Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro is urging talks with President Trump on drug-trafficking — but recent events, including the apparent U.S. bombing of a drug-trafficking launch base inside Venezuela last month, suggest it may be too late for that.
Trump himself asserted this week that the December U.S. military strike took place, and reports from people inside Venezuela have since seemed to corroborate it, though there has been no further confirmation from his administration.
Military experts also tell WLRN the attack likely did take place — and that a surprise foray by U.S. fighter jets early last month into Venezuela air space, over the Gulf of Venezuela, was likely an advance reconnaissance mission.
"It makes sense that those flights were a sort of rehearsal for the actual bombing," said one expert, who asked not to be identified.
Indigenous Venezuelans on the northwest coast of the Gulf of Venezuela, near the border with Colombia, told NBC News and Telemundo in recent days that they saw an enormous explosion there on Dec. 18, in an area where drug traffickers and border-crossing Colombian guerrillas are known to conduct narco-operations.
Since then, ordnance fragments have reportedly washed up on shore there that suggest the bombing included U.S. missiles, such as AGM-114 Hellfires, that may have been dropped by a U.S. MQ-9 Reaper drone.
If the reports and Trump's own assertion of a bombing on Venezuelan territory are true, it marks a major escalation in the U.S.'s months-long campaign of intimidation against Maduro. It had previously been confined to destroying suspected narco-trafficking boats — and killing their passengers — in international waters off Venezuela's coast.
READ MORE: U.S. fighter jets briefly enter Venezuela airspace in escalation of intimidation campaign
As a result, Maduro said Thursday he’s “ready” to forge an anti-drug trafficking partnership with the U.S.
But the Trump administration, which insists Maduro’s regime is actually part of the narco-mafia the U.S. has been targeting, has offered no response.
The administration is likely to continue targeting suspected drug cartel sites inside Venezuela as part of the U.S.’s “Operation Southern Spear” to militarily combat Latin American narco-trafficking and possibly oust Maduro from power.
That operation, however, remains under legal scrutiny: traffickers are considered under international law to be civilian criminals — even though Trump has designated them as "narco-terrorist combatants" at war with the U.S. — and as a result summarily killing them militarily may constitute a war crime.
It is still unclear if anyone was killed or injured in the apparent Dec. 18 attack. Almost 40 suspected narco-trafficking vessels have been destroyed by the U.S. military in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific since September, and 115 suspected drug traffickers have so far been killed in those strikes.
