It has been sold as a special US operation, unprecedented, in the fight against drug trafficking. A gang of drug traffickers has been classified and targeted as the great enemy to be defeated, while the top leader of a country has even been placed as the supposed leader of this criminal organization. And, in the midst of what is already considered an unprecedented escalation in South America and, more specifically, on the Caribbean coast, the White House has once again made a last-minute turn.
Through the US president himself, Donald Trump, the possibility of the US and Venezuelan governments entering into talks has been announced in a context in which the Trump Administration – also in the president’s mouth – has assured that “more or less” they have already “made the decision.” In this case, “decision” is a euphemism that covers a hypothetical direct land military intervention – something that has not been seen since the cases of the island of Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989) -.
Once again, in conversations with the journalists accompanying Trump aboard the Air Force OneTrump has once again broken the mold with a simple comment before boarding the presidential plane, at the airport in West Palm Beach (Florida). “We may have some conversations with [Nicolás] Maduro”, dropped when asked about ‘Operation Lanza del Sur’. The same military campaign that includes the recent deployment of the largest and most modern aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, with its dozens of state-of-the-art fighter aircraft and 5,000 marines on board. And that was added to what had already been deployed before: eight warships, a nuclear submarine and the feared F-35 fighters.
“We’ll see what happens (…) I’ll talk to anyone”
Donald Trump, president of the United States, after being asked if he would engage in talks with Nicolás Maduro
Trump has not stopped there by slipping that he could speak with the government of the same president that the US does not recognize as legitimate – beyond the case of the last elections, considered a fraud by much of the international community, and in which the Venezuelan Executive has refused to hand over the electoral records. “We’ll see what happens,” said the current occupant of the Oval Office, but not before highlighting that regardless of what the US position has been so far, in his case “I’ll talk to anyone.”
Humming John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, with the missile launchers ready
In this sense, the last few hours have been especially turbulent in the US tug-of-war with Venezuela. “We are preventing drug traffickers and drugs from entering our country,” Trump said, in relation to the twenty-first bombing of ships supposedly belonging to drug traffickers in the Caribbean and the South Pacific. Nearly 80 people have lost their lives as a result of these attacks that do not have authorization from the US Congress and that different NGOs in defense of human rights call “illegal extrajudicial executions”, as in the case of Amnesty International.
Trump’s own Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, announced the designation of the Cartel of the Suns as a “foreign terrorist organization”, while placing Maduro himself as its top boss, although a reward of 50 million US dollars was already on him. Washington maintains that the Cartel of the Suns provides support to the , the organization to which it attributes the floating corpses after its bombings of the boats. But it is more than just a consideration, since this designation allows the US to act legally against anyone who supports this organization, considering it a crime.
That also applies in relation to the figure of Nicolás Maduro. The person responsible for US foreign policy has not hidden that placing the Venezuelan president at the top of that cartel would give the US carte blanche – in reality, according to the laws of the US itself and not international law – to attack Maduro’s assets and properties. Of course, Rubio was already cautious before Trump’s words: “He allows us to do it, but we have not said that we are going to do it.”
For his part, Maduro continues with the strategy of demanding peace and warning the international community that there is time to avoid “another Gaza” in the region. He has done it with his usual style, in which he has even taken advantage of a public intervention to sing a song that is actually a peace anthem, the Imagine by John Lennon. However, Maduro has recalled that both the Venezuelan Army and the civilian population that has been mobilized in recent months – with military training – are prepared to defend the homeland.
In parallel, and as one of the factors that increase fears that the US is actually going to intervene militarily in a foreign country, opposition leader María Corina Machado has multiplied her calls to the Venezuelan Army to lay down its weapons in the face of a possible uprising of the people, “when the time comes.”
Along these lines, Maduro himself and the Minister of the Interior, Diosdado Cabello, have already drawn the main lines of a defense that could mean more than one headache for the Army of a power like the United States. Caracas has adapted its defensive capabilities to the key characteristics that mark its large, vast and orographically complicated territory. In addition to instructing and providing light weapons to part of the population for the creation of popular defense militias, it has also established a network of some 5,000 missile launchers placed at strategic points.
They are not typical bazookas, but they have this format. These are ‘Super Igla’ air defense missile launchers that could cause extensive damage to aircraft such as helicopters and other troop transport systems. , also intoning English to ask for “peace.”
