US Congress investigates reported follow-up attack on Venezuelan ship
Issued on: 01/12/2025 - FRANCE24
US lawmakers are investigating a reported second strike on a suspected drug boat in the Caribbean after a Washington Post report claimed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the killing of all survivors. Trump denies knowing about the alleged follow-up attack. UN experts and Venezuela call the strikes extrajudicial killings, as tensions between Washington and Caracas continue to rise.
TRUMP LIES!
Trump confirms call with Maduro, Caracas slams US maneuvers
Caracas (AFP) – US President Donald Trump confirmed Sunday he had recently spoken with Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro amid soaring tensions between the two countries, while Caracas slammed what it called US preparations for an attack.
Issued on: 01/12/2025 - FRANCE24
The United States is piling the pressure on Venezuela, with a major military buildup in the Caribbean, the designation of an alleged drug cartel run by Maduro as a terrorist group, and an ominous warning from Trump that Venezuelan airspace is "closed."
Washington says the aim of the military deployment launched in September is to curb drug trafficking in the region, but Caracas insists regime change is the ultimate goal.
"I wouldn't say it went well or badly. It was a phone call," Trump told reporters Sunday aboard Air Force One.
The New York Times reported Friday that Trump and Maduro had discussed a possible meeting, while The Wall Street Journal said Saturday that the conversation also included conditions of amnesty if Maduro were to step down.
Republican Senator Markwayne Mullin said Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union" talk show that the United States has offered Maduro the chance to leave his country for Russia or elsewhere.
The United States accuses Maduro, the political heir to Venezuela's late leftist leader Hugo Chavez, of heading the "Cartel of the Suns" and has issued a $50 million reward for his capture.
But Venezuela and countries that support it insist no such organization even exists.
Several Venezuela experts say what Washington calls the Cartel of the Suns refers to the corruption of senior officials by criminal gangs.
The United States also does not recognize Maduro as the legitimate winner of last year's presidential election.
Though Trump has not publicly threatened to use force against Maduro, he said in recent days that efforts to halt Venezuelan drug trafficking "by land" would begin "very soon."
- Aid from OPEC? -
Venezuela says it has requested assistance from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), of which it is a member, to help "stop this (American) aggression, which is being readied with more and more force."
The request came in a letter from Maduro to the group, read by Vice President Delcy Rodriguez, who is also Venezuela's oil minister, during a virtual meeting of OPEC ministers.
Washington "is trying to seize Venezuela's vast oil reserves, the biggest in the world, by using military force," Maduro wrote in the letter.
Since September, US air strikes have targeted alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing at least 83 people.
Trump's administration has offered no concrete evidence to back up the allegations behind its campaign, and numerous experts have questioned the legality of the operations.
US media reported Friday that in one strike in September, the US military conducted a follow-up strike that killed survivors of an initial attack.
The Washington Post and CNN said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had issued a directive to "kill everybody," but Trump said Sunday that Hegseth had denied giving such an order.
"We'll look into it, but no, I wouldn't have wanted that -- not a second strike," Trump told reporters. "Pete said he did not order the death of those two men."
'Extrajudicial executions'
The head of Venezuela's legislature, Jorge Rodriguez, said he met Sunday with relatives of Venezuelans killed in the strikes.
He would not comment on a possible Trump-Maduro call.
But when asked about the report about the Hegseth order, he said: "If a war had been declared and led to such killings, we would be talking about war crimes."
"Given that no war has been declared, what happened...can only be characterized as murder or extrajudicial executions," he added.
The steady US military buildup has seen the world's largest aircraft carrier deployed to Caribbean waters, while American fighter jets and bombers have repeatedly flown off the Venezuelan coast in recent days.
Six airlines have canceled services to Venezuela, but on Sunday, the airport in Caracas was functioning as usual.
