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    US strikes another alleged drug boat bringing death toll from campaign in Latin America to 70

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    US forces struck another alleged drug trafficking boat in the Caribbean, killing three people, defense secretary Pete Hegseth has said, bringing the death toll from the Trump administration’s controversial campaign to at least 70.The US began carrying out such strikes – which some experts say amount to extrajudicial killings even if they target known traffickers – in early September, taking aim at vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific.The US strikes have destroyed at least 18 vessels so far – 17 boats and a semi-submersible – but Washington has yet to make public any concrete evidence that its targets were smuggling narcotics or posed a threat to the United States.Hegseth released footage on X of the latest strike, which he said took place in international waters like the previous strikes and targeted “a vessel operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization.”No US forces were harmed in the operation, he said.“To all narco-terrorists who threaten our homeland: if you want to stay alive, stop trafficking drugs. If you keep trafficking deadly drugs – we will kill you,” he wrote.Like some previous videos released by the US government, a section of the boat is obfuscated for unspecified reasons.President Donald Trump’s administration has built up significant forces in Latin America, in what it says is its campaign to stamp out drug trafficking.So far it has deployed six Navy ships in the Caribbean, sent F-35 stealth warplanes to Puerto Rico, and ordered the USS Gerald R Ford carrier strike group to the region.On Thursday, the US Senate blocked a Democratic war powers resolution that would have forced Donald Trump to seek congressional approval to launch strikes in Venezuela, allowing the president to remain unchecked in his ability to expand his military campaign against the country.The administration has developed a range of options for military action in Venezuela, according to two people familiar with the matter, and Trump’s aides have asked the justice department for additional guidance that could provide a legal basis to strike targets other than boats.The governments and families of those killed in the US strikes on alleged drug boats have said many of the dead were civilians – primarily fishers.Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro has repeatedly accused Trump of seeking to oust him.US bombers have also conducted shows of force near Venezuela, flying over the Caribbean Sea off the country’s coast on at least four occasions since mid-October.Maduro – who has been indicted on drug charges in the United States – insists there is no drug cultivation in his country, which he says is used as a trafficking route for Colombian cocaine against its will.The Trump administration has said in a notice to Congress that the United States is engaged in “armed conflict” with Latin American drug cartels, describing them as terrorist groups as part of its justification for the strikes.With Agence France-Presse More

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      Trump says Maduro’s days are numbered but ‘doubts’ US will go to war with Venezuela

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      Donald Trump has sent mixed signals about potential US intervention in Venezuela, playing down concerns of imminent war against the South American nation but saying its leader Nicolás Maduro’s days were numbered.The president’s remarks, made during a CBS interview released on Sunday, come as the US amasses military units in the Caribbean and has conducted multiple strikes on alleged drug-trafficking vessels, killing dozens.Asked during the 60 Minutes program if the US was going to war against Venezuela, Trump said: “I doubt it. I don’t think so.” However, when asked if Maduro’s days as president were numbered, he replied: “I would say yeah. I think so, yeah.”Maduro, who faces indictment on drug charges in the US, has accused Washington of using drug trafficking as a pretext for “imposing regime change” in Caracas to seize Venezuelan oil.More than 15 US strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific have killed at least 65 people in recent weeks, with the latest taking place on Saturday, prompting criticism from governments in the region.Washington has yet to make public any evidence that its targets were smuggling narcotics or posed a threat to the US.In the same interview, Trump alleged countries including Russia and China had conducted underground nuclear tests unknown to the public, and that the US would test “like other countries do”.“Russia’s testing, and China’s testing, but they don’t talk about it,” he told 60 Minutes.“I don’t want to be the only country that doesn’t test,” he said, adding North Korea and Pakistan to the list of nations allegedly testing their arsenals.Confusion has surrounded Trump’s order that the US begin testing, particularly if he meant conducting the country’s first nuclear explosion since 1992.Trump first made his surprise announcement in a social media post on Thursday, minutes before entering a summit with the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, in South Korea, saying he had “instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis”.The announcement came after Russia said it had tested a new nuclear-powered cruise missile, the Burevestnik, and a nuclear-powered and nuclear-capable underwater drone.Asked directly if he planned for the US to detonate a nuclear weapon for the first time in more than three decades, Trump told CBS: “I’m saying that we’re going to test nuclear weapons like other countries do, yes.”No country other than North Korea is known to have conducted a nuclear detonation for decades. Russia and China have not carried out such tests since 1990 and 1996, respectively.Pressed on the topic, Trump said: “They test way underground where people don’t know exactly what’s happening with the test. You feel a little bit of a vibration.”However, Trump’s energy secretary, Chris Wright, on Sunday downplayed any possible tests by the US, telling Fox News on Sunday: “I think the tests we’re talking about right now are system tests. These are not nuclear explosions.”The US has been a signatory since 1996 to the comprehensive nuclear-test-ban treaty, which bans all atomic test explosions, whether for military or civilian purposes.Other topics addressed in the interview included:

      Trump said he “won’t be extorted” by Democrats to reopen the government, making clear that he has no plans to negotiate as the government shutdown will soon enter its sixth week.

