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Story at a glance…
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Venezuela is at risk of regime change and invasion by the Trump government, which has authorized covert and overt action against it.
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The Trump regime has failed to provide evidence for any of the claims it’s made against Venezuela’s government, or its sailors in the Caribbean who are subject to extrajudicial killings.
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President Trump previously attempted to overthrow the government in Venezuela in 2019, and is now trying again.
The Trump regime has taken the prospects of regime change in Venezuela explored during his first term and turned them into the prospects for war in the South American country.
A US Navy Admiral and Commander of US Southern Command resigned unexpectedly—a result of tensions with the War Department over operations in his theater of command—namely Venezuela. Additionally, a fourth, and fifth boat of unidentified sailors were executed by US drone or air strike on the high seas between Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago.
On Wednesday, the New York Times front page read that the Trump Administration has tasked the CIA to begin “lethal covert” operations on the ground inside Venezuela, either in conjunction with conventional military or unilaterally, and that such operations could be against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro directly.
The Times report noted that the policy toward Venezuela is being driven by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as Trump’s national security advisor. Caracas must have winced seeing Rubio, who had previously threatened Maduro via X with a picture of an open coffin and a caption saying his “days are numbered,” obtain such significant cabinet positions with Trump’s return to office.
The CIA joins what is already a substantial US combined-branch deployment to the southern Caribbean, consisting of 8 warships, including US Marine Corps amphibious landing craft, Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers, and others, a submarine, a squadron of F-35 warplanes based at Puerto Rico, some 2,200 marines, 4,500 sailors, and an unknown number of Special Forces teams.
Their roles have so far been aiding in the killing of Venezuelan sailors aboard boats launching from the northern coast of the country. 6 times this has now happened, with some 27, mostly unidentified men being killed in the first 5 bombings. Social media has witnessed eulogies from friends and family members which described some of the victims as fishermen, most recently from among Trinidadians, according to The Guardian. Two men killed in a recent attack came from this US ally in the Caribbean, and one was a fisherman visiting family in Venezuela.
“According to maritime law, if you see a boat, you are supposed to stop the boat and intercept it, not just blow it up,” Lenore Burnley, a mother to a man named Joseph, who was killed in the recent bombing, told AFP. “That’s our Trinidadian maritime law and I think every fisherman and every human knows that”.
The Trump Administration hasn’t provided Congress or the media any evidence to support the claim that these 27 men were trafficking drugs.
The newly-made label of “narcoterrorists” has been bolted on to them and their operations so as to make it seem the President has unilateral authority to execute them. In the same way, the Trump Administration has claimed that President Maduro is the leader of the Cartel of the Suns, a make-believe drug trafficking organization that no one can prove exists.
Drug trafficking reports by both the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) have found Venezuela not to be a drug-producing country and to play a marginal role in narcotics trafficking. The vast majority of drug shipments that enter the US transit through Pacific routes and Central America.
On Thursday, a 6th boat was bombed, but three men survived for the first time since the killings began. President Trump did not announce the 6th bombing on Truth Social, as he had done for the first 5.
Past escalations, current conflicts
WaL has reported extensively on past US aggression towards Venezuela. The reports demonstrate that what was a stop-start pattern has now metastasized into nearly-weekly belligerence, driving the country to start planning for a land war within its borders.
This month, the Trump Administration ordered to cease diplomatic dialogue with Caracas, but that was hardly the starting pistol to whatever it is Washington has planned for its hemispheric neighbor.
A War Department readout from August detailed a training exercise during which “six special tactics airmen parachuted into the Caribbean Sea with an inflatable boat, 3 miles off the shore [of the Virgin Islands]… Eleven more combat controllers and pararescuemen then jumped directly into [an airport] from the same aircraft, with both forces combining to take control of the airfield”.
This is believed to be a potential scenario the Pentagon would carry out to see US troops or Special Forces inserted into the country.
It continued, saying that the exercises had been a year in the making, suggesting that potential action against Maduro is not a recent development. During Trump’s first term in office, his cabinet and intelligence services were very involved with attempting regime change following the 2018 presidential elections in Venezuela, where a political nobody from a far-right fringe party was suddenly recognized by the State Department as the legitimate head of government.
The figurehead, called Juan Guaido, then attempted a violent street coup d’état that failed to drum up any support. A year later, he was all but pushed out by the opposition to Maduro in the country, suffering from direct allegations that Guaido was to be the instrument of an ExxonMobil-led regime change by the United States that would have seen oil-rich border provinces ceded to neighboring control for exploitation by the US oil major.
This time around, Trump has been far more vocal in labeling Maduro an entity to be eliminated, and admitted his cabinet were looking into options “on land, because we have the seas pretty much locked down”.
CIA Director Jim Ratcliffe, whom Antiwar reports played a big part in crafting Trump’s Venezuela strategy, said during his confirmation hearing that he would make the agency less wary of risk and more direct and lethal in covert its operations.
In a statement, the Venezuelan government rejected Mr. Trump’s “bellicose” language, and accused him of seeking “to legitimize regime change with the ultimate goal of appropriating Venezuela’s petroleum resources”.
Venezuela said it planned to raise the matter at the UN Security Council, which met October 11th in an extraordinary session to discuss the matter. Miroslav Jenča, Assistant Secretary-General for Europe, Central Asia and the Americas, intervened in the emergency session to call for de-escalation and for efforts to tackle organized crime to adhere to international law and the UN Charter, following condemnations by Russia and China against the US on Venezuela’s behalf.
However, the meeting ended without a resolution being adopted, and with the US using its Security Council veto many times to prevent a ceasefire in Gaza, one could hardly imagine the most roguish of all rogue nations adhering to a Sec. Council resolution at this point. WaL
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PICTURED ABOVE: Missouri and Kentucky Air National Guard conducting training sessions in August. PC: Dale Greer, Air National Guard.
