‘No one is going to step on this land and do what we’re supposed to do,’ Venezuela’s defense minister said.
Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino said Sept. 7 that more troops would be sent to states along the country’s Caribbean coast to combat drug trafficking, five days after the U.S. military killed 11 people aboard a boat allegedly carrying narcotics from Venezuela.
Padrino said Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro had ordered the deployment of 15,000 additional troops.
He said they would be sent to the Guajira region of the state of Zulia and the Paraguaná Peninsula in the state of Falcon.
The Guajira region, near the city of Maracaibo in northwestern Venezuela, borders Colombia, and the northern end of the Paraguaná Peninsula lies just 18 miles from Aruba in the Dutch Antilles.
In a video uploaded to social media, Padrino said: “No one is going to come and do the work for us. No one is going to step on this land and do what we’re supposed to do.”
Padrino said the Venezuelan military would also expand its presence in Nueva Esparta, an island in the northeast, and in Sucre and Delta Amacuro, near Margarita Island and Trinidad and Tobago, respectively.
On Sept. 3, Trinidadian Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar welcomed the U.S. attack on the Venezuelan boat.
“The pain and suffering the cartels have inflicted on our nation is immense,” he said. “I have no sympathy for traffickers. The U.S. military should kill them all violently.”
Tensions between the United States and Venezuela have grown since U.S. President Donald Trump stepped up the fight against the inflow of illegal narcotics when he returned to the White House in January.
Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20 designating the Tren de Aragua cartel as a foreign terrorist organization, giving the U.S. government power to go after the group’s finances, target those who supply them with weapons, and carry out military strikes against their facilities.
The Sept. 2 strike at sea came after the U.S. government doubled the reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest to $50 million.
The U.S. military also dispatched air and naval assets to the southern Caribbean Sea to counter drug trafficking.
