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AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show looking at the Trump administration’s escalating threats of war against Venezuela and the region. On Sunday, the U.S. docked a warship in Trinidad and Tobago. The Pentagon has also deployed the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, which can hold at least 90 airplanes and attack helicopters, with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro accusing the Trump administration of fabricating a new eternal war.
PRESIDENT NICOLÁS MADURO: [translated] And the people of the United States know that they’re making up a new eternal war. They promised that they will never enter a war, and they’re making up a war, that we will avoid. How? With the mobilization of the peoples of South America, as South America and the Caribbean all say no to war, yes to peace, yes to prosperity, yes to harmony and living together.
AMY GOODMAN: There are approximately 10,000 U.S. troops, both at sea and onshore, in the Caribbean, many stationed in Puerto Rico.
Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth Friday confirmed the U.S. had struck another vessel in the Caribbean, killing at least six people, whom Hegseth accused, without evidence, of being drug traffickers. The U.S. has carried out at least eight naval strikes on boats in the Caribbean and two others on vessels in the Pacific Ocean, killing over, all together, 40 people.
The Trump administration Friday also announced sanctions against Colombian President Gustavo Petro, his family, as well as the Colombian interior minister, swelling tensions between the U.S. and Colombia. Last week, Petro recalled Colombia’s ambassador to the U.S. back to Bogotá and recently accused the U.S. of committing murder for killing a Colombian fisherman in one of the Trump administration’s boat attacks on the Caribbean in mid-September. Trump responded by calling Petro a “lunatic” and a, quote, “illegal drug leader.” Petro has also blasted the U.S. for attempting to destabilize the region under the guise of combating drug trafficking. President Petro spoke at a massive rally in Bogotá Friday following news of the U.S. sanctions against him.
PRESIDENT GUSTAVO PETRO: [translated] To the current government of Donald Trump, we must not respond by kneeling. We must respond, as humanity has already done, by standing firm and taking to the streets to defend people’s rights, the rights of democracy, not to be governed by tyrannies. … I have never done business. I don’t have a dollar in the United States. There’s no account to freeze. I have no desire — and I never will — to do business in the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: For more, we’re joined in our New York studio by Alejandro Velasco, associate professor at NYU, where he’s a historian of modern Latin America. [Alejandro] Velasco is a former executive editor of NACLA Report on the Americas and author of Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela. He was born and raised in Venezuela.
Professor Alejandro Velasco, it’s great to have you with us. Let’s start off with the latest U.S. attack, bringing to 10 the number of vessels the U.S. has bombed in the Caribbean and the Pacific.
ALEJANDRO VELASCO: It’s horrifying on so many levels. On the one hand, of course, we have these competing interests that are, in fact, converging within the Trump administration. You have those who are intent on ousting the Venezuelan government, especially Marco Rubio. You have Pete Hegseth, who’s intent on starting war, even though Trump has said that he doesn’t want to start wars. You have expat oppositions, including María Corina Machado, who has openly said that they want an intervention and then to be able to provide the United States with Venezuela’s oil.
AMY GOODMAN: She just won the Nobel Peace Prize.
ALEJANDRO VELASCO: Who just won the Nobel Peace Prize.
AMY GOODMAN: But said President Trump should win the Nobel Peace Prize.
ALEJANDRO VELASCO: Correct. In fact, has said that it should have been him and that she gave the award to him, on his honor. And so, all of these competing and conflicting interests, that in other situations might not, in fact, align, are seeing Venezuela as an instrumental piece in order to achieve their own particular ends. And, of course, who’s left out of this equation are Venezuelans in Venezuela, who would suffer tremendously the brunt of a chaotic invasion.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to President Trump last week asserting he had the authority to continue to launch airstrikes against boats in international waters without a congressional declaration of war.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I don’t think we’re going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. OK? We’re going to kill them. You know? They’re going to be, like, dead. OK.
AMY GOODMAN: “We’re just going to kill them. … They’re going to be, like, dead.” I mean, even Republican [Senator] Rand Paul, the Kentucky senator, objected, speaking on Fox News Sunday.
SEN. RAND PAUL: The Constitution says that when you go to war, Congress has to vote on it. And during a war, then, there’s a lower rules for engagement, and people do sometimes get killed without due process. But the drug war or the war — or the crime war has typically been something we do through law enforcement. And so far, they have alleged that these people are drug dealers. No one said their name. No one said what evidence. No one said whether they’re armed. And we’ve had no evidence presented. So, at this point, I would call them extrajudicial killings. And this is akin to what China does, to Iran does with drug dealers. They summarily execute people without presenting evidence to the public. So it’s wrong.
AMY GOODMAN: Just to be clear, that’s Republican Senator Rand Paul. Professor Alejandro Velasco, your response? Again, they haven’t pretended even to present evidence on either the strikes in the Pacific or in the Caribbean, the number of people killed at least 40 at this point.
