Trump orders CIA to attack Venezuela: US military kills innocent people in war based on lies

The USA is waging war on Venezuela. Trump authorized CIA "lethal operations" to try to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro. The US military is killing innocent fishermen from Colombia and Trinidad.

The United States is waging war on Venezuela. This is not a hypothetical; it is happening.

The Donald Trump administration is using extreme violence to try to overthrow Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro.

The US military has killed dozens of Venezuelans in strikes on boats in international waters without charge or trial. UN experts have publicly condemned these attacks as “extrajudicial executions” that violate international law.

It is not only Venezuelans who have been executed by the US military. Among the victims of these illegal US attacks have been fishermen who were citizens of Colombia and Trinidad and Tobago.

Family members of the victims, from a Trinidadian fishing village, were interviewed by The Guardian, and they condemned Trump for “killing poor people”, arguing that he simply wants to take their “gas and their oil”.

In other words, the Trump administration is killing innocent people from multiple countries as part of its war on Venezuela.

US military threatens Venezuela with B-52 bombers

Week by week, Trump is ratcheting up the US war on Venezuela.

The US military has approximately 10,000 troops in the Caribbean, along with eight warships and a submarine, all preparing to escalate.

The Trump administration has ordered three B-52 bombers to fly off the coast of Venezuela, threatening to bomb the country.

ABC News published a report on 16 October, writing (all emphasis added):

In less than a week, President Donald Trump has threatened to attack inside Venezuela, confirmed ongoing covert operations inside the country, and ordered bombers capable of dropping nuclear weapons to fly in circles off its coast in what appears to be an unprecedented show of force intended to pressure the Venezuelan president to step down.

Trump orders the CIA to carry out “lethal operations” to provoke regime change in Venezuela

Meanwhile, Trump has admitted that he has authorized the CIA to carry out destabilization operations inside Venezuela.

The public narrative of the US government is that it is supposedly targeting “drug traffickers”. This is not true. The real goal is regime change.

The New York Times interviewed members of the Trump administration, and reported, “American officials have been clear, privately, that the end goal is to drive Mr. Maduro from power”.

Trump has ordered the CIA “to carry out lethal operations in Venezuela”, the Times noted.

“The Trump administration’s strategy on Venezuela, developed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, with help from John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, aims to oust Mr. Maduro from power”, the Times added.

Rubio is a lifelong neoconservative war hawk. He has spent his entire political career pushing for regime change not only in Venezuela, but also in Cuba and Nicaragua.

During Trump’s first term, when the US launched another coup attempt, Rubio was not in the administration, but he lobbied Trump to invade Venezuela.

Trump discussed his attacks on Venezuela in a press conference at the White House on 15 October.

“Why did you authorize the CIA to go into Venezuela?” a journalist asked the US president.

Trump gave two excuses, falsely claiming that it is because Venezuela is supposedly sending criminals to the US and that he wants to stop “drug trafficking”. Both allegations are not true. They are demonstrable lies that the Trump administration is using to try to justify a war of aggression.

The journalist then asked Trump, “Does the CIA have authority to take out Maduro?”

The US president replied, “Oh, I don’t want to answer a question like that. That’s a ridiculous question for me to be given. Not really a ridiculous question, but wouldn’t it be a ridiculous question for me to answer? But I think Venezuela is feeling heat”.

The CIA’s history of terrorism and coups in Latin America

The CIA has carried out myriad crimes against humanity in Latin America. The US spy agency has armed and trained death squads who have burnt down schools and hospitals and tortured and massacred civilians, like the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

The CIA has also committed war crimes directly. The CIA put mines in Nicaragua’s ports in the 1980s, in a flagrant violation of international law.

Nicaragua took the United States to the International Court of Justice, the UN’s top judicial authority, in 1984, and it won the case in 1986. The Hague ruled in support of the people of Nicaragua, determining that the US government, and specifically the CIA, had violated international law in its attacks on Nicaraguan civilian targets.

However, Washington ignored the ICJ ruling and vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that demanded it be respected.

To this day, the US rogue regime refuses to pay the reparations that it legally owes to Nicaragua.

The CIA has also sponsored dozens of coups d’etat against democratically elected left-wing leaders in Latin America.

In 1954, the CIA overthrew Guatemala’s democratically elected President Jacobo Árbenz on behalf of US corporation the United Fruit Company (now known as Chiquita).

Then, on 11 September 1973, the CIA toppled Chile’s democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende, and put in power the fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet, who killed thousands of people and maintained an iron grip on power for nearly two decades.

Trump is now clearly giving the CIA a green light to try to do the same in Venezuela, to overthrow the leftist Chavista government of President Maduro and install a right-wing puppet regime that will privatize the country’s massive oil and gold reserves and other natural resources and sell them off to US corporations.

Trump lies about “drug trafficking” to push regime change

The false narrative that the Trump administration is using is that it is attacking Venezuela supposedly in order to stop the “flow of drugs” into the US. This is a lie that has been debunked by multiple sources.

