{"id":13297,"date":"2025-10-20T11:05:46","date_gmt":"2025-10-20T03:05:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tingchao.xyz\/?p=13297"},"modified":"2025-10-20T11:05:49","modified_gmt":"2025-10-20T03:05:49","slug":"trumps-threats-and-military-strikes-turn-up-heat-on-latin-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tingchao.xyz\/?p=13297","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s Threats and Military Strikes Turn Up Heat on Latin America"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
President Trump said the U.S. would stop aid payments to Colombia.\u00a9\u00a0Alex Wong\/Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

President Trump\u2019s vow to intervene against\u00a0drug smugglers in Colombia<\/a>\u00a0sharpened questions about a widening U.S. counternarcotics campaign in Latin America that began with military strikes on oceangoing boats but is increasingly focused on threatening governments in the region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His broadside against Colombia came in a social-media post Sunday morning that branded its president, Gustavo Petro, an \u201cillegal drug leader,\u201d vowing to halt U.S. aid to Bogot\u00e1, and to take unilateral action unless Petro closed \u201cthese killing fields immediately.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The threats turned one of Washington\u2019s most critical security partners into a target, adding to a U.S. offensive that has included attacks on alleged drug vessels in the Caribbean and increasing pressure on Venezuelan President Nicol\u00e1s Maduro\u2014an effort that drug experts and former officials say is blurring the line between counternarcotics and regime change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Trump administration believes its campaign against Maduro is working, and that increased U.S. military pressure in the region will convince him he can\u2019t remain in power. \u201cThe idea is to make him miserable enough to go away,\u201d a senior administration official said, conceding it could take time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maduro has denounced the deployment of Pentagon assets off the coast of Venezuela as a provocation that is part of a larger effort to drive him from power. Yet in a letter to Trump last month, Maduro promised to produce data showing his country doesn\u2019t traffic drugs. Trump on Friday said that Maduro is willing to give \u201ceverything\u201d to ease tensions, adding \u201che doesn\u2019t want to f\u2014 around with the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump earlier this week said he had authorized the CIA<\/a> to conduct covert action in Venezuela.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Strikes inside Venezuela are an option\u2014and Trump has publicly raised the possibility\u2014but they aren\u2019t currently being contemplated, the administration official said. More broadly, the U.S. plan has been to close the southern border, then attack drug flows on the water, and then potentially shift to combating air transport.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new focus on Colombia\u2019s Petro, a former leftist guerrilla who frequently criticizes U.S. policy, comes in the midst of seven weeks of operations by U.S. forces in the Caribbean in which airstrikes have blasted seven vessels out of the water. At least 32 people have been killed in the strikes, according to U.S. officials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The White House has described the people manning the vessels as \u201cnarco-terrorists,\u201d in some cases linking them to Venezuelan and Colombian criminal groups they have designated as foreign terrorist organizations. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Sunday \u201cthese cartels are the al Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the unprecedented use of U.S. lethal force against small drug boats, which was initially targeting vessels from Venezuela, has quickly expanded to include nationals of other countries in the region in recent weeks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Colombia and Trinidad and Tobago say citizens of their countries have been killed in the strikes. Two crew members the U.S. said survived an airstrike<\/a> last week\u2014a Colombian and an Ecuadorean\u2014were to be repatriated to their homelands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe U.S. is pushing the boundary of international law,\u201d said Sergio Guzm\u00e1n, who heads Colombia Risk Analysis, a consultancy that studies U.S.-Colombia policy. \u201cEssentially, the U.S. has now cut all of its foreign assistance to Colombia and it is also looking for regime change in Venezuela\u2014two things that eight months ago or 10 months ago were not fathomable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump accused Colombia\u2019s president of doing nothing to stop drug production and having \u201ca fresh mouth toward America.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Petro has responded defiantly. On his X account, he said that one airstrike\u2014which Colombian state television said was in mid-September\u2014killed a Colombian fisherman, Alejandro Carranza, and \u201cviolated our sovereignty in territorial waters.\u201d He said that Colombia \u201chas never been rude with the U.S.\u201d and called the American leader \u201cignorant with Colombia.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have pressed the White House<\/a> for a legal explanation and clarification about the administration\u2019s objectives. In a confidential notice to Congress, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal, Trump declared the U.S. is in a \u201cnoninternational armed conflict\u201d with the cartels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey had a very hard time explaining to us the legal rationale for doing this and the constitutionality of doing it,\u201d Sen. Mark Kelly (D., Ariz.) said on CBS\u2019s \u201cFace the Nation\u201d on Sunday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSo all these people have been blown up without us knowing their name without any evidence of a crime,\u201d said Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.), on NBC\u2019s \u201cMeet the Press.\u201d Paul said that he thinks some members of his administration \u201chave been agitating for war with Venezuela for a long, long period of time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Earlier this month, Paul sided with Senate Democrats in unsuccessfully pushing for a measure that would have required Trump to seek congressional approval before further U.S. military action in the Caribbean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The U.S. strikes are happening amid the largest U.S. military buildup in Latin America<\/a> in more than three decades. This campaign is now colliding with Colombia, which has depended on American Black Hawk helicopters, U.S. intelligence and military training to battle cocaine and armed groups.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Behind the scenes, Colombian and U.S. diplomats and defense officials have been working for months to keep the security cooperation between the two countries from unraveling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bogot\u00e1 has received more than $14 billion in U.S. aid since 2000. After dramatically cutting cocaine production by 2012 with U.S. help, then-President Juan Manuel Santos ended the aerial spraying of coca with herbicides. Colombia\u2019s cocaine production has skyrocketed since to the highest levels on record, reports by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Last month, the Trump administration decertified Colombia for the first time in nearly three decades, saying the country had \u201cfailed demonstrably\u201d to meet international counternarcotics obligations. But most of the aid continued through congressional and national interest waivers, underscoring how critical the cooperation remains to U.S. counternarcotics efforts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

President Trump\u2019s vow to intervene against\u00a0drug smugglers in Colombia\u00a0sharpened questions about a widening U.S. counternarcotics campaign in Latin America that began with military strikes on oceangoing boats but is increasingly focused on threatening governments in the region. His broadside against Colombia came in a social-media post Sunday morning that branded its president, Gustavo Petro, an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":13298,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[1608,1750,1724],"class_list":["post-13297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-usa","tag-military","tag-strikes","tag-trump"],"yoast_head":"\nTrump\u2019s Threats and Military Strikes Turn Up Heat on Latin America - LISTEN WORLD<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/tingchao.xyz\/?p=13297\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Trump\u2019s Threats and Military Strikes Turn Up Heat on Latin America - LISTEN WORLD\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"President Trump\u2019s vow to intervene against\u00a0drug smugglers in Colombia\u00a0sharpened questions about a widening U.S. counternarcotics campaign in Latin America that began with military strikes on oceangoing boats but is increasingly focused on threatening governments in the region. 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