Far-left President of Colombia Gustavo Petro — a notoriously ardent cocaine advocate — denounced the U.S. precision strike against a drug-laden vessel in international waters as “murder” on Wednesday.
“If this is true, it is murder anywhere in the world,” Petro wrote on social media. “We have been capturing civilians transporting drugs for decades without killing them. Those who transport drugs are not the big drug lords, but very poor young people from the Caribbean and the Pacific.”
As part of its ongoing efforts to combat drug cartels in Caribbean international waters, the United States carried out a precision strike this week against a vessel loaded with drugs, killing 11 members of the Tren de Aragua terrorist organization.
President Donald Trump explained in a Truth Social post, “The strike occurred while the terrorists were at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States. The strike resulted in 11 terrorists killed in action. No U.S. Forces were harmed in this strike.” Trump went on to declare, “Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. BEWARE!”
Venezuela’s socialist Maduro regime claims that video footage of the strike published by President Trump and other U.S. government officials is “fake.”
Communications Minister Ñáñez claimed on Tuesday that it was allegedly generated using Artificial Intelligence tools. Ñáñez based his accusations against the footage on a purported “analysis” he supposedly made using Google’s Gemini AI assistant which, according to him, declared the video as “fake.”
On Wednesday, Interior Minister and long-suspected drug lord Diosdado Cabello also claimed that the video of the strike is “fake” and part of a purported “disinformation and attack campaign” from the United States against Venezuela. According to Cabello, the United States uses fake news to “destroy the image of anyone, a person or a country.”
During the latest broadcast of his weekly socialist propaganda show “Hitting with the Mallet,” Cabello claimed that if the video were true then President Trump and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio “publicly admitted to the murder of several people who were on the boat and whose identities are unknown.”
“As President Gustavo Petro said: the big drug lords are the ones who never transport the drugs themselves. That’s why there are protocols that are used in times of tension without having to blow them to smithereens, or it was necessary that no evidence of certain things remain,” Cabello said, basing his assertions on the contents of a purported “letter” from an anonymous informant.
Cabello, who leads the Maduro regime’s brutally repressive apparatus, accused the United States of violating “international law and the right to live” for not intercepting and judging the men that were on board the struck vessel.
The Interior Minister, who stands accused by U.S. authorities of being a leading member of the Cartel of the Suns alongside dictator Nicolás Maduro and other members of the Venezuelan socialist regime, questioned the ongoing efforts of the United States against drug cartels in Caribbean international waters, claiming that “we have never seen them dismantle a drug cartel in the United States.”
Cabello called for the U.S. Congress to investigate the drug-fighting operations because, according to him, it is not a “genuine fight against drugs” but rather, a purported attempt at ousting the Venezuelan regime.
Unnamed sources claimed to the Venezuelan outlet El Pitazo that the struck drug-filled vessel allegedly sailed from the Venezuelan town of San Juan de Unare, Sucre on Sunday night towards Trinidad and Tobago. Of the 11 men on board, El Pitazo detailed, eight were residents of San Juan de Unare and three from neighboring towns.
“San Juan de Unare is an area that has been taken over by drug trafficking, identified for several years by US authorities,” Venezuelan journalist Ronna Rísquez reportedly told El Pitazo, and explained that boats carrying drugs, fishermen, and migrants often leave from the area, where there is usually a lot of traffic from both Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela.
El Pitazo reported that, according to information obtained from the unnamed sources, two other drug-filled vessels passed through the same route undetected by U.S. military forces.
El Pitazo’s director César Batiz said that the population of San Juan de Unare are in “turmoil,” as several of the men that died on the strike were “well known” by the locals. The outlet further reported that, according to other sources, members of the Bolivarian National Guard travelled to San Juan de Unare on Tuesday, with more officials expected to arrive later.
On Thursday, El Pitazo reported that the friends and families of the 11 men that were on the vessel posted messages lamenting the deaths of their relatives, and denying that the footage of the strike published by the United States was a fake video made using artificial intelligence.
Nicolás Maduro, Diosdado Cabello, and other members of the Venezuelan regime stand accused by the United States of leading the Cartel of the Suns, an international cocaine trafficking operation run by leading figures of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) and by some top Venezuelan military officials. On August, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the United States doubled its bounty on information that can lead to Maduro’s arrest from $25 million to $50 million.
President Gustavo Petro, a former member of the Marxist M19 terrorist group and Colombia’s first leftist president in the country’s history, claimed in August that the Cartel of the Suns “does not exist” and is instead a “fictitious excuse used by the far-right to overthrow governments that do not obey them.”
Petro is widely known for his passionate defense of the use of cocaine, which he claims is “less harmful” than sugar. Earlier this year, Petro called for the legalization of cocaine because it is “not worse than whiskey” and could be “sold like wine” if it were legal.
Petro himself has been accused by former members of his administration of allegedly suffering from drug addiction problems. Between April and May, former Foreign Minister Alvaro Leyva released two letters accusing Petro of suffering from drug addiction problems, but did not specify which drug the President allegedly is addicted to. Leyva’s letters prompted the Colombian Congress to launch an ongoing inquiry to investigate the claims.
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