US Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed Thursday, August 14, that he is sending troops to the southern Caribbean Sea to carry out military operations in the region. He said the goal is to arrest Latin American drug traffickers and linked one of these groups to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Rubio reinforced, without presenting evidence, the White House narrative that Maduro is the leader of the Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns), an alleged criminal organization. On July 25, the US State Department classified the group as an international terrorist group.

Now, Rubio has stepped up his game, stating that he is sending air and naval troops to control cartels that bring “poison” to the US. He stated that drug trafficking is a threat to US security and again called the Maduro government a “criminal organization”.

“These are groups that are operating with impunity in international waters, simply exporting to the United States poison that is killing, that is destroying communities… The Cartel de los Soles is one of the largest criminal organizations that exist in the hemisphere, which unfortunately has not been given enough attention. It is a cartel that today is indicted in the federal courts of the United States. It is not a government, the Maduro regime is not a government, it is a criminal organization,” Rubio said in a statement.

The Secretary of State did not provide details of the operation, but said the goal is to intercept the flow of drugs in the region.

Venezuelan military personnel interviewed by Brasil de Fato do not believe the United States could launch a military attack against the country. Sectors within the Armed Forces say they have not definitively ruled out any possibility, but understand the dispatch of planes and ships as yet another threat and a show of force by the White House.

The decision follows a report published last week by the New York Times. The report stated that Trump had signed a secret executive order directing the Pentagon to begin using “military force” against certain Latin American drug cartels considered terrorists. The order authorizes direct military operations at sea and in other countries.

Henry Navas Nieves, head of the Master’s program in Military History at the Bolivarian Military University of Venezuela, agrees with this thesis and states that the US learned from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, two conflicts that had a very high political, military, and economic cost for people in the United States.

“Since Obama, a new model of US warfare against expanding countries has emerged. They have abandoned direct armed confrontations and learned that it was possible to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi in Libya without deploying any soldiers. And they apply and replicate this. The use of their own military forces is inconvenient in these cases, and they resort to harassment and unilateral coercive measures,” Nieves told Brasil de Fato.

The military understands that the White House’s logic is based on encouraging conflicts and attacks by paramilitary and far-right groups in Venezuelan territory.

This week, the Venezuelan government announced that it had demobilized a new attempted attack against strategic structures in Venezuela. Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello said on Tuesday, August 12, that security forces had identified terrorist plans organized by far-right sectors in conjunction with paramilitaries.

According to him, explosives were seized that had the capacity to hit targets at a distance of up to 1.2 kilometers and were intended to be used to attack hospitals, gas stations, and political figures.

One of the targets was Venezuela Plaza in downtown Caracas. According to Cabello, the group intended to blow up the Monument to the Victory of the Great Patriotic War against Nazism, a memorial to the Soviet Union, which was inaugurated in the first half of this year.

Navas claims that these new US military threats are “inexplicable” because they are based on an unfounded accusation: that Maduro leads a criminal organization.

“The Venezuelan government has actually dealt a severe blow to drug trafficking. These aggressive measures also respond to Venezuelan police operations against the far right, which attempted to organize terrorist attacks, something that was denounced and dismantled by security forces, in addition to the tons of explosives seized,” he stated.

Escalation in threats

Since the July 27 municipal elections, the US has increased its attacks on the Venezuelan government. In an interview with Fox News, US Attorney General Pamela Bondi said that more than USD 700 million in Maduro’s assets had been seized. She said that these were “mansions, cars, planes, and jewelry”, but presented no evidence and gave no indication of the location of these assets.

Navas argues that this escalation of threats is the result of a profound crisis the US is experiencing, involving a struggle between different conservative wings. He believes Rubio’s group seeks dominance in the region to regain the “sympathy” of its support base in Florida, where the Latin American far-right living in the US is concentrated.

“There is a mosaic of interests in the US vying for space and seeking to control the White House’s political decisions. Rubio leads one of them, and he is putting pressure on the government to launch an offensive against Venezuela in an attempt to overthrow the government. This is an escalation and a response to the Maduro government’s advance, which has seen significant victories in the recent regional, legislative, and municipal elections,” he said.

Last week, the US announced an increase to USD 50 million (approximately R$270 million) in the reward for information leading to the arrest of President Nicolás Maduro. The message was promptly responded to by the Venezuelan government. Foreign Minister Yván Gil called the announcement “a ridiculous political propaganda operation and a joke.”

Read more: US increases bounty on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to 50 million

Another speaker was Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López. He called this “immoral” and emphasized that criminal groups operating in Venezuela, such as the Aragua Train, have been “completely dismantled”.

Maduro also refuted the accusations and said that the Venezuelan response could be “the beginning of the end of the American empire”. This Thursday, August 14, the president called the US advance a “war of declarations”.

The heightened tension also resonated with the Venezuelan far right. Former extreme-neoliberal congresswoman and opposition figure María Corina Machado thanked the Republican president on Thursday for “pressuring to defeat this criminal organization”.

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