      Asked to clarify whether he would try to run for a third term, which is barred by the constitution, Trump said: “I don’t even think about it,”

      Trump said immigration enforcement officials hadn’t gone far enough in deporting people who were in the country without legal authorisation.
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      Trump’s military pressure on Maduro evokes Latin America’s coup-ridden past

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      The ghosts of sometimes deadly Latin American coups of the past are being evoked by Donald Trump’s relentless military buildup targeting Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s autocratic socialist leader, whom Washington has branded a narco-terrorist.Salvador Allende, the democratically elected Marxist president of Chile toppled in a military coup in 1973, and Rafael Trujillo, the longstanding dictator of the Dominican Republic who was assassinated in 1961 in an ambush organized by political opponents, are just two regional leaders whose fates serve as a warning to Maduro.Allende is believed to have killed himself, although some doubt that explanation, as troops stormed the presidential palace in the Chilean capital, Santiago, in a coup – fomented by then president Richard Nixon’s administration – that ushered in the brutally repressive military regime of Gen Augusto Pinochet.The CIA is believed to have supplied the weapons used to kill Trujillo.Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, escaped into exile after being overthrown in a 1954 coup also instigated by the CIA. But the event triggered a 30-year civil war that killed an estimated 150,000 people and resulted in 50,000 disappearances.The agency is also thought to have made at least eight unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, the leader of Cuba’s communist regime, which is still in power and is closely allied to Maduro.The plot to depose Castro also included the failed Bay of Pigs invasion carried out by Cuban exiles and organized by the CIA in the early months of John F Kennedy’s presidency in 1961, but which was defeated by Cuba’s armed forces.Now, as the US stages its biggest naval buildup in the region since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, some believe Maduro’s life is equally at risk.Washington is preparing to carry out military strikes imminently inside Venezuela on already pinpointed targets that have been identified as military facilities used to smuggle drugs, according to reports.US officials are leaving little doubt that this could lead to fatal consequences for Maduro.“Maduro is about to find himself trapped and might soon discover that he cannot flee the country even if he decided to,” the Miami Herald quoted a source with close knowledge of US military planning as saying. “What’s worse for him, there is now more than one general willing to capture and hand him over, fully aware that one thing is to talk about death, and another to see it coming.”The Trump administration has offered a $50m bounty for information leading to the arrest or conviction of the Venezuelan leader, after announcing in August that it was doubling the $25m reward initially offered during Trump’s first presidency.Explaining his decision this month to authorize covert CIA actions against Venezuela, Trump pointedly refused to say whether US forces were authorized to “take out” Maduro. However, Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA Latin America analyst, said the intense security surrounding the Venezuelan leader in effect rendered the reward a “dead or alive” proposition, meaning any attempt to snatch him is likely to result in his death.“Anybody who’s going to try to take him is going to be so heavily armed that any defense that he put up would lead to them pulling triggers,” said Armstrong.“Let’s say it’s locals and they want the bounty. Most of them will assume that they’ll get the bounty dead or alive. Our forces would be a little bit more disciplined, but then imagine the adrenaline that anybody trying to do a snatch would have coursing through their veins. They’re going to be trigger-happy.“Only a fool would think that they can go in there and say, ‘OK, let me put handcuffs on you and escort you to the car.’ That’s not how it’s going to work.”Maduro has survived at least one apparent attempt on his life, when two drones exploded as he was speaking at a military parade in Caracas in 2018. Television footage shows several members of his security team rushing to his side to shield him after the explosions.Maduro accused neighboring Colombia of being responsible, although some opponents suggested the episode was a false flag operation staged to win sympathy.In May 2020, Venezuelan security forces foiled an attempt by about 60 dissidents, accompanied by two former US Green Berets, to capture and oust him in a plot that involved infiltrating the country by sea. The episode was afterwards dubbed the “Bay of Piglets” in mocking reference to the botched plot against Castro.But a fresh sign of Washington’s determination to get its hands on Maduro emerged this week when the Associated Press reported that