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US sends troops to southern Caribbean in new threat to Venezuela

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Original article by Lorenzo Santiago republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio meets with US Special Operations Command in April, 2025. Photo: X

The action was announced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who called the Venezuelan government a “criminal organization”.

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.”

Venezuela demands the immediate repatriation of migrants detained in El Salvador

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Original article by Pablo Meriguet republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

Venezuelans rally against deportations. Photo: Francisco Trias

The Venezuelan government has promised that it will “fight until it frees all its compatriots” who have been imprisoned and deported without evidence thanks to an 18th-century US law.

Thousands of Venezuelans rallied in Caracas on Tuesday, March 18, to protest the deportation of Venezuelan migrants from the United States to a high security prison in El Salvador. Family members of the deported migrants addressed Venezuelan officials and fellow citizens to demand the immediate return of their loved ones, with many insisting that their relatives are not criminals or members of the infamous Tren de Aragua as Donald Trump claims.

The mobilization occurred days after the deportation of over 200 migrants to El Salvador in one of the most controversial acts by the administration of Donald Trump during his two months in office. In January, shortly after Trump’s swearing in, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele had offered up his country’s prisons to take in deported migrants or even the US’ national incarcerated population. It appears that this discussion advanced, and El Salvador, like several other countries in the region, will now provide detention centers for deported migrants, with no clarity of the criteria for who gets sent, how long they stay there, and under what jurisdiction they are. According to the US government, the Venezuelan migrants deported on Saturday all belong to the criminal group called Tren de Aragua (Aragua Train).

The Trump administration has yet to show evidence to back up its accusation.

“It is a massive violation of human rights,” says the Venezuelan government.

For its part, the Venezuelan government has condemned the US-Salvadoran decision as a violation of human rights. Jorge Rodríguez, president of Venezuela’s National Assembly, said in a press conference, “How do the Dantesque images we saw [of the deported Venezuelan migrants] differ from those of the Warsaw ghetto? How does Mr. Bukele’s barbarity when he said that he had bought slave labor differ from the memory of forced labor in the concentration camps of Auschwitz?”

In this sense, the Venezuelan government informed the families of the detainees that it would do everything possible to repatriate the migrants that were deported and now are being indefinitely held in a high security prison in El Salvador with no due process.

Maduro accuses Bukele of exercising fascist tactics against Venezuelan migrants

For his part, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro publicly rebuked Bukele for the treatment Venezuelans have received in El Salvador, and accused his government of fascist practices: “Are you going to protect this cruelty, this injustice, without [the detainees having] the right to any [judicial process], of creating concentration camps and putting noble working migrants in jails without a [due] trial, without having committed crimes in El Salvador, without having any sentence issued by a court in El Salvador? Is this legal, is this fair, Nayib Bukele?”

In addition, Maduro denounced the treatment suffered by the Venezuelan deportees: “They put them in handcuffs by hands and legs without telling them where they were going, and when they arrived in El Salvador, they made them get off the plane beating them with sticks and clubs; they humiliated them, threw them on the floor, shaved their hair. Is that called justice? Is that called international law? Is that called human rights? That is called fascism, Nazism, and Venezuela is ready and willing to denounce this massive violation of human rights against the hard-working and noble migrants in the United States!”

Migration is not a crime, sanctioning a people is. Photo: Francisco Trias

An 18th-century law to imprison migrants

According to the US Executive, its decision is based on an 18th-century law (1789) called the “Alien Enemies Act,” which states that the President of the nation has the power to order the detention and expulsion of foreign citizens from countries with which the United States is at war.

The bicentennial law was passed during the administration of John Adams, during a potential war with France, to prevent espionage and sabotage by foreigners in the United States. This law was applied again in 1812 during the war between the United States and the United Kingdom, and during the two world wars, during which US authorities imprisoned tens of thousands of foreigners in concentration camps for several years.

The law permits the imprisonment and deportation of foreign nationals without proper defense or normal judicial process, expediting the process under the pretext of national security.

Trump claimed that the law could be applied today because the Tren de Aragua is “perpetrating, attempting, and threatening a predatory invasion or incursion against US territory.” However, a judge in the District of Columbia named James Boasberg stated that there was no legal justification for enforcing the law, and asked that it be stayed. However, in another unprecedented move, Trump ignored the judge and did not reverse the action, allowing for the deportation of hundreds of Venezuelans to Salvadoran territory.

ALBA Movimientos rejects the deportation and imprisonment of Venezuelan migrants

In a statement, the Social Movements of ALBA, a platform of social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, condemned Trump and Bukele’s decision as a violation of international law and human rights, and called it a kidnapping of migrants.

“This constitutes a barbaric action, demonstrative of the fascist, racist and defiant character of the basic human rights conventions, by the government of Donald Trump, who invoking a law of 1798 (three centuries ago) attributes to himself the power to kidnap, deport and imprison people only for being Venezuelans and the presumption of belonging to the ‘Tren de Aragua’, without any evidence and the right to defense,” states the communiqué.

In addition, the international organization that brings together people’s movements in the region, argues that Trump’s decision could bring dire consequences for Venezuelans in the United States:

“One of the most serious consequences of the application of this law is the criminalization of migration and in particular of Venezuelan migration, giving rise to the possibility that any Venezuelan migrant over the age of 14 could be qualified as an ‘invader’, ‘enemy of the US’ or ‘terrorist’ member of the so-called ‘Tren de Aragua’ and immediately could be deprived of his freedom, confiscating his goods, bank accounts and any kind of belongings.”

Finally, the communiqué demands the unity of the peoples of the world to stop this type of action that could have dangerous consequences for world peace, while supporting the actions of Maduro’s government in its crusade to repatriate the detained migrants:

“These dangerous expressions of neo-fascism that the global right wing under Trump’s leadership are wanting to naturalize and intensify, besieging countries, generating migration, promoting armed groups and then using those same groups to justify policies of criminalization against migrants and to top it off there are countries that commodify this imprisonment.”

“We therefore call for an international campaign to repudiate and denounce this dangerous escalation of criminalization of migration and the Venezuelan people. We accompany and support the actions of the Venezuelan Government before international organizations to rescue the kidnapped Venezuelan citizens and to take the necessary actions within the framework of public international law to prevent this neo-Nazi policy from continuing or spreading.”