ALEJANDRO VELASCO: Part of it is a show of force, not only to Venezuela and the region, but it’s also a show of force domestically to opponents in the United States whose activism is increasing, to say that they are, in fact, above the law, that they do not care about the law. Yes, they can talk about what and how this fits into particular frameworks of the past and precedent, but the reality is that you even now have Republicans coming out and saying, no, this is not only illegal, but this is, in the context of lack of oversight, extrajudicial killings.
AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about the sanctioning also of Colombia at the same time, I mean, escalating pressure in all of these areas, and secretary of state and national security adviser Marco Rubio — who had that double title before? I think it was Henry Kissinger —
ALEJANDRO VELASCO: That’s right.
AMY GOODMAN: — now wielding immense power. He has had a longtime vendetta against Nicolás Maduro. Talk about how much power he’s wielding at this point, as President Trump, in the last few hours, said something like or refused to rule out a run himself for president. He also talked about Marco Rubio, JD Vance as a team for the ’28 election.
ALEJANDRO VELASCO: No, absolutely. What’s fascinating and disturbing about Marco Rubio is that his animosity towards Venezuela, his sort of center-mindedness on Venezuela, in ousting the government, certainly precedes Maduro. It goes all the way back to Chávez. And what he has discovered now with the power that he has is that his agenda, which is primarily ideological — he primarily just wants to get rid of the Cuban government, right? That this has long been his primary mission.
AMY GOODMAN: He’s Cuban American.
ALEJANDRO VELASCO: He is Cuban American. And so, he knows that he can’t sell Trump on ideology. He can’t sell Trump on the idea we’re going to commit troops, we’re going to commit a ground invasion, just on the basis of ousting a communist. So he has to find other ways to do that. And he’s found it through drugs, right? But in order to make that more of a credible threat, he also has to tie it to Colombia, which is a major drug producer, in the way that Venezuela is not. So, in some ways, Petro here has become involved in this larger kind of effort to frame what’s going on in the Caribbean, and in Venezuela, in particular, as a larger war on drugs, when in fact it’s primarily Marco Rubio’s ideological project.
AMY GOODMAN: So, the increased sanctions on Petro, his wife and others in the Colombian government. Also, Petro has been fierce around criticizing Israel on Gaza. Do you think that plays in?
ALEJANDRO VELASCO: It does, only insofar as it allows for this narrative to cement itself. But, in fact, Marco Rubio, because he is the one that’s driving this policy, all he wants to do is to oust the government in Venezuela in order to then oust the government in Cuba. He needs to oust the government in Venezuela to show Trump that this is something that we can do, and we can do it so easily. And as a result, there’s nothing that Cuba can provide us. Venezuela can provide us oil; Cuba can provide us nothing. But it’s OK, because we’ve got this.
AMY GOODMAN: I also want to talk about Argentina. The far-right President Javier Milei’s party won a decisive victory in Argentina’s midterm elections yesterday, picking up 14 seats in the Senate, 64 in the lower house of Congress, still short of a congressional majority for Milei’s party. It comes after Trump earlier this month promised a $40 billion bailout for Argentina if Milei’s party was victorious. Now, Trump told reporters, quote, “We’ve made a lot of money based on that election.” Since taking office in 2023, Milei has imposed painful austerity measures on Argentina, slashing thousands of jobs, curbing public investments in infrastructure, healthcare and education, which have led to widespread protests. So, go to what is happening here. I mean, here in the U.S., millions face losing food benefits, health benefits, but President Trump is promising 20 — it’s $20 billion of government aid, and then, supposedly, Bessent and his friends, the Treasury secretary, will give another $20 billion — and make money at the same time. What about Trump saying he’s going to make money out of this?
ALEJANDRO VELASCO: I mean, it’s so brazen, right? And we’ve seen this as Trump’s MO. But it also speaks to a larger and more troubling reality, which is that he’s at the same time building, in fact, a global Trumpist coalition. Milei has absolutely bought into it. There are others, in Ecuador and in other parts of Latin America, obviously in El Salvador, who very much fashion themselves as Trumpists in a different place. And what’s fascinating, of course, is that this completely belies the discourse of people like Rubio and others that we’re intervening in Venezuela in order to promote democracy. Of course, what they’re promoting is a Trumpist version of an entirely materially interested, you know, foreign policy and domestic policy agenda.
And so, you know, what’s surprising about the case of Argentina is that it’s not the first time that the United States has essentially extorted Latin American voters by promising massive amounts of deal in order to have a particular electoral result. This happened in Panama. This happened in Nicaragua in 1990, before the referendum there that upset the Sandinista government. And so, this is a well-worn pattern in Latin America with the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you for being with us. We continue to cover this. Alejandro Velasco, associate professor at New York University, NYU, where he’s a historian of modern Latin America, former executive editor of NACLA: The Report on the Americas and author of Barrio Rising: Urban Popular Politics and the Making of Modern Venezuela, born and raised in Venezuela.
Up next, will the ceasefire in Gaza hold? How is the Palestinian leadership organizing for the next phase of the deal? We’ll speak with Drop Site News’s Jeremy Scahill. Stay with us.
