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The independently-run Venezuela Analysis reports that the national militia of Venezuela has swelled as thousands rush to sign-up following a series of indications that the US under Donald Trump is planning to launch something between counternarcotics and open war.
“Military officials, diplomats, and analysts,” have told either the New York Times or other outlets that the real goal behind the recent extrajudicial killings of sailors onboard Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean is not combating illegal drug smuggling but to threaten Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.
Nationwide defense maneuvers and exercises were launched in the early hours of the morning on September 11th, involving 284 battlegroups of the Venezuelan armed forces (FANB). Called the Independence 200 Plan, it involved air defense and artillery forces, ground troops, and police-militia brigades in every FANB position in the country.
“The seas, lands, and mountains belong to the people of Venezuela, they will never belong to the North American empire (…) we have increased our capacity for mobilization at any time, whenever and for whatever it takes,” President Maduro emphasized at the time.
The Pentagon, under the justification of countering “narcoterrorism” has deployed 8 warships, including US Marine Corps amphibious landing craft, Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers, and others, a squadron of F-35 warplanes, some 2,200 marines, 4,500 sailors, and an unknown number of Special Forces teams to the southern Caribbean. So far their presence has been explained by the need to fight cocaine and fentanyl trafficking into the country, but several outlets have noted that the country is not a large producer of cocaine, nor a port of transit for fentanyl entering the US.
Since the start of this buildup, the US has bombed three separate vessels transiting Caribbean waters. The Times reported that Senators on the Armed Forces Committee had been briefed about the bombings which have been condemned as blatant violations of US and international law.
“[T]here is no plausible argument under which the principle legal authority for the US so-called “war on terror”—the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force—authorizes military action against the Venezuelan criminal entity Tren de Aragua,” wrote Brian Finucane, former legal advisor to the US State Dept. and a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Reiss Center on Law and Security at NYU School of Law.
The lack of evidence has a preponderance of its own, and indeed the administration has not provided anything to suggest that Maduro is the leader of a narcotrafficking cartel, that any of the crews the Pentagon has executed were involved in drug trafficking or the Tren de Aragua prison gang, and certainly nothing as granular as whether or not all those onboard knew drug trafficking was going on and whether or not they were participating willingly. Additionally, the administration hasn’t provided any evidence to back up its justification of the strikes as preventing an “imminent threat”. Officials said the first speed boat that was bombed was going to Trinidad and Tobago, which certainly undermines the idea of an imminent threat.
Terrorists or militias
WaL reported extensively during the previous Trump and Biden administration on US aggression towards Venezuela. Regime change in the South American country is an ambition of some more than others in Washington, in particular the current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has threatened Maduro on social media with a picture of Libyan dictator Moammar Ghaddafi’s killing on the street and insinuating a similar fate would befall the head of state. In other instances, Rubio, then a mere Senator, had no qualms about remarking that Maduro’s “days were numbered”.
“We’re not going to have a cartel, operating or masquerading as a government, operating in our own hemisphere,” 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”. It’s far from any international norm or law for a nation to criminally indict another head of state as a fugitive from the law to whom they aren’t subject to.
The language that Trump officials are using now in regards to not only Maduro, but those unnamed boat crews being bombed by the US, is easily reminiscent of the language used when targeting ISIS and al-Qaeda terrorists.
“Narco-terrorists are enemies of the United States — actively bringing death to our shores,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on social media the second of three such bombings, adding, “we will track them, kill them, and dismantle their networks throughout our hemisphere — at the times and places of our choosing”.
Trump himself told reporters on September 8th “you’ll find out” when asked if the President was considering striking drug cartels inside Venezuela.
In addition to the three bombings, a tuna fishing boat was illegally intercepted, boarded, and occupied by US marines for 8 hours while still within Venezuela’s Exclusive Economic Zone. A complaint to the UN was filed saying the US military was inhibiting the Venezuelan fishing industry. The increasingly snide Vice President J.D. Vance mocked Venezuelan fishermen who have halted fishing operations since the killings began.
For his part, President Maduro has never had any illusions about his northern neighbors, saying in the wake of the September 2nd boat strike that “they want our oil for free”.
The president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, said yesterday that the Oval Office has provided no evidence that the vessel it bombed just recently, killing three onboard, was crewed by Venezuelans, and in fact could have been crewed by Colombians, who indeed produce most of the cocaine that enters the US
It’s difficult to ascertain the strength and conviction of the armed forces in developing countries, but according to the regimental history of the FANB, they are the liberators of no less than 5 South American countries from Spanish rule. Additionally, much of the country is not only forested, but mountainous, conditions against which the US military has struggled in before during occupational campaigns in Vietnam and Afghanistan. WaL
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PICTURED ABOVE: President Nicolas Maduro confers with officers during the Independence 200 exercises on September 11th. PC: Presidential Office