© 2025 AFP
The Caribbean Faces Two Choices: Join the US Attempt to Intimidate Venezuela or Build Its Own Sovereignty
Map of Southern Caribbean around Venezuelan coast showing La Orchila Island. Image Source: GilPe – © OpenStreetMap contributors – CC BY-SA 2.0
US President Donald Trump has authorised the USS Gerald R. Ford to enter the Caribbean. It now floats north of Puerto Rico, joining the USS Iwo Jimaand other US navy assets to threaten Venezuela with an attack. Tensions are high in the Caribbean, with various theories floating about regarding the possibility of what seems to be an inevitable assault by the US and regarding the social catastrophe that such an attack will occasion. CARICOM, the regional body of the Caribbean countries, released a statement affirming its view that the region must be a “zone of peace” and that disputes must be resolved peacefully. Ten former heads of government from Caribbean states published a letter demanding that “our region must never become a pawn in the rivalries of others”.
Former Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Stuart Young said on 21 August, “CARICOM and our region is a recognised zone of peace, and it is critical that this be maintained”. Trinidad and Tobago, he said, has “respected and upheld the principles of non-intervention and non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries and for good reason”. On the surface, it appears as if no one in the Caribbean wants the United States to attack Venezuela.
However, the current Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Kamla Persad-Bissessar (known by her initials as KPB), has openly said that she supports the US actions in the Caribbean. This includes the illegal murder of eighty-three people in twenty-one strikes since 2 September 2025. In fact, when CARICOM released its declaration on the region being a zone of peace, Trinidad and Tobago withdrew from the statement. Why has the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago gone against the entire CARICOM leadership and supported the Trump administration’s military adventure in the Caribbean?
Backyard
Since the Monroe Doctrine (1823), the United States has treated all Latin America and the Caribbean as its “backyard”. The United States has intervened in at least thirty of the thirty-three countries in Latin America and the Caribbean (90 percent of the countries, in other words) —from the US attack on Argentina’s Malvinas Islands (1831-32) to the current threats against Venezuela.
The idea of the “zone of peace” emerged in 1971 when the UN General Assembly voted for the Indian Ocean to be a “zone of peace”. In the next two decades, when CARICOM debated this concept for the Caribbean, the United States intervened in, at least, the Dominican Republic (after 1965), Jamaica (1972-1976), Guyana (1974-1976), Barbados (1976-1978), Grenada (1979-1983), Nicaragua (1981-1988), Suriname (1982-1988), and Haiti (1986).
In 1986, at the CARICOM summit in Guyana, the Prime Minister of Barbados, Errol Barrow, said “My position remains clear that the Caribbean must be recognised and respected as a zone of peace… I have said, and I repeat, that while I am prime minister of Barbados, our territory will not be used to intimidate any of our neighbours be that neighbour Cuba or the USA.” Since Barrow made that comment, Caribbean leaders have punctually affirmed, against the United States, that they are nobody’s backyard and that their waters are a zone of peace. In 2014, in Havana, all members of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) approved a “zone of peace” proclamation with the aim “of uprooting forever threat or use of force” in the region.
Persad-Bissessar or KPB has rejected this important consensus across political traditions in the Caribbean. Why is this so?
Betrayals
In 1989, trade union leader Basdeo Panday formed the United National Congress (UNC), a centre-left formation (whose former name was the Caucus for Love, Unity, and Brotherhood). KPB joined Panday’s party and has remained in the UNC since then. Throughout her career till recently, KPB stayed at the centre of the UNC, arguing for social democratic and pro-welfare policies whether as opposition leader or in her first term as Prime Minister (2010-2015). But even in her first term, KPB showed that she would not remain within the bounds of the centre-left but would tack Far-Right on one issue: crime.
In 2011, KPB declared a State of Emergency for a “war on crime”. At her home in Phillipine, San Fernando, KPB told the press, “The nation must not be held to ransom by groups of thugs bent on creating havoc in our society”, “We have to take very strong action”, she said, “very decisive action”. The government arrested seven thousand people, most of them released for lack of evidence against them, and the government’s Anti-Gang Law could not be passed: this was a policy that mimicked the anti-poor campaigns in the Global North. Already, in this State of Emergency, KPB betrayed the legacy of the UNC, which she dragged further to the Right.
