São Paulo, Brazil — United States President Donald Trump told reporters on Tuesday that strikes inside Venezuela are going to start “soon.”
“We’re going to start doing those strikes on land too,” said Trump to the press following a cabinet meeting at the White House. “We know where they live. We know where the bad ones live, and we’re going to start that very soon.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was also present at the cabinet meeting, said, “We’ve only just begun striking narco boats and putting narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean,” adding, the U.S. military is “taking the gloves off.”
Both Hegseth and Trump also said they weren’t aware of a second strike on an alleged drug boat in September which killed two people who had survived an initial strike.
Instead the Pentagon said the repeat strike was ordered by Navy Admiral Frank Bradley, who serves as the head of the United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM).
The Washington Post last week reported that Hegseth had given a verbal order to kill everyone on board suspected drug boats, sparking criticism from lawmakers and rights groups that suspect war crimes could have been committed.
Since September, Trump has been authorizing attacks on small go-fast boats allegedly carrying drugs off the coasts of Venezuela and Colombia. More than 80 people have been killed so far, and in August, the U.S. began sending military warships to the Caribbean.
Most analysts see the military buildup not as a viable effort to combat drug trafficking, but rather posturing on behalf of the U.S. government in order to force regime change in an autocratic Venezuela.
On November 24 the U.S. designated the Cártel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), alleging that what most narcotics analysts call a loose network of corrupt military officials who traffic in drugs, is actually controlled by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Yván Gill Pinto, Venezuela’s Minister of Foreign Relations, rejected the designation, saying that the U.S. “hinders the development of the Caribbean peoples and contributes nothing to a true and genuine fight against drug trafficking.”
On Tuesday, Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson told reporters that the 82 killings of “narco-terrorists” had saved potentially 25,000 American lives from overdosing.
She added that the U.S. has a contingency plan in case Maduro tries to leave the country.
“The department has a contingency plan for everything,” Wilson affirmed. “We are a planning organization, if anything were to happen around the world, we have a response planned and ready.”
Featured image credit:
Image: United States president Donald Trump
Source: The White House Gallery
