Gunboats and smokescreens in the Caribbean

It is wonderful to see a new post by Nat South on LiveJournal

This article is about the news about the destruction by the U.S. Navy of a fast-launch, supposedly off the coast of Venezuela. The first thing that springs to mind is the expression: to crack a nut with a sledgehammer.

It seems that maritime interdiction U.S. style is reminiscent of the U.S. Wild West mentality.  Let’s hope that it an A.I. video, as suggested by the Venezuelan minister of information, and not another example of the banality of U.S. repression, extra-judicial execution, by a missile, of a boat crew and possibly passengers.  I consider it as some kind of macabre ‘info-tainment’, to appease U.S. domestic audience primarily, just as bread and circuses were seen as entertainment during the Roman era.

Bloodthirsty ‘policy demonstration’ on show 

Suffice to say, there are a lot of these types of boats in the Caribbean region, the majority are fishing boats, while some are used to transport migrants around.  Mentioning “Tren de Aragua” is a convenient placeholder, that dials into the audience limited awareness of current affairs.  This item would be probably best suited as a one minute extract for a Hollywood movie, yet it is shown as actual ‘reality’ as presented by high-level U.S. officials.

There is very little context or details on the incident, I have yet to see a press release from the U.S. military on this, outlining the circumstances.   No proof,  just social media and a video post, with some gloating on the sidelines. It is a very feeble justification for the presence of a dozen U.S. Navy, USNS and coastguard ships and aircraft in the region. In the greater scheme of things, it is just a footnote in a more ghastly and brutal world, especially when considering the on-going ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.

Soon after taking his seat in the White House, Donald Trump signed an executive order formally designating eight cartels as “foreign terrorist organisations”, including the Venezuela-based Tren de Aragua. The others: six in Mexico, one Central American one that originated in California. All of the non-Venezuelan cartels are well-known and very well documented.   The “Tren de Aragua” isn’t so well documented, yet it is the one that is all too often cited  by U.S. officials and media outlets, in sharp contrast to the others that have a long-standing notoriety.

Further to this, Trump then went on to sign a ‘secret’ directive in August, authorising the military to use force against the cartels.  Fast-forward nearly a month, now we see one reported consequences of these decrees.

It doesn’t bear stating how these decrees are legal minefields, given that:

1. international law: sovereign jurisdiction of the countries affected;
2. no UN mandate nor U.S. legislative oversight of such missions.
3. legal quagmire over extra-judicial executions by U.S. military.

The directives and legal loop jumping by U.S. authorities  is still an act of skating on wafer-thin ice.  Unilaterally, the U.S. acts as sheriff, judge and now executioner.

Donald Trump essentially wants to uphold the U.S. Monroe Doctrine, by recycling   the excuses for intervening in the region, thus, creating a new chapter in an old book called: “the war on drugs”.   I’m not even to bother to go into the details into the long-running saga, other to say, it is a ruse for U.S. exceptionalism to maintain its presence in other countries, (notably DEA presence and U.S. military bases).  By sending out the U.S. naval ships, it is the latest ‘ big stick’ to wave at and get Central and South American to fall in line with Trump’s brash smokescreen war on drug cartels and into the U.S. sphere of influence.

It doesn’t come out of the blue though, because it can only be a casual coincidence that President Maduro had recently talked about gunboat policy on the news, and within a week, this video and social media post is published.

It represent the start of actions, that have been drip-fed over the last week or so.  On Monday, there was news of shots being exchanged on the Guyanese border.

Drip drip, the sound of the narratives being fed to the public.  The mainstream media dutifully play the role of the snake oil merchant, in shaping and driving home those narratives. The war of words launched by the U.S. government, started at the beginning of August, with once more a doubling of the bounty on Maduro’s head.  The U.S. government accuses Maduro of being the leader of the Cartel of the Suns (Cartel de los Soles). Again another highly-doubtful criminal entity, that doesn’t figure in drug reports. So, this is another fig leaf that the U.S. uses to hide behind, to take action against the Venezuelan government. Yet by July, it too had been designated as as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” by the U.S. government.  The stepping stones towards the latest potential regime change operation, have been put into place.

At the end of August 29, Marco Rubio, the State Dept Secretary, went to U.S. Southern Command  HQ, responsible for U.S. military activities in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Given the media glare and official spotlight, I could be forgiven that both the Tren de Aragua and the Cartel de los Soles would be investigated in depth, analysed and under minute scrutiny by U.S. law enforcement bodies and the intelligence community, but what is provided in official reports offers sparse details of these entities, just a patchwork of narratives, incidents, threaded together.

Then came the deployment of the U.S. Navy to the region to “to counter Latin American drug cartels”, off Venezuela. In all of my time in the maritime world, and also in law enforcement, Venezuela has not been a major player in the drug cartel world,  but Colombia (without fail, just look at the link of a 2016 image provided to U.S. Congress), Mexico and Ecuador. Yet the U.S. Navy is apparently off Venezuela. If it isn’t obviously political, not purely law enforcement, I’ll shall have to eat my hat.  The U.S. Coastguard is the primary law enforcement side of maritime drug smuggling. The stated presence of a U.S. nuclear submarine as part of the deployment, is unusual to say the least.  There is a sense of deja-vu in all of this U.S. build up, echoing what happened five years, (Newsweek April 2020), “the administration’s public statements acknowledge that these operations are intended to squeeze Maduro.”

Five decades of the “War on Drugs”

Some images and statistics to review, but of course, the main information is the annual UN report on drugs and U.S. equivalents, both of which confirm the insignificance of Venezuela in the drug cartel routes. Yet the U.S. administration insists that it is a central player.  The statistics and report show a different picture.

See DEA NDTA report 2025

See UNODC report 2025

The US government has frequently labeled Venezuela as a “major drug transit country,” but conveniently and consistently ignores the  significant major transit routes, for just the one transit route through a non-U.S. proxy country, that has been subjected to bi-partisan regime change attempts for two decades. In other words, it is purely a smokescreen.

The series of U.S. long-running fabrications, along with the implementation of a well-orchestrated smokescreen, has now turned into a more deadly one, if the video is real. It makes a ghastly mockery of genuine drug interdiction operations and maritime interdiction on the whole. The reality is that interdiction operations are the result of careful intelligence work, often with years of research, done in accordance to specific standard operational procedures. All we get is a fragments of an attack on a boat.

In my opinion: This latest action maybe was done to try to start to lure out the Venezuelan navy and then possibly provoke a false flag incident, thus providing a casus belli for the U.S. to swing into a limited military action against the Venezuelan authorities.