image source, Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
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- Author, Drafting
- Author title, BBC News World
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Reading time: 4 minutes
US President Donald Trump asserted that his country had destroyed a drug production facility in Venezuela last week, without providing further details about the alleged operation.
If confirmed, it would be the first US land intervention in the South American country since Washington began military operations in the Caribbean.
In a conversation with millionaire John Catsimatidis, his supporter and owner of radio station WABC, last Friday, December 26, Trump declared that the United States had “destroyed” a drug production facility in Venezuela.
“I don’t know if you’ve read it or seen it, but they have a large facility, large facilities that the ships come out of, and two nights ago we destroyed them,” Trump said in a phone call to the station to speak with Catsimatidis.
At the time, Trump did not specifically refer to Venezuela, but rather to US media like that New York Times They spoke with government officials who confirmed that the president was referring to a drug production facility in Venezuela.
Neither the US military, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) nor the White House commented on this information, the newspaper says.
The Venezuelan government has not yet reported a US attack on its territory.
So far, the U.S. has attacked dozens of boats in both the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, claiming they were carrying drugs without providing any evidence. More than a hundred people have died in these attacks, which legal experts call illegal and those most critical of Trump call extrajudicial killings.
The United States has also deployed a large naval force to the Caribbean as part of the so-called Operation Southern Lance, with the largest and most modern of its aircraft carriers, the Gerald R. Ford, as its flagship.
In mid-December, Trump also ordered a “total and complete” blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers entering or leaving Venezuela.
Shortly before, the US captured one of these ships, the oil tanker Skipper, and has since intercepted a second ship, the Centuries, and pursued a third, the Bella 1.
image source, Getty Images
Oil or drugs?
Oil is a fundamental source of revenue for the Venezuelan government, and the US blockade was seen as a form of pressure on Nicolás Maduro’s government.
Although the reason Trump initially cited for the military campaign against Venezuela was drug trafficking and disrupting the flow of drugs from the Latin American country to the United States, the focus has gradually shifted to oil and pressure to ostensibly force regime change.
“Every time I destroy a ship, I save 25,000 American lives,” Trump said on WABC, without providing corroborating data. He also claimed that drug trafficking to the United States had declined by “97.2%,” without providing any evidence.
Catsimatidis asked him whether Venezuela would supply the US with much more oil if Nicolás Maduro leaves power, to which Trump replied: “It’s about a lot of things, it’s about, they kept our oil, they took it away from us, but they also sent millions of people from their prisons there to our country, some of the worst people in the world.”
The bombing of the boats of suspected drug traffickers was to be followed, as Donald Trump himself announced, by a second phase of ground operations against targets linked to drug production.
In October, Trump himself confirmed that he had authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela.
The United States also announced that it has designated the Sun Cartel as a terrorist organization, allegedly led by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and other figures in his government.
Designating organizations as terrorist groups gives U.S. law enforcement and the military more authority to target and dismantle them.
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