Venezuelan Ambassador Warns Trump Admin Is ‘Bloodthirsty’ Killer ‘Roaming Around the Caribbean’
Original article by Brad Reed republished form Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
The Venezuelan ambassador accused the Trump administration of “killing everyone who is on the sea working.”
Venezuelan United Nations Ambassador Samuel Moncada on Thursday delivered a scathing denunciation of US President Donald Trump’s drone attacks on purported drug boats off the coast of his country.
While holding up a copy of Thursday’s edition of the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian, which highlighted two Trinidadian citizens who were killed by a US drone strike while on a boat, Moncada lambasted the Trump administration and compared it to a serial killer.
“There is a killer roaming around the Caribbean!” he declared. “He’s bloodthirsty! He’s killing everyone who is on the sea working! And people from different countries—Colombia, Trinidad, etc.—are suffering the effects of these massacres!”
According to Reuters, Moncada this week also sent a letter to the United Nations Security Council asking it to rule on the legality of the US strikes, while also releasing a statement affirming Venezuela’s sovereignty.
The two Trinidadian citizens mentioned by Moncada were killed in a Tuesday drone strike that also reportedly took the lives of four other men.
In interviews with the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian, friends and relatives of 26-year-old Chad Joseph, one of the men killed in the strike, denied that he was involved with any drug trafficking.
“I find it wrong because it have—people will be innocent and they will still do and say otherwise,” Joseph’s mother, Lenore Burnley, told the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian. “The sea law is they supposed to stop the boat and intercept it, not blow it up like that.”
With the Tuesday strike, the total number of people killed by the Trump administration’s attacks on suspected drug boats totaled at least 27.
The administration carried out yet another boat strike on Thursday, and Reuters reported that at least two crew members had survived the attack, marking the first time that an attack on suspected drug vessels had left any survivors.
Reuters noted that “the development raises new questions, including whether the US military rendered aid to the survivors and whether they are now in US military custody, possibly as prisoners of war.”
The Trump administration so far has provided no legal justification for the strikes on boats, nor has it provided any evidence that any of the boats it has targeted were involved in the trafficking of illegal drugs.
Many legal experts believe that the strikes on the boats would be illegal even if they were found to have been carrying drugs, however, and some critics have accused the Trump administration of extrajudicial murder.
Moncada said Thursday that the Trump administration, which has also reportedly approved “lethal operations” by the CIA in Venezuela, is “looking for wars.”
“Everybody knows what’s going on here,” he said. “They are fabricating a war. The emperor is naked. Stop pretending this is complicated.”
Original article by Brad Reed republished form Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).
