President Trump is threatening to start a war with Venezuela, allegedly to counter drug trafficking to the United States. At the same time, the would-be king has announced his intention to pardon the notorious drug kingpin and former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández. In a Federal Court last year prosecutors argued that Hernández “paved a cocaine superhighway to the United States.” Hernández was convicted of flooding the US with more than 500 tons of cocaine and was sentenced to 45 years in prison.
Venezuela, by contrast, is not considered an important player in drug production, even though it allows cartels to use the country as a transit point.
Trump has also ordered attacks on Venezuelan and Colombian boats alleged to be running drugs into the United States. In these attacks, at least 83 people have been killed in 21 strikes on 22 vessels. Eleven of these vessels were in the Caribbean Sea and 11 in the Eastern Pacific. Secretary of Defense Hegseth ordered the military to “kill them all.”
The Trump gang has provided no evidence that the boats under attack are smuggling drugs or that the sailors being killed are “narco-terrorists” as the regime claims. The attacks and killings are widely seen as war crimes or murders, depending on the specifics of the attacks.
In addition to the bloody attacks on local watercraft, Trump has dispatched a veritable armada of more than a dozen warships and 15,000 troops to the Caribbean off Venezuela, representing the largest military buildup in the Caribbean since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.
These ships include the world’s largest aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford, and its strike group. as well as eight other warships, some 10,000 troops, fighter jets, sophisticated drones, and a nuclear-powered submarine.
The Trump regime justifies this extraordinary buildup as necessary to counter the transshipment of drugs into the United States through Venezuela. Nevertheless, drug cartels operating vessels in the Caribbean are mainly moving cocaine from South America to Europe, not to the United States, according to current and former U.S. law enforcement and military officials.
And the deadliest drug of all, fentanyl, is almost exclusively smuggled over land from Mexico, the officials and experts say. It’s strike group. as well as eight other warships, some 10,000 troops, fighter jets, sophisticated drones, and a nuclear-powered submarine.
“Fentanyl is not coming out of Venezuela. Fentanyl comes from Mexico,” said Christopher Hernandez-Roy, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington. “What’s coming out of Venezuela is cocaine.”