In the midst of a Thanksgiving conversation with military leaders, the US president seized the opportunity to increase military pressure on Venezuela and the government of Nicolas Maduro. After 21 attacks that resulted in 83 extrajudicial killings in Caribbean and eastern Pacific waters, Donald Trump declared: “In recent weeks, we have been working to deter Venezuelan drug traffickers, and there are a lot of them. A large number of them are no longer coming by sea. They are sending their poison to the United States, where they kill hundreds of thousands of people a year. But we will deal with this situation. By land, it is easier, and that will begin very soon. Stop sending poison into our country.”
A few weeks ago, the US Senate voted on a resolution—the War Powers Resolution—that sought to halt the attack on Venezuela by requiring congressional authorization to go to war. That vote overturned the resolution by 49 votes to 51, but with the House reopening after the government shutdown, a new resolution was recorded for a vote in mid-December. In this case, the attack on Venezuela is not explicitly mentioned, but on the cartels, which may turn out to be a tactical error since Republicans express much less problems with the extrajudicial killings of supposed “narco-terrorists” than with the idea of involvement in an operation to overthrow Maduro.
Regarding the alleged drug boats, several Democratic senators are calling for the release of the alleged Justice Department report that supposedly gives legal protection to attacks in the Caribbean and Pacific.
There are many legal doubts about this, while the legal basis for this report, as published by The Guardian on Tuesday, is that it is a regional defense mechanism against the cartel threat to allied countries such as Mexico, and that the violence is being financed through drug shipments. It is an argument that differs from the White House argument, in that it is not the one that Trump uses in his public appearances, when he always talks about attacks that seek to prevent drug shipments from entering the United States “which could kill 25,000 Americans.”
The Trump administration has not yet provided any evidence for what it says in any of the 21 attacks committed since September 2.
“Few decisions are more important to democracy than the use of lethal force. Therefore, we believe that declassifying and publishing this document is necessary to advance transparency in the use of lethal force by our armed forces, and necessary to ensure that Congress and the American people are fully informed of the legal justification supporting these attacks,” the Democratic senators wrote in the letter sent to Attorney General, Pam Bondi, and Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, requesting the declassification of the opinion they wrote and published. Office of the Legal Counsel (OLC) of the Ministry of Justice.
Meanwhile, it has been reported in the past few hours that Trump may be willing to start a conversation with Maduro, Axios reports. This news comes in parallel with Maduro’s designation as a terrorist as a member of the alleged Suns Cartel, a ghost organization used by Washington to tighten the siege on Venezuela’s rulers. It also coincides with the fact that General Dan Keane, the military strategist behind Trump’s operation to blockade Venezuela, has traveled to Trinidad and Tobago and Puerto Rico, where up to 10,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen are stationed on military bases renovated after two decades of abandonment.
Meanwhile, the context in which the Trump administration operates is that 70% of American citizens oppose military intervention in Venezuela, according to a CBS poll.
“I can talk to him,” Donald Trump said Tuesday. “We’re discussing it with different teams, maybe we’ll talk to Venezuela. If we can do things the easy way, that’s perfect. And if we have to do them the hard way, that’s OK too. I’m not going to tell you what the point is. Maybe you should know that already. They’ve caused a lot of problems and sent millions of people into our country.”
In this context, the President of the Dominican Republic, Luis Abinader, announced on Wednesday that he had allowed the United States government to operate within the restricted areas of the Caribbean country in its supposed war against alleged drug traffickers.
Abi Nader, who made the announcement accompanied by US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, said the United States will be able to refuel aircraft, transportation equipment and technical personnel in restricted areas within San Isidro Air Base and Las Americas International Airport.