a US agent, working for the Department of Homeland Security, had unsuccessfully tried to bribe the Venezuelan president’s pilot into diverting his plane to enable American authorities to capture him.The Trump administration has deployed a daunting array of military hardware off the Venezuelan coast in what appears to be an intimidating statement of intent to bring about regime change in the country.Last week, the Pentagon announced that the USS Gerald Ford, the biggest aircraft carrier in the US navy, would sail from Europe to join a military force consisting of destroyers armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles, B-1 and B-52 bombers, and special forces helicopters.At least 57 people have been killed in more than a dozen US military strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and Pacific. Washington has accused Maduro and other senior Venezuelan officials of being at the head of a cartel smuggling drugs into the US. Maduro denies the charge and experts dispute the significance of Venezuela’s role in the illegal drug trade.Trump has intensified the pressure further by authorizing the CIA to carry out covert activities inside Venezuela, although the contents of his instructions are classified and unknown.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionArmstrong argued that Trump was aware that his policy could prove fatal for Maduro.“What person wouldn’t be aware of that potential because you’re trying to take out a head of state, a tenacious head of state,” he said.“We do assassinations on a routine basis of people that we suspect of not even being senior members of groups that we consider to be terrorists. If we’re authorizing the assassination of regular combatants in the war on terror, how crazy is it to think that the administration would authorize the use of lethal means, if necessary, to snatch the head of a cartel.”Another former CIA officer, speaking on condition of anonymity because of their previous involvement in targeted assassinations in the Middle East, said decisions to authorize such killings were normally taken with great care and based on threat severity.“It is very specific and usually because there is a lethal threat to America and our allies. They are done super carefully,” the former agent said.“The president and the [national security council] come up with the plan, and then they decide who’s going to take the shot … Is it going to be the military [or some other agency], will it lead to war?”High-profile assassinations in recent times include Osama bin Laden by a Navy Seal team in 2011; Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Qods force, killed by a drone strike ordered by Trump in 2020; and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s former deputy in al-Qaida, who was killed by a drone in Afghanistan in 2022 during Joe Biden’s presidency.“Bin Laden was an easy decision – he killed thousands of Americans, and even before the 9/11 attacks he had done lesser stuff,” said the ex-officer. “Suleimani, too, was easy because he had killed so many Americans.”Maduro, however, presents a less clearcut target, even though Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, has described the Venezuelan regime as “the al-Qaida of the western hemisphere”.“The idea of going after a guy, Maduro, who is a sitting leader of a sovereign country, whether we like the country or not, just seems really strange and disproportionate,” the former agent continued. “Maduro is not Hitler. Bin Laden, Suleimani and al-Zawahiri were not heads of countries.“If you look at our history, even in the last 40 or 50, years, we’ve been staying away from going after world leaders.”Disclosures about the CIA’s role in backing coups and assassination attempts on foreign leaders during the 1950s and 1960s led to committees being established in Congress to oversee the agency’s activities.While there is no evidence that Trump has authorized Maduro’s assassination, John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, told senators during his confirmation hearings that he would make the agency less risk averse and more willing to conduct covert action when ordered by the president.Armstrong suggested the administration’s preferred course was to goad Maduro’s opponents in the Venezuelan military and other parts of society to topple him in a coup, setting the scene for a democratic transition while precluding the need for direct US action.But some analysts believe such a scenario would probably spawn a replacement loyal to the leftist movement spearheaded by Maduro’s late predecessor, Hugo Chávez – with a full-blown democratic transformation potentially taking years to bear fruit.Angelo Rivero Santos, a former Venezuelan diplomat in the country’s US embassy and now an academic at Georgetown University, said the chances of a coup were likely to be dashed by domestic realities and the fact that even Maduro’s critics have rallied around the flag in response to recent US pressure. .“The year 2025 is not 1973,” he said, referring to the coup that deposed Chile’s Allende. “Statements from the opposition show that this is not heavily supported inside the country.” More

