The Pentagon’s aircraft carrier deployment to the Caribbean is a major escalation
In a series of actions on Friday, the Trump administration significantly ratcheted up tensions with Latin America — and signaled that it was set to dramatically expand its nascent military offensive against so-called “Transnational Criminal Organizations” in the region.
The escalation began overnight, when the military targeted another boat in the Caribbean that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a Friday morning social media post, claimed was involved in drug smuggling and was carrying members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan criminal enterprise. The strike, which killed six people, was the 10th known operation since Sept. 2, and the third this week, following two others in the eastern Pacific off the coast of South America.
So far, at least 43 people that President Donald Trump labeled “narco-terrorists” have perished in these attacks. “We take them out,” Trump said on Fox News, and later joked about how people, most of them desperately poor, are now afraid to fish along certain coastlines.
Without releasing credible evidence to back it up, Trump has claimed that the victims’ vessels were “stacked up with bags of white powder that’s mostly fentanyl and other drugs, too.” He said they were “smuggling a deadly weapon poisoning Americans” on behalf of various “terrorist organizations.”
The president’s use of “terrorist” is telling. The designation allows him to treat the victims as enemy combatants in a war that does not exist but that he increasingly seems to want to incite.
“The land is next,” Trump said this week, and on Friday it appeared he could be correct. As news of the latest boat strike sunk in, the Pentagon announced that it was moving the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford and other warships to Latin America as part of an effort to “degrade and dismantle” drug and criminal enterprises. The Ford, the reported, is “the world’s largest aircraft carrier, typically carrying dozens of fighter jets, numerous helicopters and more than 4,000 sailors.”
The prospect of U.S. warships in the Caribbean is chilling, particularly when considered against reports that the administration is considering intensifying efforts for regime change in Venezuela. (The country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, was indicted in the U.S. on drug trafficking charges in 2020.)
But Trump also has his eyes set elsewhere. On Friday afternoon, as the Ford prepared to set sail from Croatia, where it has been stationed, the administration also announced sanctions on Colombian President Gustavo Petro, as well as his family and associates. Petro recently criticized the Trump administration’s action in the region, and on Oct. 19 credibly accused Trump of murder in a mid-September strike against a boat that the administration claimed was carrying drugs.