When KPB returned to power in 2025, she began to mimic Trump with “Trinidad and Tobago First” rhetoric and with even harsher language against suspected drug dealers. After the first US strike on a small boat, KPB made a strong statement in support of it: “I have no sympathy for traffickers, the US military should kill them all violently”. Pennelope Beckles, who is the opposition leader in Trinidad and Tobago, said that while her party (the People’s National Movement) supports strong action against drug trafficking, such action must be “lawful” and that KPB’s “reckless statement” must be retracted. Instead, KPB has furthered her support of the US militarisation of the Caribbean.
Problems
Certainly, Trinidad and Tobago faces a tight knot of economic vulnerability (oil and gas dependence, foreign exchange shortages, slow diversification) and social crises (crime, inequality, migration, youth exclusion). All of this is compounded by the weakness of State institutions to help overcome these challenges. The weakness of regionalism further isolates small countries such as Trinidad and Tobago, which are vulnerable to pressure from powerful countries. But KPB is not only acting due to pressure from Trump; she has made a political decision to use US force to try and solve her country’s problems.
What could be her strategy? First, get the United States to bomb small boats that are perhaps involved in the centuries-old Caribbean smuggling operations. If the US bombs enough of these little boats, then the small smugglers would rethink their transit of drugs, weapons, and basic consumer commodities. Second, use the goodwill generated with Trump to encourage investment into Trinidad and Tobago’s essential but stagnant oil industry. There might be short-term gain for KPB. Trinidad and Tobago requires at least $300 million if not $700 million a year for maintenance and for upgrading its petrochemical and Liquified Natural Gas plants (and then it needs $5 billion for offshore field development and building new infrastructure). ExxonMobil’s massive investment in Guyana (rumoured to be over $10 billion) has attracted attention across the Caribbean, where other countries would like to bring in this kind of money. Would companies such as ExxonMobil invest in Trinidad and Tobago? If Trump wanted to reward KPB for her unctuousness, he would tell ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods to expand on the deepwater blocks investment his company has already made in Trinidad and Tobago. Perhaps KPB’s calculation to set aside the zone of peace ideas will get her some more money from the oil giants.
But what does this betrayal break? It certainly disrupts further any attempt to build Caribbean unity, and it isolates Trinidad and Tobago from the broader Caribbean sensibility against the use of the waters for US military confrontations. There are real problems in Trinidad and Tobago: rising gun-related violence, transnational trafficking, and irregular migration across the Gulf of Paria. These problems require real solutions, not the fantasies of US military intervention. US military interventions do not resolve problems, but deepen dependency, escalate tensions, and erode every country’s sovereignty. An attack on Venezuela is not going to solve Trinidad and Tobago’s problems but might indeed amplify them.
The Caribbean has a choice between two futures. One path leads toward deeper militarisation, dependency, and incorporation into the US security apparatus. The other leads toward the revitalisation of regional autonomy, South-South cooperation, and the anti-imperialist traditions that have long sustained the Caribbean’s political imagination.
Venezuela War Would Be Over Oil, Agrees Pentagon, US Congress, Maduro, and Colombian President
Having amassed an enormous combined arms force off the coast, placed the Venezuelan President on the US list of known terrorists, and closed the airspace to commercial flights above Venezuela, all signs point to the White House’s intention of attacking the Venezuelan regime.
The war would be fought to steal Venezuela’s oil and other natural resources: if that sounds illegal or below the moral standard of the US military, consider that the presidents of both Colombia (a NATO partner) and Venezuela, a sitting US Congresswoman, and the former Commander of Southern US Command, have all said that the US would fight a war in Venezuela to take its oil and other natural resources.
Modern American history is replete with military actions sanctioned on poorly substantiated evidence, liberal interpretation of US law, and complete disregard for international law. But could the Pentagon and White House really bomb or invade another country for such a blatantly base and illegal justification?
The answer is that they could if they face no resistance or punishment.