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      US military kills 14 in attacks on vessels in the Pacific, according to Hegseth

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      The US military killed 14 people and left one survivor in more strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats in the eastern Pacific, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, said on Monday, as the Trump administration continued to expand its campaign beyond the Caribbean.The latest strikes mean the US has now attacked at least 13 vessels and brought the officially acknowledged death toll to 51 people since the campaign began at the start of September.Hegseth did not provide geographic details beyond saying that the strikes took place in the eastern Pacific, in international waters. Last week, the administration started targeting boats on the western side of the Americas after initially focusing on boats off the coast of Venezuela.The four boats were hit on Sunday in three strikes, Hegseth said in a social media post announcing the matter. His said the boats were “known by our intelligence apparatus, transiting along known narco-trafficking routes, and carrying narcotics”. He also acknowledged there was a survivor.In perhaps an effort to avoid the legally thorny questions that could come with detaining that person, Hegseth said the US enlisted Mexico to take on search-and-rescue responsibilities – which Mexico accepted.Hegseth sought to justify the attacks by comparing the US strikes against alleged drug traffickers to conducting strikes on al-Qaida targets during the global “war on terror”.“The Department has spent over TWO DECADES defending other homelands. Now, we’re defending our own. These narco-terrorists have killed more Americans than Al-Qaeda, and they will be treated the same. We will track them, we will network them, and then, we will hunt and kill them,” Hegseth said.Even so, the justification for the strikes has been widely disputed by legal experts. For one, when the US killed al-Qaida members, Congress had authorized the use of force. In targeting drug cartel members, the administration has relied on Trump’s Article II powers to defend the US against an imminent threat.Republican senator Rand Paul, who has been at odds with Trump in recent weeks, on Tuesday expressed criticism with the unilateral strikes and the prospect of a wider escalation with the Venezuelan government.“I am disturbed by the actions with blowing up boats, with people whom we don’t know their name, we’ve been presented with no evidence of a crime,” Paul told reporters. “We don’t even know if they’re armed, frankly, and that’s more indicative of a war. It may be a prelude to war, but I hope it’s not.”Still, the latest boat strikes come as the US appears destined to start hitting land-based targets in the coming weeks, after the Pentagon sent its most advanced aircraft carrier and its strike group to the Caribbean – a major escalation in the Trump administration’s stated war against drug cartels.The move is expected to bring the USS Gerald Ford, with its dozens of fighter jets and its accompanying destroyers, to the coast of Venezuela by roughly the end of the week, according to a person familiar with the matter.Sending the carrier strike group to the Caribbean is the clearest sign to date that the administration intends to dramatically expand the scope of its lethal military campaign from hitting small boats alleged to be carrying drugs bound for the US to targets on land.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe supercarrier has dozens of F-18 Super Hornet jets that increase the offensive firepower and ability for the US to hit air-defense systems in Venezuela. That would clear the way for US special operations or drones to destroy land-based targets, current and former officials said.Donald Trump confirmed to reporters at the White House on 23 October that the next stage of the campaign was to hit targets on the ground. “The land is going to be next,” the president said. “The land drugs are much more dangerous for them. It’s going to be much more dangerous. You’ll be seeing that soon.”Trump did not discuss which targets in which countries the US intended to strike. But he directed Hegseth, who was seated beside him at the White House event about curbing the flow of illegal drugs into the US, to notify Congress about the administration’s plans.Asked whether he would declare war against the cartels, Trump suggested he would continue with individual strikes. “I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK?” he said. “We’re going to kill them, you know? They’re going to be, like, dead.” More

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      Javier Milei hails ‘tipping point’ as his far-right party wins Argentina’s midterm elections

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      The party of Argentina’s far-right president, Javier Milei, has won Sunday’s midterm elections after a campaign in which Donald Trump announced a $40bn bailout for the country and made continued aid conditional on the victory of his Argentinian counterpart.With more than 95% of ballots counted, La Libertad Avanza secured 40.84% of the nationwide vote, in an election widely seen as a de facto referendum on the self-styled anarcho-capitalist’s nearly two years in power. The Peronist opposition, Fuerza Patria, secured 31.67%.While the result falls short of giving Milei a congressional majority – which remains with the Peronists – it has surprised Argentinian analysts, given the recent blows to the libertarian’s popularity from corruption allegations involving his sister to the current economic crisis.The government had downplayed expectations, considering anything between 30% and 35% a satisfactory outcome, especially after Milei’s heavy defeat in the provincial elections in Buenos Aires in September, when he lost to the Peronists by 14 percentage points.View image in fullscreenThis time, Milei’s party turned the tide, winning in Argentina’s largest electoral district, home to about 40% of the electorate.“I am the king of a lost world,” Milei sang as he took the stage in front of hundreds of supporters at a hotel in Buenos Aires. He began his speech by saying: “Today we passed the tipping point – the construction of a great Argentina begins.”The president hailed the US bailout as “something unprecedented, not only in Argentine history but in world history, because the US has never offered support of such magnitude”.“Now we are focused on carrying out the reforms that Argentina needs to consolidate growth and the definitive takeoff of the country – to make Argentina great again,” the president said in Spanish, echoing the Trumpist slogan.View image in fullscreenTrump soon offered his congratulations on Sunday night, calling the win for Milei’s party a “landslide victory”.Speaking on a trip to Asia on Monday, Trump said Milei had a “lot of help” from the US, as he praised the unexpectedly “big win”, describing it as “a great thing”.“He had a lot of help from us. He had a lot of help. I gave him an endorsement, a very strong endorsement,” Trump said, also crediting some of his top officials, including the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, who oversaw the financial assistance to Argentina. “We are sticking with a lot of the countries in South America. We focus very much on South America,” Trump said.View image in fullscreenUp for grabs in the election were 127 of the 257 seats in the lower house and a third of the senate, 24 of its 72 seats. Milei’s party secured 64 lower house seats and 12 in the senate.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe new seats in the lower house, combined with those already held, allow the government to meet its main goal for this election: securing at least a third of the lower house to sustain presidential vetoes.Milei began his administration almost two years ago with his “chainsaw” spending cuts, slashing tens of thousands of public jobs and freezing investment in infrastructure, healthcare, education and even the supply of medicines for pensioners.He managed to bring down inflation from more than 200% in 2023 to about 30% in September, achieving the country’s first fiscal surplus in 14 years. Economic activity grew by 0.3% in August 2025 after three consecutive months of decline.View image in fullscreenBut purchasing power has plummeted: most Argentinians say they are struggling to make ends meet, more than 250,000 jobs have been lost and about 18,000 businesses have closed.The libertarian’s popularity also took a hit when Milei promoted a cryptocurrency that later collapsed; his sister and most powerful cabinet member, Karina Milei, was implicated in an alleged corruption scheme; and one of his party’s leading candidates withdrew from Sunday’s election after admitting to having received $200,000 from a businessman accused of drug trafficking in the US.To prevent the peso from devaluing, the government burned through its dollar reserves, even after taking a $20bn loan (of which $14bn has been disbursed) from the International Monetary Fund, and was forced to turn to Trump, who came to the rescue with a $40bn bailout.Trump’s stance was seen by many in the country as interference in the election, and some predicted that – owing to anti-American sentiment among parts of the population – US support could backfire on Milei.Although voting is compulsory, turnout was the lowest since the return to democracy in 1983, at 67.85%, surpassing the previous record low of 71% set in 2021. More

