“Consider the airspace over and around Venezuela as completely closed.” The president of the United States, Donald Trump, has issued a warning in the midst of military escalation and pressure on Venezuela and the Government of Nicolás Maduro: “To all airlines, pilots, drug traffickers and human traffickers, please consider the airspace over and around Venezuela as completely closed.”
The blockade of Venezuelan airspace decreed this Saturday by Trump is one more step in the spiral of siege that the US president is exercising, and occurs a week after having issued notices to airlines to cancel their flights due to military activity in the area.
The US president launches the threat the day after it was published that he spoke with Nicolás Maduro by phone last week, and that in that conversation they discussed the possibility of meeting face to face, according to The New York Times published this Friday.
All this in a context in which the US president announced on Thursday night a “prompt” ground intervention to combat alleged “narco-terrorist groups” after a three-month campaign in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific with 21 attacks and 83 extrajudicial murders reported: “The land is easier, but that is going to start very soon”:
In the middle of a Thanksgiving conversation with Army commanders, the US president took the opportunity to increase military pressure on Venezuela and Maduro: “In recent weeks, we have been working to deter Venezuelan drug traffickers, who are many. Not as many arrive by sea anymore. They send their poison to the United States, where they kill hundreds of thousands of people a year. But we are going to take care of that situation. We are already doing a lot. Around 85% have been stopped by sea. And also “We will begin to stop them by land. By land it is easier, and that will begin very soon. Stop sending poison to our country.”
The United States has also sent an aircraft carrier to the waters near Venezuela, and Air Force bombers to the region, in addition to having prepared covert action plans and has systematically threatened the use of force.
A few weeks ago the US Senate voted on a resolution – War Powers Resolution, WPR – that sought to stop an attack on Venezuela by requiring authorization from Congress to go to war. That vote knocked down the resolution 49-51, but with the reopening of the House of Representatives after the government shutdown, a new resolution has been registered to be voted on in mid-December. In this case, an attack on Venezuela is not explicitly mentioned, but on the cartels, which may turn out to be a tactical error since the Republicans are expressing much fewer problems with the extrajudicial murders of supposed “narcoterrorists” than with the idea of getting involved in an operation to overthrow Maduro.
In relation to the alleged drug boats, several Democratic senators are calling for the publication of the alleged Department of Justice report that supposedly grants legal protection to the attacks in the Caribbean and the Pacific.
There are many legal doubts about this, while the legal basis of this report, as published last Tuesday by The Guardian, is that it is a regional defense mechanism against the threat of cartels to allied countries such as Mexico, and that the violence is financed by drug shipments. An argument that differs from that of the White House, in that it is not the one Trump uses in his public appearances, when he always talks about the attacks seeking to prevent the entry into the United States of drug shipments “that could kill 25,000 Americans.”
And the Trump Administration still has not offered a single piece of evidence for what it says in any of the 21 attacks committed since September 2.
“Few decisions are more consequential for a democracy than the use of deadly force. Therefore, we believe that the declassification and publication of this document is essential to reinforce transparency in the use of deadly force by our Armed Forces, and necessary to ensure that Congress and the American people are fully informed about the legal justification that supports these attacks,” write the Democratic senators in the letter sent to the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, and the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, requesting the declassification and publication of the opinion written by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) of the Department of Justice.
“Kill everyone”
The order was from Pete Hegseth, Secretary of War. And it occurred before the first attack against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, on September 2, according to The Washington Post this Friday: “The order was to kill everyone.”
A missile whizzed off the coast of Trinidad, hitting the ship and starting a fire from bow to stern. For several minutes, commanders watched the ship burn via live drone footage. When the smoke cleared, they got a surprise: two survivors were clinging to the smoldering remains, TWP reports.
The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the first action in the Trump administration’s war against suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were left destroyed in the water.
Hegseth’s order, which had not been previously released, adds another dimension to the campaign against suspected drug traffickers.
Pardon for former president convicted of drug trafficking
And while Trump raises his threats against Venezuela in an alleged campaign against “narcoterrorism” that has already claimed the lives of 83 people murdered in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific, he has announced the pardon for former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández (2014-2022), who in 2024 was convicted of three drug trafficking crimes and possession of weapons, for which he was sentenced to 45 years in prison in 2024.
The former president was accused of having received money from ‘Chapo’ Guzmán to finance electoral fraud in exchange for participating in a conspiracy that brought more than 500 tons of cocaine into the United States.
The pardon of the person convicted in the US for drug trafficking has been announced by Donald Trump, who at the same time is evaluating military actions against Venezuela for alleged drug trafficking and who has sanctioned Nicolás Maduro and Gustavo Petro with that excuse, two days before the presidential elections in Honduras, for which he has supported Hernández’s party partner, the candidate Tito Asfura, of the right-wing National Party: “According to many people whom I greatly respect [Hernández] “He was treated very harshly and unfairly.”
Source: www.eldiario.es
