The Venezuelans Cheering Trump’s Drug War

3 comments

1. Gisela Salim-Peyer: “Last month, the United States sent Navy ships to the Venezuelan coastline, invoking war powers for an anti-drug mission that would normally be a routine job of the U.S. Coast Guard. The extraordinary move left me with a nagging sense of déjà vu. A little while later, I understood why.

   “I’d interviewed the leader of Venezuela’s opposition movement, María Corina Machado, a few months earlier. She’d told me she would love to see a scenario remarkably similar to the one now developing. I confess that I didn’t pay much attention to this idea, which at the time seemed fantastically improbable. But when the flotilla was lined up, I figured I’d relisten to the recording I’d made of the interview.

   “I’d been speaking to Machado in the context of Venezuela’s unfolding electoral drama. She had not been permitted to run against the strongman president, Nicolás Maduro, in the summer of 2024, but by the tallies of electoral observers (an official count is still unavailable), her surrogate garnered a majority of the vote. Maduro made clear that he had no intention of ceding power, and anyway, no one could make him. In the months that followed, the still-popular Machado endeavored to keep the flame of hope alive … By winter, that flame had dimmed. Donald Trump had returned to the White House with little interest in Venezuela beyond deporting its people from the United States.”

   “… In the past, Machado had mostly framed supporting the Venezuelan democratic opposition as a moral imperative. How would America go about treating Venezuela as a law-enforcement target instead? I asked for an example.

   “Machado told me that she wished the Trump administration would carry out a ‘big antinarcotics operation in the Caribbean,’ given that, she said, Venezuela was the country through which most Colombian drugs make their way to the United States. After all, Machado added, Maduro is the leader of Tren de Aragua, a gang Trump often decries.

   “… Some Venezuelan observers have speculated that the Trump administration launched this mission at least partly with Machado’s encouragement. (Her spokesperson declined to comment for this story.) The notion is not far-fetched. The opposition leader maintains close ties with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, one of the most enthusiastic proponents in the Cabinet of this particular naval buildup. Administration officials have echoed many of Machado’s claims—that Maduro leads Tren de Aragua, for example—and embraced a Machado-like use of narco as a prefix (‘narco-boat,”’ ‘narco-terrorists’).

   “No one can be certain that Machado had a role in convincing the administration to pursue these tactics, but she does appear to be welcoming them.”

   Read more: [https://theatln.tc/BPUdZn5h](https://theatln.tc/BPUdZn5h) 

2. Trace the money, I’m sure it comes from the same place all the Save Gaza protests that just up an vanished after the election. Fake outage and bullshit

3. There was a window of opportunity for Trump to go after Venezuela with full support of the international community of democratic states, but since pretty much every play he made in foreign policy after taking office entailed undermining, bulling and delegitimizing the international community of democratic states, that’s not an option now.

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