U.S. fighter jets briefly enter Venezuelan airspace in escalation of intimidation campaign

Two U.S. Navy fighter jets entered Venezuelan airspace on Tuesday in an apparent escalation of the Trump administration's intimidation campaign against the Maduro regime and drug traffickers.

According to private flight-tracking internet sites such as the Sweden-based platform FlightRadar24, the Navy F18 Super Hornet jets flew over the Gulf of Venezuela, just northeast of Maracaibo, Venezuela's second-largest city, around noon for little more than a half hour.

The aircraft then turned back north to the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, the Navy aircraft carrier (the world's largest) from where they had likely taken off. Various flight-tracker sites posted the F-18's call signs as RHINO11 and 12.

The Ford is part of Operation Southern Spear, a massive deployment of military assets President Trump has deployed in the Caribbean since late last summer.

It may have been no coincidence that late this morning the U.S. military’s Southern Command based in Doral, which oversees the Caribbean campaign, posted a photo of an F-18 Super Hornet on the USS Gerald R. Ford.

A spokesperson for SouthCom told WLRN they cannot comment on military aircraft operations and therefore cannot comment on the information reported by the flight-tracking sites.

Jeon Heon-kyun

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The build-up in the region, which includes at least eight warships and more than 10,000 sailors and soldiers, is ostensibly for counter-narcotics operations.

But Trump has made it clear the mission may also be meant to remove Venezuela's brutal socialist dictatorship led by President Nicolás Maduro — who is under U.S. indictment himself for drug trafficking.

Since Sept. 2, the U.S. military has destroyed almost 25 suspected drug-ferrying vessels and killed almost 90 suspected traffickers in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific.

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Those strikes, however, have raised serious concerns in Washington, D.C., and around the hemisphere that the U.S. is committing extrajudicial killings of civilians and therefore war crimes.

The Trump administration insists the attacks are legal because it has designated the Latin American drug criminals as "narco-terrorist combatants" whose trafficking of deadly drugs into the U.S. is an act of war.

Either way, Trump has indicated in recent weeks that the U.S. is likely to conduct anti-drug military strikes inside Venezuela — and Tuesday's brief fly-over into the country's airspace may have been a rehearsal.