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      Republican senator calls Trump’s military airstrikes ‘extrajudicial killings’

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      The Trump administration’s military airtrikes against boats off Venezuela’s coast that the White House claims were being used for drug trafficking are “extrajudicial killings”, said Rand Paul, the president’s fellow Republican and US senator from Kentucky.Paul’s strong comments on the topic came on Sunday during an interview on Republican-friendly Fox News, three days after Donald Trump publicly claimed he “can’t imagine” federal lawmakers would have “any problem” with the strikes when asked about seeking congressional approval for them.US forces in recent weeks have carried out at least eight strikes against boats in the Caribbean off Venezuela’s coast, killing about 40 people that the Trump administration has insisted were involved in smuggling drugs.Speaking with Fox News Sunday anchor Shannon Bream, Paul asserted that Congress has “gotten no information” on the campaign of strikes from Trump’s administration – despite the president claiming the White House would be open to briefing the federal lawmakers about the offensive.“No one said their name, no one said what evidence, no one said whether they’re armed, and we’ve had no evidence presented,” Paul said of the targeted boats or those on board. He argued that the Trump administration’s actions bring to mind the way China and Iran’s repressive governments have previously executed drug smugglers.“They summarily execute people without presenting evidence to the public,” Paul contended in his conversation with Bream. “So it’s wrong.”Paul’s comments separate him from other Republican members of Congress who have spoken in favor of the Trump administration’s offensive near Venezuela, including US House representative Bernie Moreno of Ohio and Senator Cynthia Loomis of Wyoming, as reported by the US news website Semafor.The Kentucky libertarian joined Democratic US senators Tim Kaine of Virginia and Adam Schiff of California in introducing a war powers resolution that would have blocked the Trump administration’s use of military strikes within or against Venezuela. But the measure failed to win a majority in the Senate.Trump on Friday told the media that his administration would be willing to brief lawmakers on the strikes but simply saw no reason to seek congressional authorization for them.“I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK?” Trump said. “We’re going to kill them. They’re going to be – like – dead.”Paul has had military-related disagreements with Trump before his Sunday interview on Fox.Trump telegraphed his intent to use the US military to support his administration’s goals of deporting immigrants en masse before he won his second presidency in the 2024 election. After Trump’s second electoral victory but before he retook the Oval Office in January, Paul said he believed using the military in support of deportation was “illegal” and a task better suited for US law enforcement. “It’s a terrible image, and I … oppose that,” Paul said at the time. More

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      Why is Trump, the self-proclaimed ‘president of peace’, aiming to topple the Venezuelan regime?

