug traffickers, signaling a further escalation. There is a war going on with the cartels in South America.
The administration is considering several operations and has not ruled out alternative diplomatic options to the president’s campaign. According to CNNCiting US officials.
Trump is “in no rush” to make a decision on attacking Venezuela, while his focus is on a trip to Asia and talks with Russia and Ukraine to end the wars, CNN reports.
But possible plans to attack the country – an operation that could spill over into a regional war – follow a surge in military forces in the region and a series of deadly attacks on alleged drug boats that have killed more than 40 people within the past month.
Asked Thursday why he would not seek congressional authorization for a military operation targeting South American regimes he claims are fueling the drug epidemic in the United States, Trump said his government is “just going to kill people” instead.
“I don’t think we would necessarily ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just going to kill people who are bringing drugs into our country, OK? We’re going to kill them,” Trump said during a White House roundtable with administration officials on Thursday.
“They’ll, like, die, OK,” he said.
Independent The White House and the Pentagon have been requested to comment.
On Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the U.S.S. Gerald R. ford The aircraft carrier – the world’s largest – and its accompanying strike group are in a command area that covers Caribbean and South American waters.
According to chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell, the “enhanced force presence” of the giant aircraft carrier and her escort ships will “enhance the U.S. ability to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the security and prosperity of the United States homeland and our security in the Western Hemisphere.”
“These forces will complement and enhance existing capabilities to disrupt and dismantle drug trafficking [transnational criminal organizations]“He said.
Flight-tracking data this week also showed a B-1B bomber operating in the Caribbean near the Venezuelan coast, a move Trump denied.
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Venezuela is not a major cocaine producing country.
Virtually all coca crops are inside Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, and the Drug Enforcement Administration under Trump did not mention Venezuela in a March report on the cocaine trafficking situation.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration has sought to link Maduro’s regime to the drug trade as well as the gang Tren de Aragua, despite reports from intelligence agencies that have denied ties between the group and Maduro’s government.
Last week Trump said that he has authorized the CIA to work Covert operation inside VenezuelaClaiming that Maduro’s government “emptied the United States of its prisons” and flooded the country with drugs.
He said that at that time the US was considering launching “ground attacks” in the country.
Last month, the administration announced that the United States is Formally engaged in “armed conflict” with drug cartels According to a classified notice to members of Congress, the President has labeled them “unlawful combatants.”
The notice claims the cartels are “non-state armed groups” whose activities “constitute an armed attack against the United States” and that they are now engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” – or a war with a non-state actor.
Critics have argued that the Trump administration’s air campaign against alleged smugglers amounts to illegal extrajudicial killings, while members of Congress and civil rights groups are pressing the administration for evidence to justify the strikes.
So far, the administration has been unwilling to share any intelligence used to select the targeted boats or the legal reasoning behind the attacks. And while the administration continues to describe those killed as “terrorists”, two who survived the recent attack in the Caribbean Instead of being detained, they were deported back to their home countries.
Maduro on Thursday appealed for peace and made a plea in both English and Spanish to stop the “crazy war” in the region.
Earlier this month, Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López accused the Trump administration of trying to “force regime change” in the country.
“I want to warn the population: we have to prepare ourselves because the irrationality with which the American empire acts is not normal,” Padrino said in televised remarks. “It is anti-political, anti-human, anti-war, crude and obscene.”