By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The situation in Venezuela

As described by us already in 2014, among the most complex foreign policy challenges facing the new U.S. administration is the situation in Venezuela.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro rejected US allegations of being a drug trafficker and asked President Donald Trump for dialogue, according to a letter released Sunday by Caracas, as tensions soar between the two countries.

He also sent a letter addressed to Trump, dated September 6, and was sent days after the United States deployed warships off the coast of Venezuela and carried out the first of several attacks on Venezuela-based boats, as alleged by Trump.

The U.S. Military Buildup in Caribbean Signals Broader Campaign Against Venezuela. Trump officials say the mission aims to disrupt the drug trade. But military officials and analysts say the real goal might be driving Venezuela’s president from power.

Two F-35 jets are taxiing on a runway in front of palm trees and other vegetation. As tensions in the Caribbean Sea have risen, the Pentagon has dispatched 10 F-35 stealth fighters to Puerto Rico to deter Venezuelan flyovers near U.S. ships and to be positioned should President Trump order airstrikes against targets in Venezuela.

The U.S. military strikes this month on three boats that Trump administration officials have asserted were smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea have cast a spotlight on the sizable naval armada and aerial fleet of spy aircraft the Pentagon has dispatched to the region in what it says is a counternarcotics and counterterrorism mission.

Military officials, diplomats, and analysts say a main purpose of the force is to ratchet up pressure on Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, as top figures in the Trump administration call him an illegitimate leader and accuse him of directing the actions of criminal gangs and drug cartels.

 “We’re not going to have a cartel, operating or masquerading as a government, operating in our own hemisphere,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Fox News this week, adding that Mr. Maduro had been indicted in the United States and was “a fugitive of American justice.”  “There’s a reward out for his capture,” he said.

The heavy military presence in the Caribbean, including F-35 fighters in Puerto Rico, suggests the United States plans to do more than blow up small vessels, analysts said. But the scope of the operation remains unclear.

The 4,500-member force currently aboard eight warships is too small to invade Venezuela or any country harboring traffickers. And it is not operating in the main body of water to carry out a major drug interdiction campaign. That would be the eastern Pacific Ocean, regional experts say. The clandestine deployment of elite Special Operations forces suggests that strikes or commando raids inside Venezuela itself may be in the works, experts note.

Administration officials refuse to say what U.S. military action might come next. Asked on Air Force One en route back to Washington from Britain on Thursday if he had discussed regime change in Venezuela with Mr. Rubio or any of his military leaders, President Trump said no.  Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said recently that the administration was “prepared to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our country and to bring those responsible to justice.”

In a news conference this week, Mr. Maduro condemned the first strike, carried out on a Venezuelan boat on Sept. 2, as a “heinous crime” and “a military attack on civilians who were not at war and were not militarily threatening any country.”

He said that if the United States believed that the boat’s passengers were drug traffickers, they should have been arrested. He accused the administration of trying to start a war. Shortly after the news conference, the U.S. military struck a second boat.  Image Nicolás Maduro seated at a table during a press conference.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro rejected US allegations of being a drug trafficker and asked President Donald Trump for dialogue, according to a letter released Sunday by Caracas, as tensions soar between the two countries.

He also sent a letter addressed to Trump, dated September 6, and was sent days after the United States deployed warships off the coast of Venezuela and carried out the first of several attacks on Venezuela-based boats, as alleged by Trump.

That first attack left 11 people dead, and two more strikes have followed, despite Maduro’s letter with his plea for peace.

In the missive, Maduro, whose July 2024 reelection was seen by the opposition and much of the international community as fraudulent, rejected as “absolutely false” US allegations that he leads a drug cartel.

The US military deployment has been widely denounced in Latin America, stoking fears that the US is planning to attack Venezuela.

It involves eight warships and a nuclear-powered submarine sent to the southern Caribbean off the coast of Venezuela and 10 fighter jets sent to nearby Puerto Rico.

Venezuela has denounced the "military threat" against it following the deployment of the US ships. Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lppez spoke of an "undeclared war."

The US deployment has also prompted debate over the legality of the killings, with drug trafficking itself not a capital offense under US law. The US is attacking and destroying vessels rather than seizing them and arresting their crew, which is the normal procedure in anti-drug operations.

 

 

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