Trump confirms U.S. ‘hit’ loading dock in Venezuela
The military said Monday it had struck a 30th alleged drug boat. The dock strike is the first on land.
President Donald Trump said Monday that unspecified U.S. forces were responsible for an explosion at a marine loading facility in Venezuela, escalating the confrontation with the South American country over alleged drug smuggling.
“There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs,” Trump told reporters outside his Mar-a-Lago Club on Monday while greeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “And that is no longer around.”
Trump has been raising pressure on Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, by building up naval forces in the region, seizing oil tankers and destroying 29 boats that U.S. officials said carried drugs.
The military said Monday that it had conducted another strike against a boat accused of smuggling drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing two people.
The strike, which was announced by U.S. Southern Command on social media, has brought the total number of known boat strikes to 30 and the number of people killed to at least 107 since early September.
The shoreline attack would be the first on land, which Trump has been previewing for months.
Trump declined to say if the military or the CIA carried out the strike. He previously authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations.
“I know exactly who it was, but I don’t want to say who it was,” he said.
The Pentagon declined to address questions about the U.S. military’s involvement in the attack. The CIA declined to comment.
The president has declared a “non-international armed conflict” on drug cartels, with officials likening traffickers to al-Qaeda or Islamic State terrorists. Judges and lawmakers from both parties have questioned the administration’s legal authority for the strikes and for fast-tracked deportation of alleged gang members.
Trump first referenced the shoreline attack on Friday in a radio interview with Republican donor John Catsimatidis, saying the strike occurred two nights earlier.
“We just knocked out — I don’t know if you read or you saw — they have a big plant or big facility where they send the, you know, where the ships come from,” Trump said in the interview. “Two nights ago, we knocked that out. So we hit them very hard.”
In October, Trump signed a document known as a “finding” that gave the CIA authority to undertake aggressive covert action against the Venezuelan government and associated drug traffickers, according to two people familiar with the document. The document does not explicitly order the CIA to overthrow Maduro, but it authorizes steps that could lead to that outcome, according to the people familiar with it.
Trump’s precise instructions to the CIA are highly classified. The CIA has moved to beef up its presence in the region, surging personnel to the Caribbean and surrounding area to collect human and electronic intelligence, the people familiar with the matter said.