USA vs Mexico Cartels: Trump send troops to fight cartel in Latin & South America. Trump authorized the CIA to carry out “lethal operations” in Venezu
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We couldn't beat a bunch of Arabs wearing Super Bowl XLII champs Patriots shirts and handmade sandals on sand. The last thing you have to worry about in the Venezuela wild is another human. Nature is undefeated.
US aint ready to go into those mountains full of guerillas
Ahiddd
Shiddd behind all of that oil somebody going take that land over
US aint ready to go into those mountains full of guerillas
Shiddd behind all of that oil somebody going take that land over
Ahiddd
Shiddd behind all of that oil somebody going take that land over
the guerillas and other factions have been and still are the landlords of those mountains before Escobar and cocaine -even with the oil companies
Well I didn’t state my reply correctly
Behind that oil somebody from Washington gonna try to take that land over
another Vietnam
they will invade Venezuala for oil and politics and end up fighting in Columbia and Bolivia too
Just like Iraq turnt into Afghan and Pakistan
But you definitely onto something with Columbia
Especially the way their leaders been talking
its not only the politicians - those mountains from Venezuala to Bolivia are ungovernable
there is a real reason why experienced former columbian soldiers are in very high demand with security contractors
Damn it’s like that, very interesting
It’s actually four with two possibles and a maybe but I don’t want to againVenezuala Iran Chicago
Trump trying to out do Hitler by conducting a 3 front war
4 - Russia, Chitown, Iran and Vinny
2 possibles - Afghanistan & Puerto Rico(I’m put Burkina Faso here)
Maybe but I don’t want to again - Yemen
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Interesting
Did he see anything else about this?
Trump Administration Authorizes Covert C.I.A. Action in Venezuela
The development comes as the U.S. military is drawing up options for President Trump to consider, including possible strikes inside the country.
Oct. 15, 2025Updated 5:17 p.m. ET
Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s authoritarian leader, in Caracas last month. American officials have been clear, privately, that the Trump administration aims to drive Mr. Maduro from power.Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times
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The Trump administration has secretly authorized the C.I.A. to conduct covert action in Venezuela, according to U.S. officials, stepping up a campaign against Nicolás Maduro, the country’s authoritarian leader.
The authorization is the latest step in the Trump administration’s intensifying pressure campaign against Venezuela. For weeks, the U.S. military has been targeting boats off the Venezuelan coast it says are transporting drugs, killing 27 people. American officials have been clear, privately, that the end goal is to drive Mr. Maduro from power.
Mr. Trump acknowledged on Wednesday that he had authorized the covert action and said the United States was considering strikes on Venezuelan territory.
“We are certainly looking at land now, because we’ve got the sea very well under control,” the president told reporters hours after The New York Times reported the secret authorization.
Any strikes on Venezuelan territory would be a significant escalation. After several of the boat strikes, the administration made the point that the operations had taken place in international waters.
The new authority would allow the C.I.A. to carry out lethal operations in Venezuela and conduct a range of operations in the Caribbean.
The agency would be able to take covert action against Mr. Maduro or his government either unilaterally or in conjunction with a larger military operation. It is not known whether the C.I.A. is planning any specific operations in Venezuela.
But the development comes as the U.S. military is planning its own possible escalation, drawing up options for President Trump to consider, including strikes inside Venezuela.
The scale of the military buildup in the region is substantial: There are currently 10,000 U.S. troops there, most of them at bases in Puerto Rico, but also a contingent of Marines on amphibious assault ships. In all, the Navy has eight surface warships and a submarine in the Caribbean.
The new authorities, known in intelligence jargon as a presidential finding, were described by multiple U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the highly classified document.
Mr. Trump ordered an end to diplomatic talks with the Maduro government this month as he grew frustrated with the Venezuelan leader’s failure to accede to U.S. demands to give up power voluntarily and the continued insistence by officials that they had no part in drug trafficking.
The C.I.A. has long had authority to work with governments in Latin America on security matters and intelligence sharing. That has allowed the agency to work with Mexican officials to target drug cartels. But those authorizations do not allow the agency to carry out direct lethal operations.
The Trump administration’s strategy on Venezuela, developed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, with help from John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director, aims to oust Mr. Maduro from power.
Mr. Ratcliffe has said little about what his agency is doing in Venezuela. But he has promised that the C.I.A. under his leadership would become more aggressive. During his confirmation hearing, Mr. Ratcliffe said he would make the C.I.A. less averse to risk and more willing to conduct covert action when ordered by the president, “going places no one else can go and doing things no one else can do.”
The White House and the C.I.A. declined to comment.
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump said he had made the authorization because Venezuela had “emptied their prisons into the United States of America.”
