Illustrative image. (U.S. Army)
The United States government’s decision to designate Venezuela’s Cartel de los Soles a foreign terrorist organization provides the Defense Department with “new options” to go after the alleged drug cartel in the country, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in an interview with One America News Network, which aired on November 20.
The designation was announced by the State Department over the weekend and is expected to take effect by November 24.
The decision is significant as many in the administration of President Donlad Trump, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, consider Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to be the head of Cartel de los Soles, an accusation that Caracas has denied.
“Well, it brings a whole bunch of new options to the United States,” Hegseth said.
The defense secretary noted that the designation gives “more tools to our department to give options to the president to ultimately say our hemisphere will not be controlled by narco-terrorists.”
“It will not be controlled by cartels,” Hegseth said. “It will not be controlled by what illegitimate regimes try to push toward the American people.”
“It’s just about options, and we plan better than any organization in the world here; we want to make sure the president has options to include doing a whole lot, to include doing, you know, the cartel mission that we’re doing there as well,” he added. “So nothing’s off the table, but nothing’s automatically on the table.”
Hegseth went on to call Maduro an “illegitimate leader” and reiterated that the reward for information that leads to his arrest was doubled to $50 million in August.
Since then, the Trump administration has built up a large military presence in the Caribbean Sea, including its newest aircraft carrier the USS Gerald R. Ford.
The U.S. also began launching strikes against boats alleged to be carrying drugs in September. It has since taken out 21 such boats in the Caribbean and in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing at least 83 people whom the administration has called “narco-terrorists.”
Hegseth also raised the possibility of expanding strikes against drug cartels, hinting that operations on land were on the table.
“If we need to apply that inside our own hemisphere against narco-terrorists who are terrorizing and poisoning the American people, nobody would do it better,” Hegseth said during the interview. “Whether it’s on land or in the maritime.”
These remarks come as Trump has indicated that he is open to having talks with Maduro but has not ruled out military options.
Between November 20 and 21, data from aviation tracking websites like Flightradar24 showed an uptake in U.S. military activities over the Caribbean close to the shores of Venezuela. Up to five American warplanes were up over the sea at one time, including an RC-135W Rivet Joint large reconnaissance aircraft.
Click to see full-size image. (X)
Click to see full-size image. (X)
The RC-135W mission is to produce theater and national level intelligence with near real-time on-scene collection, analysis and dissemination capabilities.
The other warplanes were either F/A-18E/F Super Hornet fighter jets from the USS Gerald R. Ford or F-35 Lightning II fighter jets from Jose Aponte de la Torre Airport in Puerto Rico. A video shared recently by the U.S. Southern Command showed operations at the latter.
The amount of assets that the Trump administration has so far allocated to this new front in the Caribbean, and more importantly the cost of the military build up, suggest that the escalation against Venezuela is very serious. Washington may have already spent too much to back down.
Recent reports from U.S. media noted that the designation of Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization, could open the door for the Trump administration to target Maduro personally.
An agreement is still possible, but Trump will not likely accept anything less than favorable investments in Venezuela’s oil reserves which are the largest in the world.
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no other regime has ever been so pretentious, so disaffected as this us of america _______________ trump will get away with it but all these younger like hegseth, rubio, etc. will end up executed in public