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President Donald Trump said he could hold talks with the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in a major update on tensions in the region.
Trump’s remarks, which he made before boarding Air Force One in Palm Beach, Florida, on Sunday, hinted toward opening a potential diplomatic path after the U.S. designated the Venezuelan leader a terrorist.
“We may be having some discussions with Maduro, and we’ll see how that turns out,” Trump said. He added in four telling words that Maduro’s government “would like to talk.” His remarks also come as the USS Gerald R Ford, regarded as the most advanced U.S. aircraft carrier, arrived in the area with more troops and weaponry on Sunday.
The U.S. military presence in the Caribbean, including more than 14,000 troops, a dozen warships, F-35 fighter jets, and a nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine, is seen as an effort to pressure Maduro by critics in Venezuela.
Trump said he has “sort of made up my mind” on whether he would order a military operation in Venezuela.
“I can’t tell you what it is, but we made a lot of progress with Venezuela in terms of stopping drugs from pouring in,” Trump said on Friday.
His administration says the military campaign is aimed at curbing the flow of narcotics in the U.S. from Venezuela.
U.S. strikes have killed at least 80 people in 20 attacks on small boats that the U.S. has accused of transporting narcotics in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, since early September.
On Sunday, the U.S. carried out its 21st attack and killed an additional four people, according to U.S. Southern Command, which oversees military operations in the region.
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Daniel Driscoll, the U.S. Army Secretary, told CBS on Sunday that the administration was “reactivating our jungle school in Panama” to train troops in the country for the first time in more than two decades.
Kamla Persad-Bissessar, the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, said the U.S. Marines have begun joint exercises in the dual-island nation a few miles off Venezuela’s coast.
In a speech, Maduro said that the U.S. exercises in Trinidad and Tobago are “intended to be threatening to a republic like Venezuela, which does not allow itself to be threatened by anyone.”
On Sunday, the U.S. suggested it would designate the Cartel de Los Soles, a drug cartel that the U.S. claims is headed by Maduro and officials in his regime and which the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned in July, as a foreign terrorist organisation.
The Cartel de los Soles is “responsible for terrorist violence throughout our hemisphere as well as for trafficking drugs into the United States and Europe,” and the U.S. “will continue using all available tools to protect our national security interests and deny funding and resources to narco-terrorists, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Sunday.