WaL has reported that since the beginning of the Pentagon’s build-up in the southern Caribbean, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has stayed on message that the war is an imperial attempt to seize the country’s oil reserves: larger as they are than even Saudi Arabia’s. Following the first of Trump’s 21 lethal attacks of fishermen and boats in Venezuelan and international waters, Maduro told his people “they want our oil for free”.
On November 26th in an interview with Fox Business, Florida Congresswoman Maria Salazar was asked why Americans should support an aggressive war in Venezuela that could leave American soldiers and sailors dead, and she responded “for the American oil companies, [it] will be a field day”.
“Venezuela, for those Americans who do not understand why we need to go in… Venezuela, for the American oil companies, will be a field day, because it will be more than a trillion dollars in economic activity,” said the daughter of Cuban exiles.
Salazar made more absurd claims – that Maduro is transferring uranium to Iran and Hezbollah, without citing any evidence, but she was only taking the line that former Commander of US Southern Command said at the Aspen Security Forum in 2022 – that South America is rich in resources and “adversaries” take advantage of that “every single day”.
“[O]ur competitors and adversaries also know how rich in the resources that this region is. 60% of the world’s lithium is in the region, you have heavy crude, you have light sweet crude, you have rare earth elements… and there are adversaries that are taking advantage of this region every single day right in our neighborhood,” said General Laura Richardson in her opening remarks of a QA in which she was asked how she viewed the SOUTHCOM Area of Responsibility in terms of national security. The terms are of resources, and of adversaries having them.
The heart of the matter
Others who see that oil is the reason behind the uptick in threats and violence against the South American country include the Gustavo Petro, the President of Colombia, a major non-NATO ally nation.
“(Oil) is at the heart of the matter,” he told CNN in an interview, adding that US President Donald Trump is “not thinking about the democratization of Venezuela, let alone the narco-trafficking”.
He said that Colombian investigations have not found any major link between narco-trafficking and Venezuela. The problem with his eastern neighbor, he said, was a “lack of democracy,” not narcotics.
Oil has consistently featured in Washington’s narrative around its problems with Venezuela. During the Trump Administration, when the 2018 Venezuelan presidential elections saw Maduro receive a second term, Washington backed a political nobody with a penchant for street fights named Juan Guaido, whom 81% of Venezuelans had never heard of, and whose political party received just 2% of the vote, to be a so-called “Interim-President”.
Putting aside the matter of whether Maduro rigged the election as some in Washington have accused, and others have denied in testimony to the UN, in 2019 Vice President Delcy Rodriguez released a recorded phone message between Guaido’s close aid in-country Manuel Avendaño and his party’s top envoy in London, Vanessa Neumann, in which the envoy explains that London won’t back Guaido’s claim to the presidency unless he “drop the topic” of Essequibo, a disputed oil-rich border area with Guyana.
Neumann tells her party ally that she’d been told in talks with the British Foreign Commonwealth Office and Guyana’s high commissioner that “they won’t support [Guaido’s efforts to overthrow Maduro] while we continue [that] line,” the line being that “we want to take control of the Essequibo from Guyana”.
In 2015, ExxonMobil, whose former legal advisor Carlos Vecchio was Juan Guaido’s ambassador to the US, discovered some 12.8 billion barrels of oil in the Essequibo region. It was first concluded to belong to Guyana in 1899 at a conference when no Venezuelan envoys were present. That agreement was annulled at a Geneva Summit in 1969. In 2023, after years of hearing evidence and statements, the International Court of Justice concluded that it did have jurisdiction to rule on the disputed territory. No ruling has yet been made.
Venezuela’s Attorney General Tarek William Saab launched an investigation into Juan Guaido over the phone call and other charges which he said amounted to “high treason”. Reported on worldwide, the video of the phone call recording on YouTube has been removed, but is available here on the Way Back Machine.
While there is a lot of accusations coming out of the US of Nicolas Maduro running a narco-state, Venezuela and Colombia dispute this. There’s only one casus belli that everyone in the region can agree on: Venezuela has lots of oil, and the US wants it.
