Early on Tuesday, September 7th, U.S. President Trump posted footage of a missile strike on what the government has claimed – without providing any evidence – was a boat carrying narcotics to the U.S. Eleven people were confirmed to be on board. Any evidence that they were cartel members or that they were in fact carrying drugs was destroyed in the strike. There has been no reporting indicating that the boat was ordered to stop or if warning shots were fired before striking the boat. The strike is a violent departure from previous drug enforcement operations, which normally would’ve been carried out by the Coast Guard or a civil law enforcement branch like the DEA. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had previously declared the Tren de Aragua cartel a foreign terrorist organization, which provided the strike with a shaky legal pretext.
The strike comes alongside increasingly hostile rhetoric by the Trump administration towards the Venezuelan government, led by President Nicolás Maduro. The U.S. State Department is offering a $50 million-dollar bounty for the long-time, often authoritarian, leader of Venezuela, a country which likely has the largest oil reserves in the world. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has stated that the U.S. military is “prepared with every asset it has” to pursue regime change, should the president decide to do it. To that end, eight warships and an attack submarine have been deployed to the waters surrounding the coast of Venezuela, and ten of the Air Force’s most advanced attack jets, along with thousands of Marines, have been moved to military bases in Puerto Rico. When asked if he planned to order strikes on cartels within Venezuela, Trump responded, “Well, you’re going to find out.”
It appears those in power have learned nothing from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which had devastating consequences for the people of those countries, with conservative estimates numbering the dead in the hundreds of thousands. Millions more were forced to flee their homes, triggering a massive refugee crisis that has still not been resolved. Due to corruption, debilitating sanctions, a chronically weak economy etc., nearly eight million Venezuelans have fled their country, some to the U.S., most to countries close by such as Colombia or Peru. This has placed intense strain on these states’ governments and economies, leaving them vulnerable to any kind of major shock.
The U.S. has a track record of destabilizing a country by decapitating its government, only to cut its losses, and pull out entirely when the ensuing occupation becomes politically untenable. Should such a scenario play out in Latin America, the consequences would be unimaginably destructive to tens of millions and would trigger waves of refugees that no country, not the U.S. and certainly not any country south of its border, could ever hope to adequately respond to. Not to mention, it would instantly give the cartels the exact conditions they need to thrive, which is supposedly the reason for all of this in the first place. Whether this is an attempt to appear tough on crime and the cartels, or to distract from a weakening U.S. economy, or the Trump-Epstein connection, or some combination, we must say in the strongest possible terms: No war on Venezuela!
