President Donald Trump announced that U.S. forces are preparing to launch land-based strikes inside Venezuela, escalating a months-long anti-narcotics campaign across the Caribbean and warning that any nation complicit in drug trafficking could be targeted next.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
President Trump said during a Cabinet meeting on Dec. 2 that U.S. strikes “on land” in Venezuela would begin “very soon,” marking a sharp escalation from earlier naval operations that targeted suspected drug-smuggling vessels in the Caribbean Sea.
“We’re going to start doing those strikes on land too,” Trump said at the White House. “We know where they live. We know where the bad ones live, and we’re going to start that very soon.”
The president did not specify a timeline or operational details but warned that other countries could face similar military action if implicated in narcotics trafficking. “Anybody that’s doing that and selling it into our country is subject to attack,” he added.
The planned strikes follow months of mounting tension between Washington and Caracas. The U.S. has accused Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of leading the Cartel de los Soles, a narcotics network the Trump administration recently designated as a foreign terrorist organization. The State Department has also declared Maduro’s government illegitimate, citing widespread fraud in last year’s election, which international observers said was rigged.
In a statement last month, the department described the Cartel de los Soles, alongside Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa Cartel, as “responsible for terrorist violence throughout our hemisphere as well as for trafficking drugs into the United States and Europe.” It pledged to use “all available tools to protect our national security interests and deny funding and resources to narco-terrorists.”
Reports of earlier U.S. strikes in the Caribbean have already stirred controversy. According to anonymous defense sources, a second attack in September targeted survivors from an initial strike on a suspected drug-smuggling boat. Trump and War Secretary Pete Hegseth defended the broader campaign during Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting, framing it as vital to safeguarding American communities.
“I didn’t know about the second strike. I didn’t know anything about people,” Trump said. “I knew they took out a boat, but I would say this—they had a strike.”
Hegseth told reporters he “watched the first strike live” and emphasized that commanders have his full backing. “We’ve only just begun striking narco boats and putting narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean because they’ve been poisoning the American people,” Hegseth said. “Joe Biden tried to approach it with kid gloves and allowed them to come across the border. President Trump said, ‘No, we’re taking the gloves off.’”
Hegseth called the operations a deterrent, not a repeat of “the rinse-and-repeat approach of previous administrations.” He said narcotics trafficking has devastated U.S. communities, resulting in “hundreds of thousands of Americans poisoned.”
“We always have the back of our commanders who are making decisions in difficult situations,” Hegseth added. “They’ve done the right things. We’ll keep doing that. And we have their backs.”
The Department of War dismissed media reports alleging potential war crimes stemming from the September incident. Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson said all operations in the SOUTHCOM region were lawful. “Our actions comply with the law of armed conflict and have been approved by the best military and civilian lawyers up and down the chain of command,” she said, adding that “a completely fake story in The Washington Post, now discredited by The New York Times, tried to mischaracterize these successful strikes in bad faith.”
The White House later confirmed that Vice Adm. Frank “Mitch” Bradley authorized the follow-up strike under existing operational authorities and that Hegseth “stands behind Bradley’s decision 100%.”
Trump’s announcement of imminent ground strikes came just days after he confirmed he had spoken directly with Maduro, though he offered no details about their discussion. Over the weekend, Trump declared that all airspace above and around Venezuela would be considered “closed in its entirety,” signaling the administration’s intent to expand the scope of military pressure against what it calls a “narco-terrorist regime.”
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