President Trump alluded to a recent Christmas Eve strike on a “big plant” inside of Venezuelan territory on Friday, during an over-the-phone interview with WABC radio Host and New York City grocery chain mogul, John Catsimatidis.
Trump was asked about the administration’s ongoing escalation of U.S. military pressure surrounding strikes on numerous suspected drug boats in the South Caribbean.
The administration has repeatedly accused the Venezuelan government of President Nicolás Maduro of deriving revenues from the sale of illicit narcotics into the United States to keep his regime afloat in Caracas.
The administration also claims that top officials of the Maduro government head an international criminal drug trafficking enterprise called the Cartel de Los Soles, or Cartel of the Suns.
“Every time we knock out a boat, we save 25,000 American lives. It’s very simple”, Trump said to Catsimatidis.
President Trump then followed up by alluding to a U.S. military strike on an unconfirmed facility inside of Venezuelan territory, saying, “We just knocked out, I don’t know if you read or you saw, they have a big plant to — a big facility where they send the, you know, where the ships [suspected drug boats] come from”, the president added. “Two nights ago, we knocked that out, so we hit them very hard.”
The president did not go into detail as to when precisely, or where the exact location of the strike, or even what kind of assault was carried out on the “facility.”
Over the course of the past few weeks, however, the president has warned that strikes will begin inside the Venezuelan mainland, as U.S. special operators continue to seize multiple oil tankers off the Venezuelan coast.
The United States says that it has evidence that such tankers are sanctioned by U.S. authorities and are subject to seizure for transporting illicit oil goods to U.S. adversaries in Iran and Cuba.
China is the main purchaser of sanctioned oil products exported from Venezuela, according to research analysts.
The Maduro regime has condemned these actions by the U.S. government, calling an emergency meeting at the United Nations Security Council in New York City last week, where the Venezuelan representative echoed the accusations from the Maduro government, claiming that the United States is spoiling for war in an attempt to “steal” his country’s vast reserves of oil and gold.
On December 16, the Trump White House officially declared the government of the “illegitimate” President of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), further bolstering the Pentagon’s continued campaign of deadly strikes on suspected drug vessels in the Pacific and Caribbean sea, reportedly killing almost 100 people total since September.