The Financial Times published a lengthy report, citing US officials and Venezuelan opposition figures who have been working closely with the Trump administration, and they admitted that the real goal is regime change.

The US government’s priority “is to force the departure of top Venezuelan government figures, preferably via resignation or an arranged handover — but with the clear threat that if Maduro and his inner circle cling to power, the Americans may use targeted military force to capture or kill them”, the FT wrote.

The Trump administration’s unsubstantiated accusations that Venezuela is a major center of drug production are clearly contradicted by the data compiled by UN experts.

Venezuela is not a major source of drugs, nor is it a key transit country.

According to 2022 data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), 65% of the cocaine in the world is produced in Colombia, which has historically been the closest US ally in Latin America and has been dominated by right-wing, pro-US politicians linked to cartels.

Peru is the second-largest source of cocaine, providing 27% of the global total, followed by Bolivia at 8%. Venezuela’s role is so minor it is insignificant.

US government-funded coup leader María Corina Machado pledged to privatize Venezuela’s oil

The Financial Times noted, “At stake in Venezuela are the world’s largest proven oil reserves and valuable deposits of gold, diamonds and coltan”.

The FT cited an anonymous “American businessman with interests in the country” who revealed, “What Trump wants in Venezuela is oil, minerals and gold… He wants US companies down there investing”.

Far-right Venezuelan coup leader María Corina Machado has openly called for privatizing her country’s natural resources and handing them over to US corporations.

Machado, who has been funded by the US government for more than 20 years, was awarded a so-called “Nobel Peace Prize” due to her violent, US-sponsored regime-change efforts.

In an interview with Donald Trump Jr. in February, Machado declared (emphasis added):

Forget about Saudi Arabia; forget about the Saudis. I mean, we have more oil, I mean, infinite potential.

And we’re going to open markets. We’re going to kick [out] the government from the oil sector. We’re going to privatize all our industry.

Venezuela has huge resources: oil, gas, minerals, land, technology. And, as you said before, we have a strategic location, you know, hours from the United States.

So we’re going to do this right. We know what we have to do.

…

And American companies are in, you know, a super strategic position to invest.

…

This country, Venezuela, is going to be the brightest opportunity for investment of American companies, of good people that are going to make a lot of money.

Even CNN and ex Biden officials are skeptical of Trump’s “drug trafficking” lies about Venezuela

Immediately after the US government-funded extremist María Corina Machado won the so-called “Nobel Peace Prize”, she was interviewed by CNN.

Machado proudly stated that she supports Trump and the murderous war he is waging against her country. In fact, she called for further military escalation.

“We totally support it”, Machado said, in reference to the US military attacks in the Caribbean.

“Actually, we’re asking other countries in the Caribbean, in Latin America and Europe, to join that international coalition” for war on Venezuela, added the so-called “Nobel Peace Prize” laureate.

CNN is normally a loyal mouthpiece for the US State Department. The corporate network has supported every major US war of aggression, against Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Iran, Yugoslavia, and beyond.

However, because CNN is an anti-Trump media outlet, it has been willing to challenge some of the administration’s blatant lies about Venezuela.

In fact, CNN drew parallels between Trump’s false claims about Venezuela and the fraudulent allegations that the George W. Bush administration fabricated in order to justify its illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 (which CNN had supported at the time).

The Bush administration’s CIA created false intelligence claiming that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction”, or WMDs. This was not true.

Today, the Trump administration is falsely claiming that the Venezuelan government is run by drug cartels. This is totally preposterous and is not supported by any evidence.

In her interview with US government-funded Venezuelan coup plotter María Corina Machado, CNN host Christiane Amanpour pushed back against these false claims.

Amanpour cited a previous interview she did with Juan Sebastián González, who helped oversee US policy toward Latin America in the Joe Biden administration, as the senior director of the National Security Council for the Western Hemisphere.

González admitted that Venezuela is not a major producer of drugs.

This is what this top Biden administration official told CNN:

The reason that drugs have never originated from Venezuela — in the way that they originate from Colombia, over 95% of the cocaine that comes to United States comes from Colombia — is because Venezuela has one of the largest oil reserves in the world; they have the largest gold reserves in Latin America.

So there has never been a need for them to develop a native drug-producing industry.

In her CNN interview with Machado, Amanpour noted that, “when people look at what’s going on, they say, OK, they [the Trump administration] have used the drug issue to justify getting rid of Maduro, like they used the non-existent WMD issue to get rid of Saddam Hussein in Iraq”.

“So are you, I guess what I’m asking you is, are you concerned about that?” Amanpour asked.

Machado, the US government-funded coup plotter and staunch supporter of Trump, shot back, “I totally disagree”. She cited baseless claims that the FBI made during Trump’s first administration that, supposedly, “24% of the world trade of cocaine goes through Venezuela”.

This politically motivated accusation by Trump’s FBI has been blatantly contradicted by the data published by independent international experts at the United Nations.

Trump’s lies about Venezuela are so transparent that even CNN and former Biden administration officials are willing to call them out. But their obvious fraudulence is not stopping the US government from escalating its war of aggression in the Caribbean.