President Donald Trump on Wednesday said he will not reveal the upper limits of his high-pressure policy on Venezuela.
Trump said Wednesday he had authorized covert Central Intelligence Agency action within Venezuela, according to The New York Times.
“We are certainly looking at land now, because we’ve got the sea very well under control,” Trump said as he disclosed his administration’s latest effort against the administration of Nicolas Maduro.
That led to a question from a reporter about the limits of the CIA authorization.
“Do they have the authority to take out Maduro?” Trump was asked, according to a video posted to YouTube.
“Oh I don’t want to answer a question like that. That’s a ridiculous question for me to be given. Not really a ridiculous question, but wouldn’t it be a ridiculous question for me to answer?” Trump said, adding that Venezuela was “feeling heat.”
Trump explained his decision to focus on Venezuela because Venezuelan officials “have emptied their prisons into the United States of America” and because “we have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela.”
Trump’s comments and his CIA authorization come after weeks of U.S. military operations that have targeted boats carrying drugs off the coast of Venezuela.
Is Trump doing a good job handling Venezuela?
The Times report said administration officials privately affirm that the administration seeks to drive Maduro from power, indicating that is the policy goal of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CIA Director John Ratcliffe.
The report said 10,000 U.S. troops are in the Caribbean within operating distance of Venezuela, including eight U.S. Navy warships and a submarine, as well as a Marine amphibious assault unit.
A report in The Washington Post, which said the issue of regime change in Venezuela is still being debated within the administration, said current CIA efforts in the region are focused on gathering intelligence amid the Trump administration’s war on drug cartels.
Within the CIA, the Post reported, Ratcliffe created the Americas and Counternarcotics Mission Center to address drug issues. The center is led by an experienced official who supports direction action and “is feeling pretty empowered,” a former CIA official said.
Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry called Trumps’s announcement of CIA activity “a grave violation of international law and the United Nations Charter.”
Trump put pressure on Maduro during his first term. His second-term administration has claimed Maduro illegally remained in office despite the results of last year’s election.
That has led Nobel Peace Prize winner and Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, to back Trump’s efforts.
She said Maduro has made Venezuela “a real threat to the national security of the United States,” according to CNN.
“In the case of Maduro and his criminal narco-terrorism structure, [it] is [supported] through drug trafficking, gold trafficking, arms trafficking, even human trafficking, and we need to cut those flows from coming in,” she said.
The regime change she said her homeland needs requires “applying [and] enforcing the law, cutting those flows that come from these criminal activities” to end Maduro’s “war” on the people of Venezuela.
“We need the help of the president of the United States to stop this war, because it is about human lives,” Machado said.
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