Donald Trump has deployed a destroyer just seven miles off Venezuela sparking fury from its president amid ratcheting tensions in the Caribbean.
The USS Gravely, a guided missile destroyer, docked Sunday in Trinidad and Tobago for a four-day visit, which will include joint training with local defense forces.
The island is just 6.8 miles from Venezuela at its closest point.
The country angrily denounced ‘the military provocation of Trinidad and Tobago, in coordination with the CIA, aimed at provoking a war in the Caribbean.’
Caracas added that it had arrested ‘a group of mercenaries’ with links to the CIA, days after Trump said he had authorized covert CIA operations against Venezuela.
Nicolas Maduro’s government claimed the alleged mercenaries were mounting a ‘false flag attack’ aimed at provoking a full-blown war, without giving details.
Tensions escalated when the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R Ford, was deployed to the region on Friday, joining the largest US force assembled in the Caribbean since the Cold War.
The White House has declared a formal armed conflict against drug cartels, singling out the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang as ‘narco-terrorists.’ Since September, US forces have blown up ten boats, killing 43 people.
Socialist tyrant Maduro is flooding the airwaves with propaganda that Trump is a bloodthirsty fascist who plans to invade and has mobilized tens of thousands of reservists for the onslaught he claims is coming.
The standoff has pulled in Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, a sharp critic of the US strikes who was sanctioned by Washington on Friday for allegedly allowing drug production to flourish.
Caracas has accused Trinidad and Tobago, a laid-back twin-island nation of 1.4 million people whose Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar is fiercely critical of Maduro, of serving as ‘a US aircraft carrier.’
The Trinidad and Tobago government said the USS Gravely’s visit ‘aims to bolster the fight against transnational crime and build resilience through training, humanitarian activities, and security cooperation.’
It values its relationship ‘with the people of Venezuela’ and remains committed to ‘the creation of a safer, stronger and more prosperous region,’ a government statement said.
Trinidad and Tobago, which acts as a hub in the Caribbean drug trade, has itself been caught up in the US campaign of strikes on suspected drug boats.
Two Trinidadian men were killed in a strike on a vessel that set out from Venezuela in mid-October, according to their families.
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