América Latina & Caribe

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/5045

Two reports claim that the Trump administration is poised to launch strikes against military targets inside Venezuela.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday night that the administration is preparing to attack a variety of targets inside Venezuela, including "ports and airports controlled by the military that are allegedly used to traffic drugs, including naval facilities and airstrips."

Reports from the US government and the United Nations have not identified Venezuela as a significant source of drugs that enter the United States, and the country plays virtually no role in the trafficking of fentanyl, the primary cause of drug overdoses in the US.

While the WSJ report said that the administration had not yet decided to carry out the operations against Venezuela, the Miami Herald reported on Friday morning that the administration "has made the decision to attack military installations inside Venezuela and the strikes could come at any moment."

A source who spoke with the Miami Herald didn't explicitly say that Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro would be the target of these actions, but they nonetheless hinted that the goal was to weaken his grip on power.

"Maduro is about to find himself trapped and might soon discover that he cannot flee the country even if he decided to,” the source said. “What’s worse for him, there is now more than one general willing to capture and hand him over, fully aware that one thing is to talk about death, and another to see it coming."

While the Trump administration has accused Maduro of leading an international drug trafficking organization called the Cartel de los Soles, some experts have expressed extreme skepticism of this claim.

Phil Gunson, analyst at the International Crisis Group think tank, said in an interview with Agence Presse-France earlier this year that he doubts that so-called "Cartel de los Soles" even exists, and noted that "direct, incontrovertible evidence has never been presented" to show otherwise.

Earlier this year, the administration attempted to tie Maduro to another gang, Tren de Aragua, despite US intelligence agencies rejecting the notion that the street gang had government connections.

Launching strikes on Venezuelan soil would mark a major escalation in the administration's military campaign targeting purported drug traffickers, which so far has consisted of drone strikes against boats in international waters that many legal experts have described as a campaign of extrajudicial murder.

Dozens of political leaders throughout Latin America earlier this month condemned the administration's attacks on the purported drug boats, and they warned that they could just be the start of a regime change war reminiscent of the coups carried out by the US government in the last century that installed military dictatorships throughout the region.

"We have lived this nightmare before,” they emphasized in a joint letter. “US military interventions of the 20th century brought dictatorships, disappearances, and decades of trauma to our nations. We know the terrible cost of allowing foreign powers to wage war on our continent. We cannot—we will not—allow history to repeat itself.”

Medea Benjamin, cofounder of anti-war group CodePink, accused the Trump administration of using a fight against alleged drug trafficking as a false pretext to seize Venezuela's vast oil reserves.

"Trump’s military buildup in the Caribbean isn’t about 'drugs,' it’s about oil, power, and regime change," she wrote in a post on X. "Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world, that’s why they’re escalating toward war."

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