After those at sea, land attacks in Venezuela in the fight declared by Washington against “narco-terrorists” would be a “real possibility” in the intentions of the Trump administration, with a qualitative leap in tensions between the two countries. The words of Republican Senator Lyndsey Graham outline this scenario, particularly relevant given that he is a close ally of Trump. Specifically, Graham claims that the president will inform Congress about “potential future military operations against Venezuela and Colombia”, writes Axios.
According to the senator, Trump would also have come to the conclusion that the time has come for Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro to “go away”. This a few hours after the arrival of the US missile launcher USS Gravely in Trinidad and Tobago, the small archipelago located about ten kilometers from the coast of Venezuela. The ship was already visible in the last few hours off the coast of the capital Port of Spain. His arrival, together with a unit of marines, takes place officially for exercises with the Trinidad military, but Caracas accuses Washington of having ulterior motives in its military campaign against drug traffickers, of actually wanting to “prepare a war”, and the latest American moves do not seem to do much to defuse this rhetoric, on the contrary. Some decisions by the Pentagon and the words of President Donald Trump himself have brought tension to the sky in the entire region: the American aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford has been deployed for days, joining a contingent based in Puerto Rico with three assault and amphibious transport ships, F-35B fighters, P-8 patrol planes and MQ-9 drones.
A notable effort on the American side, to the point of underlining to some analysts that if the objective is to intercept narco boats, the US deployment appears oversized. Then there is Trump’s warning from the day before: “We have blocked the entry of all drugs by sea, soon I will also stop the entry of all drugs by land. You’ll see”, together with the rumors according to which the White House is already on the table with a plan to attack cocaine production centers and trafficking routes on Venezuelan territory and all that is missing is the final decision in this regard. And the balance of operations against the alleged traffickers, in which mid-September the Americans have already hit several targets and estimated 43 deaths. Thus Graham’s latest statement on the “real possibility” of land raids cannot go unnoticed. All the more so since the friction is not limited to Venezuela: the back and forth with Colombia are getting worse, in the aftermath of the sanctions imposed by the USA against President Gustavo Petro, his son and wife, and the Minister of the Interior Armando Benedetti. Petro, who called Trump “a monster” after the American president had branded him a “drug trafficker”, now risks having his bank accounts blocked after being included in the US blacklist of drug traffickers. “An affront, a hostile act”, the Colombian Foreign Ministry thundered yesterday.