US President Donald Trump said Thursday that operations to curb Venezuelan drug trafficking “by land” would begin “very soon.”
The warning comes amid escalating tensions with Caracas and a US military buildup in the Caribbean Washington says is aimed at stopping transnational crime and drug smuggling. Venezuela says the buildup and the US anti-narcotics campaign are a covert effort to remove leftist leader Nicolás Maduro. Washington views Maduro as illegitimate and accuses him of drug trafficking — allegations Maduro rejects. Maduro’s re-election last year was widely rejected by the international community as fraudulent.
What did Trump say?
In a video call to US service members from his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida to mark Thanksgiving, Trump said the military campaign had reduced maritime drug trafficking.
“There aren’t too many [Venezuelan drug traffickers] coming in by sea anymore,” he said. “We’ve almost stopped — it’s about 85% stopped by sea. And we’ll be starting to stop them by land also. The land is easier, but that’s going to start very soon.”
Several of the military units he spoke with are directly involved in the anti-drug initiative, known as “Southern Spear.”
What do we know about the US anti-narcotics operations?
The US has struck a number of boats in international waters in the Caribbean and the Pacific that it says were smuggling illegal narcotics into the country. It has not publicly produced evidence to support those claims. At least 83 people have been killed in those strikes, according to a count of publicly available figures by the AFP news agency.
The assembled US military firepower, which includes an aircraft carrier strike group, far outweighs what would typically be needed for anti-drug smuggling operations.
Edited by Karl Sexton