US President Donald Trump on Wednesday justified a lethal military strike that his administration said was carried out a day earlier against a Venezuelan gang as a necessary effort by the US to send a message to Latin American cartels.
Asked why the military did not instead interdict the vessel and capture those on board, Trump said that the operation would cause drug smugglers to think twice about trying to move drugs into the US.
“There was massive amounts of drugs coming into our country to kill a lot of people and everybody fully understands that,” Trump said while hosting Polish President Karol Nawrocki at the White House.
Photo: Reuters
“Obviously, they won’t be doing it again,” he said. “And I think a lot of other people won’t be doing it again. When they watch that tape, they’re going to say: ‘Let’s not do this.’”
Tuesday’s strike was a departure from typical US drug interdiction efforts at a time when Trump has ordered a major naval buildup in waters near Venezuela.
Later on Wednesday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said such operations “will happen again.”
Photo: Bloomberg
Rubio said that previous US interdiction efforts in Latin America have not worked in stemming the flow of illicit drugs into the US and beyond.
“What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them,” Rubio said during a visit to Mexico.
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said on Fox & Friends that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was running his country “as a kingpin of a drug narco-state.”
Officials “knew exactly who was in that boat” and “exactly what they were doing,” Hegseth said.
“President Trump is willing to go on offense in ways that others have not seen,” said Hegseth, who declined to detail how the strike was carried out.
Venezuela’s government questioned the veracity of a video released by the Trump administration showing the attack.
Venezuelan Minister of Communications Freddy Nanez suggested that it was created using artificial intelligence and described it as an “almost cartoonish animation, rather than a realistic depiction of an explosion.”
Hegseth said that the strike “was definitely not artificial intelligence,” adding that he watched live footage of it from Washington.
Trump’s administration blames the Tren de Aragua gang for being at the root of illicit drug dealing and violence stemming from it.
Trump said that the operation, which killed 11 people, was carried out in international waters.
The US government has designated the gang a foreign terrorist organization.
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