The president appeared to be referring to claims by his administration that members of the Tren de Aragua prison gang had been sent into the United States to commit crimes. In March, Mr. Trump proclaimed that the gang, which was founded in a Venezuelan prison, was a terrorist organization that was “conducting irregular warfare” against the United States under the orders of the Maduro government.
An intelligence community assessment in February contradicted that claim, detailing why spy agencies did not think the gang was under the Maduro government’s control, though the F.B.I. partly dissented. A top Trump administration official pressed for the assessment to be redone. The initial assessment was reaffirmed by the National Intelligence Council. Afterward, the council’s acting director, Michael Collins, was fired from his post.
The United States has offered $50 million for information leading to Mr. Maduro’s arrest and conviction on U.S. drug trafficking charges.
Mr. Rubio, who also serves as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, has called Mr. Maduro illegitimate, and the Trump administration describes him as a “narcoterrorist.”
Mr. Maduro blocked the government that was democratically elected last year from taking power. But the Trump administration’s accusations that he has profited from the narcotics trade and that his country is a major producer of drugs for the United States have been debated.
The administration has asserted in legal filings that Mr. Maduro controls Tren de Aragua. But an assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies contradicts that conclusion.
While the Trump administration has publicly offered relatively thin legal justifications for its campaign, Mr. Trump told Congress that he decided the United States was in an armed conflict with drug cartels it views as terrorist organizations. In the congressional notice late last month, the Trump administration said the cartels smuggling drugs were “nonstate armed groups” whose actions “constitute an armed attack against the United States.”
White House findings authorizing covert action are closely guarded secrets. They are often reauthorized from administration to administration, and their precise language is rarely made public. They also constitute one of the rawest uses of executive authority.
Select members of Congress are briefed on the authorizations, but lawmakers cannot make them public, and conducting oversight of possible covert actions is difficult.
While U.S. military operations, like the strikes against boats purportedly carrying drugs from Venezuelan territory, are generally made public, C.I.A. covert actions are typically kept secret. Some, however, like the C.I.A. operation in which Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, are quickly made public.
The agency has been stepping up its work on counternarcotics for years. Gina Haspel, Mr. Trump’s second C.I.A. director during his first administration, devoted more resources to drug hunting in Mexico and Latin America. Under William J. Burns, the Biden administration’s director, the C.I.A. began flying drones over Mexico, hunting for fentanyl labs, operations that Mr. Ratcliffe expanded.
The covert finding is in some ways a natural evolution of those antidrug efforts. But the C.I.A.’s history of covert action in Latin America and the Caribbean is mixed at best.
In 1954, the agency orchestrated a coup that overthrew President Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala, ushering in decades of instability. The C.I.A.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 ended in disaster, and the agency repeatedly tried to assassinate Fidel Castro. That same year, however, the C.I.A. supplied weapons to dissidents who assassinated Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina, the authoritarian leader of the Dominican Republic.
The agency also had its hands in a 1964 coup in Brazil, the death of Che Guevara and other machinations in Bolivia, a 1973 coup in Chile, and the contra fight against the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the 1980s.
Julian E. Barnes covers the U.S. intelligence agencies and international security matters for The Times. He has written about security issues for more than two decades.
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
Commander overseeing US forces in the Caribbean to retire one year into tenure
Haley Britzky
October 16, 2025
The admiral overseeing US Southern Command, which has responsibility for forces in the Caribbean, where the US has carried out multiple legally ambiguous strikes against alleged drug cartels, is retiring one year into his tenure, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a social media post on X on Thursday.
The news comes just days after the US military conducted its fifth known strike on a boat alleged to be trafficking drugs off the coast of Venezuela, killing six people. It also comes one day after President Donald Trump said publicly that he had authorized the CIA to operate inside Venezuela to clamp down on the flow of drugs and migrants. Also on Wednesday, US Air Force B-52 bombers flew off the coast of Venezuela for more than four hours, CNN previously reported.
The reason behind Holsey’s sudden retirement and short tenure leading Southern Command is unclear. He had previously served as the deputy for Southern Command…
Commander, United States Southern Command, Admiral Alvin Holsey
Haley Britzky
October 16, 2025
The admiral overseeing US Southern Command, which has responsibility for forces in the Caribbean, where the US has carried out multiple legally ambiguous strikes against alleged drug cartels, is retiring one year into his tenure, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a social media post on X on Thursday.
The news comes just days after the US military conducted its fifth known strike on a boat alleged to be trafficking drugs off the coast of Venezuela, killing six people. It also comes one day after President Donald Trump said publicly that he had authorized the CIA to operate inside Venezuela to clamp down on the flow of drugs and migrants. Also on Wednesday, US Air Force B-52 bombers flew off the coast of Venezuela for more than four hours, CNN previously reported.
The reason behind Holsey’s sudden retirement and short tenure leading Southern Command is unclear. He had previously served as the deputy for Southern Command…
Commander, United States Southern Command, Admiral Alvin Holsey
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