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      It was a solemn pledge at the heart of Donald Trump’s “America first” appeal.A “Make America great again” (Maga) foreign policy would mean the end of military commitments that had in the past sucked the US into draining and drawn-out wars far from its own shores.Now an intense military buildup targeting the authoritarian regime of Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela is stretching that commitment to the breaking point, as the White House strikes a bellicose posture that seems to mock Trump’s self-proclaimed “president of peace” image.In recent weeks, US forces have carried out at least eight strikes, killing at least 38 people, against boats in the Caribbean off Venezuela’s coast that Washington said were being used for drug trafficking. The latest strike, announced on Friday by Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, reportedly killed six people on a boat allegedly being used to smuggle drugs on what was said to be “a known narco-trafficking route”.Two further strikes in the Pacific this week killed at least five people as tensions also rose between the US and Colombia over the Trump administration’s tactics against alleged traffickers.But the main focus has been Venezuela amid a buildup that has seen nuclear-capable B-52 bombers and elite special operations forces deployed off the South American country’s shores.Trump this month signaled a further escalation by authorising the CIA to conduct operations inside the country, fuelling fears that the US was trying to foment a military coup against Maduro – whom it has designated a “narco-terrorist” and for whose arrest it has offered a $50m bounty – or even prepare a ground invasion.“Action on the ground would be the least preferred option, and it certainly wouldn’t be GI Joe – it would be special ops people,” said Fulton Armstrong, a former CIA analyst and national intelligence officer for Latin America.“With technology, you don’t need to invade any more. The whole idea, I believe, is to get the Venezuelans to take him out.”Some Venezuelan analysts say local support for a coup is thin.The policy has been shaped by a Trump administration power struggle that has seen Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and acting national security adviser, triumph over Richard Grenell, Trump’s envoy to Venezuela, who was sidelined after arguing for a pragmatic approach that would help secure oil deals.Maduro and other senior regime figures are said to have offered extensive concessions in an effort to end the confrontation with Washington, including offering the US a dominant stake in Venezuela’s oil industry. The Trump administration has even eased some sanctions on Venezuelan oil, granting Chevron a licence to resume operating in the country and increase exports from Venezuela. But longstanding tensions have instead escalated further after Rubio pressed the case for a tough approach.“Trump had, in many conversations, meetings with different people emphasized that he really only cared about [Venezuela’s] oil,” said a US businessman with longstanding ties to Venezuela and close knowledge of the White House’s policy. “But Rubio was able to drum up this ‘narco-terrorist’ rhetoric and get Trump to pivot completely. The U-turn really reflects Rubio’s expanded influence in the administration.”Rubio, a longtime critic of Maduro’s socialist regime, won the support of Stephen Miller, the powerful White House deputy chief of staff, and Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, in persuading Trump.He did so partly by seizing on the administration’s designation of Tren de Aragua, a transnational gang of Venezuelan origin, as a “foreign terrorist organisation” that had infiltrated the US and allegedly fuelled the influx of undocumented migrants fleeing Maduro’s regime.A White House proclamation last March further identified the gang as being in cahoots with the Cartel de los Soles, a shadowy grouping of Venezuelan military figures which the administration insists is headed by Maduro and is responsible for trafficking drugs to the US. Other sources have questioned that characterisation of the cartel and Maduro’s connections to it.Experts also question Venezuela’s significance as a drugs supplier. Although the country is a conduit for trafficking, it is not a primary source for most illegal substances entering the US. Fentanyl, which is responsible for most US drug-related deaths, is mainly sourced from Mexico.There are doubts over the legality of the boat strikes – which Rubio has vociferously justified – and the military escalation in the name of combating drugs.The White House insists the actions, believed to be led by the CIA, are legal under the 2001 USA Patriot Act – passed after the 9/11 al-Qaida attacks – which affords scope for action against designated foreign terrorists, a category that now includes Maduro.William Brownfield, a former ambassador to Venezuela and ex-state department drugs and law enforcement czar, said the policy was unprecedented and vulnerable to legal challenge.“I never had anyone seriously suggest to me during my seven years as drugs and law enforcement chief that this issue could be addressed the way it is now,” he said. “I couldn’t even propose it because no one would even entertain the thought of using the military for a law enforcement mission.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUnderlying Rubio’s drive may be a mixture of ideology and political ambition. The son of Cuban immigrants, he has long denounced Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, for the financial and oil support they have provided to Cuba’s communist regime.Observers say Rubio is eyeing the Republican presidential nomination in 2028 – when Trump is constitutionally barred from seeking a third term and where adopting a hard line on Venezuela could help secure the Cuban ethnic vote in a close primary election.Tommy Pigott, a state department spokesman, played down Rubio’s role in shaping the policy, saying in a statement: “The president is the one who drives and determines our foreign policy. It is the job of the cabinet to implement. Secretary Rubio is honored to be a part of the president’s team.”He added: “Maduro is not the legitimate leader of Venezuela; he’s a fugitive of American justice who undermines regional security and poisons Americans and we want to see him brought to justice.”But there are also wider foreign policy considerations as the US tries to revive its historical habit of treating Latin America as its back yard.“Rubio’s position is that the United States was not paying sufficient attention to the Latin American region writ large and I actually agree with that,” said Brownfield. “The Trump administration is, in fact, being fairly clear when it says that the Maduro regime is a threat to basic democratic values throughout the western hemisphere.”Angelo Rivero Santos, a Latin American studies professor at Georgetown University and former diplomat in Venezuela’s embassy in Washington, said the Trump administration was reasserting the Monroe doctrine, devised in the 19th century and which saw the US claiming Latin America as its exclusive sphere of influence.“It’s not only Venezuela,” he said. “When you look at their statements on the Panama canal, at the impositions of tariffs on Brazil, the latest spat with the Colombian government, not to mention the military presence in the Caribbean, you see a return of the Monroe doctrine.”One aim, Santos argued, was to install more Trump-friendly governments in the region similar to those of Javier Milei, Argentina’s president; Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador; and Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa.Another, said Armstrong, the former CIA analyst, was an “ultra-nationalist” projection of strength.“The message is: ‘We’re tough guys,’” he said. “Maduro, like the Cubans, has given the United States the finger and told us to go fuck ourselves, and we have failed with all of the so-called maximum pressure policy that started in Trump 1.0 and has continued and increased in Trump 2.0.”The result, he warned, could be an unpredictable sequence of events as the US tries to goad Maduro into retaliation, which could be used to engineer his downfall.“They can hit a naval target, say a coastal civilian facility, and that might be the provocation that gets Maduro to hit back and maybe do something dumb,” he said. “Then you go for big targets in Caracas, and get a form of chaos. If that doesn’t do it, you put a couple of guys in, special forces or Navy Seals, to do a snatch. Of course he’s not going to go alive. I don’t see a pretty solution.”Aram Roston contributed additional reporting More