Andrew Corbley is founder and editor of World at Large, an independent news outlet. He is a loyal listener of Antiwar radio and of the Scott Horton Show. Reprinted with permission from World at Large.
The Conversation
November 30, 2025
By Evan Ellis,
As an analyst who has worked on security issues for over 30 years, I've been monitoring the US military build-up in the Caribbean for months.
The US administration now has the potential to take decisive military action in Venezuela.
Washington has described Nicolás Maduro as the leader of a terrorist group and deemed his regime illegitimate.
The US has named its mission in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean "Operation Southern Spear" and briefed President Donald Trump on military options.
The arrival of the USS Gerald R. Ford gives the US Joint Task Force established in the region the option to launch a high volume of attacks against land targets, should Trump give the order. According to media reports, there are now 15,000 troops in the region, including marines on ships and some 5,000 personnel at bases in Puerto Rico.
This massive deployment has, arguably, sought to convince Maduro's loyalists that US action is now an option on the table.
The message is clear: if a military solution is pursued, the US is highly likely to be successful.
This quantity of US military hardware in the region has not been seen since "Operation Uphold Democracy" in Haiti in 1994, when American-led forces helped end the military regime that had overthrown the democratically elected government.
The most modern aircraft carrier in the US Navy is the Gerald R. Ford aircraft carrier. Its ability to rapidly launch and recover the 75 modern fighter aircraft on board would allow it to generate a significant number of strikes against Venezuelan targets. This would serve as a complement to the substantial numbers of missiles and other weapons on the other ships in the region.
It joins an Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group. This group includes a helicopter dock ship and two landing platform vessels capable of transporting the 2,200 marines of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit and their vehicles and equipment onto land, should they be needed.
If such an event occurs, they would be transported by V-22 tilt-rotor aircraft, helicopters and rapid air cushioned landing craft with the capacity to carry marines and heavier equipment over the beach to their objectives.
In addition, the US has six destroyers and two cruisers with hundreds of missiles for both land attack and air defence and an AC-130 gunship capable of delivering high volumes of missiles against land targets.
The special operations force's support ship, the "Ocean Trader", is also in the region and there is at least one attack submarine under the water's surface.
Then on nearby US territory in Puerto Rico, the US has at least 10 F-35s, the most advanced fighter jet in the world. Flight tracking shows on Nov. 21 at least four additional aircraft were flown into the region from the US.
These capabilities are further complemented by rapidly deployable assets from nearby bases in the continental US, from which the US has already flown sorties with B-52 and B-1 bombers.
At least one MQ-9 Reaper attack and surveillance drone has also been deployed in the region.
The imbalance of military firepower cannot be overstated. The small number of man-portable Igla-S anti-aircraft weapons that Maduro can rely on could take out a handful of US helicopters. But it is likely that few are in workable condition and even those may not be in the hands of people who know how to use them.
Venezuela has around 63,000 soldiers, 23,000 troops in the National Guard and 15,000 marines. There are also unknown thousands in the militia. A submarine, two frigates, two corvettes and several missile and patrol boats are patrolling the coast. But they are massively dwarfed by the number, power and reach of what the US has stationed there.
How it could unfold
Any move by Venezuelans to oust Maduro themselves could be supported by limited US operations on land targets, including military leaders and facilities supporting what the US alleges are drug operations.
Should a home-grown attempt be unsuccessful, a large-scale, decisive US operation to capture or eliminate the regime's leadership, is one option.
One way this could be done could involve a massive barrage of missiles and strikes by stealth aircraft, supported by electronic warfare, special operations missions, and clandestine operations from inside the country. The aim would be to take down the regime’s air defence systems, command nodes, fighter aircraft and other threats.
Whether the United States would follow up such an operation with "boots on the ground" is not certain.
But if Washington has the will, the US certainly has the military might needed to remove the US-designated terrorist group "Cartel de los Soles," including its alleged head, Maduro, which it claims is a threat to US interests.
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