The government of Venezuela’s socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro claimed in a Sunday statement that it captured an alleged “mercenary group” with “direct information” from the CIA.
The statement from Maduro’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez accused the alleged group of planning a “false flag operation” from around nearby Trinidad and Tobago and accused the small island nation of performing ongoing “military exercises” under “the coordination, financing and control of the United States Southern Command.” The claim came days after the Trump administration’s Department of War authorized the deployment of the world’s largest aircraft carrier to Latin American waters to target drug cartels.
“Venezuela reports that it has captured a mercenary group with direct information from the U.S. intelligence agency, CIA, being able to determine that a false flag attack is underway from waters bordering Trinidad and Tobago, or from Trinidad or Venezuelan territory itself, which generates a complete military confrontation against our country,” Rodríguez said in the statement, originally in Spanish.
The Venezuelan vice president went on to compare the alleged “planned action” to the sinking of the USS Maine in 1898 and the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 — both widely believed to have been misrepresented — which led, respectively, to the U.S. declaring war on Spain and to the escalation of the Vietnam War.
“Venezuela does not accept threats from any U.S. vassal government, We are not intimidated by military exercises of war cries,” Rodríguez’s statement added.
The Pentagon announced Friday that it had deployed the Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group to waters in the vicinity of South America as an effort to counter transnational cartel activity. The vessel has the capacity of carrying up to 90 aircraft and was, at the time of the announcement, in Mediterranean waters near Croatia, according to BBC.
Maduro claimed to state media that the U.S.’ actions amounted to “fabricating a new eternal war,” following the Pentagon’s move, BBC reported.
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced Friday morning on X that his department, at President Donald Trump’s request the night before, “carried out a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by Tren de Aragua (TdA), a Designated Terrorist Organization (DTO), trafficking narcotics in the Caribbean Sea.”
“If you are a narco-terrorist smuggling drugs in our hemisphere, we will treat you like we treat Al-Qaeda. Day or NIGHT, we will map your networks, track your people, hunt you down, and kill you,” Hegseth added in his X post.
“Tren De Aragua, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization from Venezuela, operating under the direct control of the Venezuelan regime, has waged a campaign of rape, torture and murder against Americans, and its members are designated as Alien Enemies of the United States,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller wrote Friday on the platform in reply to Hegseth.
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