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      Pentagon deploys top aircraft carrier as Trump militarisation of Caribbean ratchets up

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      The Pentagon said on Friday that it was deploying the United States’s most advanced aircraft carrier to the Caribbean, a major escalation in the Trump administration’s war against drug cartels that provides the resources to start conducting strikes against targets on the ground.The move will bring the USS Gerald Ford carrier, with dozens of stealth fighter jets and surveillance aircraft, in addition to other warships that accompany the carrier, to the coast of Venezuela as it nears the end of its current deployment in the Mediterranean.Sending the carrier strike group to the Caribbean is the clearest sign to date that the administration intends to dramatically expand the scope of its lethal military campaign from hitting small boats alleged to be carrying drugs bound for the US to targets on land.The carrier strike group has dozens of F-35 fighter jets that increases the firepower and ability for the US to hit air-defense systems in Venezuela. That would clear the way for US special operations or drones to destroy land-based targets, current and former officials said.The expanded naval presence “will bolster US capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States homeland and our security in the western hemisphere”, a Pentagon spokesperson, Sean Parnell, said in a statement.For weeks, the Trump administration has been eyeing escalating its campaign against the drug cartels – as well its effort to destabilize the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro’s government – after an initial campaign of strikes on at least nine alleged drug-trafficking boats.Donald Trump also confirmed to reporters at the White House on Thursday that the next stage of his military campaign was to hit targets on the ground. “The land is going to be next,” Trump said. “The land drugs are much more dangerous for them. It’s going to be much more dangerous. You’ll be seeing that soon.”Trump did not discuss which targets in which countries the US intended to strike. But he directed the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who was seated beside him at the White House event to curb the flow of illegal drugs into the US, to notify Congress about the administration’s plans.Asked whether he would declare war against the cartels, Trump suggested he would continue with individual strikes. “I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK?” he said. “We’re going to kill them, you know they’re going to be, like, dead.”Trump announced what appears to have been the first strike on a boat on 3 September, releasing a brief video of the attack. In the weeks that followed, the administration announced more strikes without disclosing details other than the number of people killed and the claim that the boats carried drugs.Since the start of the military campaign, the administration has provided a dubious legal justification for the strikes, claiming the boats are affiliated with “designated terrorist organisations”, or DTOs, with which the US was now in a “non-international armed conflict”, the Guardian has reported.The administration has nevertheless provided no concrete evidence to date that those killed in the boat strikes were smuggling drugs to the US. In briefings to Congress, Pentagon officials in essence said the boats were legitimate targets because Trump had designated them as assets of cartels seen to be DTOs, people familiar with the matter said.The military campaign has also drawn in the Central Intelligence Agency. Trump confirmed on 15 October that he had authorized so-called “covert action” by the CIA in Venezuela. The Guardian has reported that the CIA has been providing a bulk of the intelligence used in the airstrikes. More

