The United States deployed three Aegis guided-missile destroyers near Venezuelan waters as part of President Donald Trump’s efforts to address threats from Latin American drug cartels, Reuters reported on Monday.
Reuters, citing two unnamed sources briefed on the matter, reported that the three ships — the USS Gravely, USS Jason Dunham, and the USS Sampson — will arrive off the coast of Venezuela in the next 36 hours.
A separate U.S. official source detailed to Reuters under condition of anonymity that “about 4,000 sailors and Marines” are expected to be committed to the Trump administration’s efforts in the southern Caribbean region. The official further said that “several P-8 spy planes, warships and at least one attack submarine,” would also complement the military assets in the broader region in a several-month-long operation in international airspace and waters.
“The naval assets can be used to not just carry out intelligence and surveillance operations, but also as a launching pad for targeted strikes if a decision is made,” Reuters said, quoting the unnamed official.
Reuters’ report comes days after the left-wing New York Times reported that President Donald Trump secretly signed an order authorizing the use of military force against “certain Latin American drug cartels.” Similarly, the report comes days after U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the United States doubled its reward for information that can lead to the arrest and/or conviction of Venezuela’s socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro from $25 to $50 million.
Maduro, who succeeded his predecessor Hugo Chávez as the head of the Venezuelan socialist regime, stands accused by U.S. courts of being a leading member of the Cartel of the Suns, an international cocaine trafficking operation identified by the United States as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) entity due to its years-long goal of flooding the United States with cocaine to harm its people.
The Cartel is run by high-ranking members of the Venezuelan military and some top leading figures of the ruling United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), also led by Maduro. The Venezuelan dictator, and several other members of his top brass, such as Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López, are actively wanted by U.S. authorities on multiple narco-terrorism charges.
Indictment documents from a U.S. federal court unsealed in July 2024 revealed that the U.S. has reason to believe Maduro, while having not been a leading figure of the cartel at the time of its creation, became more directly involved in its operations, and has come to lead the entire organization after he succeeded Hugo Chávez as dictator of Venezuela in 2013. Weeks before he died, Chávez personally and publicly appointed Maduro as his chosen successor on December 8, 2012, a date that the ruling socialists now mark as the “Day of Loyalty and Love for Hugo Chávez.”
According to the court documents, one of Maduro’s alleged initial roles in the cartel in 2005 — at a time when he served as Chávez’s foreign minister — was to help the organization purge judges unwilling to provide protection to the drug trafficking activities of Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) terrorist group, a longtime ally of the Venezuelan regime and the Cartel of the Suns. Maduro was also allegedly tasked with ensuring that Venezuela’s border with Colombia remained open at the time “to allow shipments coming from the neighboring country to enter without disruptions.”
U.S. courts argued that Maduro’s influence in the cartel grew after he succeeded Chávez in 2013, and as “the interest of the drug trafficking operations began to intertwine with the matters of state.”
Maduro, without directly referring to the U.S. warships mentioned in Reuters’ report, condemned the United States’ actions against Latin American drug cartels as a “rotten rehash of the extravagant, bizarre, and outlandish threats of imperialist supremacism against Venezuela” during a Monday evening broadcast. Maduro ordered his followers to continue implementing the “Seven Transformations,” the latest iteration of his regime’s socialist agenda, which, according to him, will ensure “sovereignty and peace” to Venezuela and will allow the country to “defeat American imperialism once more.”
The socialist dictator also announced that he will launch a special program this week to deploy over 4.5 million members of the Venezuelan militia across the country in response to the United States’ “threats.”
“Rifles and missiles for the peasant army! To defend Venezuela’s territory, sovereignty, and peace,” Maduro said on Monday. “Missiles and rifles for the working class, to defend our homeland.”
The Bolivarian militia was originally founded by Hugo Chávez in the late 2000s but has since then been folded into the regime’s Bolivarian Armed Forces. The militia is composed of individuals loyal to the socialist regime and who are “willing to give their life” for the regime, with an unspecified number of its members being elderly men and women.
While Maduro did not directly mention the new $50 million bounty on him, the dictator thanked the support received “in rejecting the narrative and the nonsense” allegedly imposed on him.
“Know that this hatred is not directed at me. Imperialism has shown its contempt for thousands of Venezuelans. They have suffered firsthand the hatred of supremacist imperialism against the Latin American people. We will never lower our gaze, we will never surrender our flags of freedom, those of [Venezuelan founding father Simón] Bolívar. Never,” Maduro said.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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