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      in US Politics

      US and Canada spar over ad of Reagan denouncing tariffs that led to derailed trade talks

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      After the US suspended all trade negotiations with Canada over a 1987 speech by Ronald Reagan denouncing tariffs that appeared to spark Donald Trump’s ire, the premier of Ontario said he planned to run an ad featuring the speech again during the World Series on Friday.Doug Ford, whose government ran the Reagan ad in US markets this week, first posted on X that the two nations were “stronger together”, while Trump added his own string of social media posts trumpeting the supposed benefits of tariffs.“Canada and the United States are friends, neighbours and allies. President Ronald Reagan knew that we are stronger together,” Ford wrote on X alongside the Reagan video. “God bless Canada and God bless the United States.”Ford said the ad will run during the first game of the World Series, but, after speaking with Canadian prime minister Mark Carney, Ford announced the campaign will end Monday.“Our intention was always to initiate a conversation about the kind of economy that Americans want to build and the impact of tariffs on workers and businesses,” Ford said. “We’ve achieved our goal, having reached US audiences at the highest levels.”The quick breakdown in relationships apparently stems from a one-minute television advertisement featuring Reagan’s radio address declaring that “trade barriers hurt every American worker”.Trump responded on Truth Social without evidence that Canada had somehow run a “fraudulent” and “fake” advertisement, and announced that “all trade negotiations with Canada are hereby terminated”.Rubio, the secretary of state, told reporters on Friday that Ford had aired commercials in the US which “took President Reagan’s words out of context”, adding that the Reagan Foundation had criticized the effort, too. “The President made his announcement that he suspended any trade talks with Canada for now,” Rubio said.The Reagan Foundation said on Thursday that the Ontario government’s advertisement “misrepresents” Reagan’s address, without elaborating how. It added that officials “did not seek nor receive permission to use and edit the remarks” and added that the organization was reviewing its legal options.It also encouraged people to watch the video of Reagan’s speech on its YouTube channel.Ford’s office responded by reposting the longer, five-minute excerpt, and said that the commercial uses “an unedited excerpt from one of Reagan’s public addresses, which is available through public domain”.Democratic lawmakers on the House ways and means committee jumped in to defend the Ontario advertisement. “This is the ad that drove Trump to cancel all trade talks with Canada,” the committee posted on social media. “Unlike Trump’s AI slop, this is real and uses Reagan’s own words on tariffs.”The dispute comes as both countries face critical deadlines in the next few weeks. Next week marks the cutoff for public comments on the scheduled review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which faces its mandatory six-year assessment in July 2026. The following day, 4 November, Carney, will deliver a federal budget expected to focus on reducing reliance on US markets.Then on 5 November the US supreme court will hear constitutional challenges to Trump’s authority to impose tariffs under emergency powers. A federal appeals court ruled in August that such sweeping duties exceed presidential authority, potentially undermining the legal foundation for the 35% tariffs now applied to Canadian steel, aluminum, timber and automobiles.Chris Sands, the director of the Center for Canadian Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, suggested the collapse in talks simply formalizes a dead-end process.“Can we stop trade talks? Yes, you can stop talks about steel, aluminum, energy, all of it,” he said.“But there was no evidence we were going anywhere anyway.”Sands noted the irony of Trump citing Reagan while reversing his trade legacy. “Reagan loved the country – he loved free trade. Maybe Donald Trump believes that, but it’s not what he’s selling now.”Washington imposed 25% tariffs on Canadian imports this spring, prompting retaliation from Ottawa before Trump raised duties to 35% in August. Ontario, heavily dependent on cross-border manufacturing and automotive trade, has been particularly affected. The breakdown ultimately leaves Carney navigating domestic pressure with a minority government.“Carney’s trying to keep all the provinces together,” Sands said. “He’s walking a tightrope between angry Canadians, an angry Trump, and premiers who are going off-script.”Before departing for Asia on Friday morning, Carney acknowledged the changed reality. “We can’t control the trade policy of the United States,” he told reporters, noting that US policy had fundamentally shifted from previous decades.But he emphasized Canada’s readiness to resume detailed negotiations on steel, aluminum and energy sectors, “when the Americans are ready to have those discussions, because it will be for the benefit of workers in the United States, workers in Canada and families in both of our countries.”For now, Carney said, Canada will focus on what it can control: building at home and “developing new partnerships and opportunities, including with the economic giants of Asia”. More