The US Senate, under Republican control, published this Thursday a cable on Donald Trump and his policy on Venezuela. By 51 votes to 49, it rejected a bipartisan resolution that would have prohibited the Republican Administration from undertaking any type of military action on Venezuelan territory without the approval of Congress, the institution responsible for declaring war.
As is now customary for voting in the US Congress, lawmakers voted mostly along their party lines. Only two Republican senators sided with Democrats to support the resolution.
Democratic Senators Tim Kaine and Adam Schiff, along with Republican Rand Paul, had drafted the proposal, the second attempt to force the White House to ask Congress for permission to act in Venezuela, after the first was also defeated in October.
The vote took place a day after Administration representatives told a group of prominent senators and congressmen that the government currently has no legal justification for attacking targets in Venezuela. The admission occurred during a confidential briefing chaired by the Secretaries of State, Marco Rubio, and Defense, Pete Hegseth, the first that both presented together with US lawmakers on the US campaign of military attacks against alleged drug trafficking boats.
Numerous analysts and experts, and even some lawmakers, consider the campaign, which has already killed at least 66 people since September 2, the latest two in a coup on Tuesday, to be illegal. They consider it illegal, among other reasons, because it does not have congressional authorization.
According to the CNN television network, despite his admission, the US government is still looking for a legal argument that would authorize it to attack ground targets in Venezuela if it wishes, without having to go through Congress.
“Based on this briefing, I believe the Administration does not want to go to war with Venezuela,” said Congressman Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. “But on the other hand, President Trump is quite famous for – how to put it – his chaotic way of doing things. He can change his mind very quickly. So who knows.”
The Senate’s decision this Wednesday also occurred while the aircraft carrier was located Gerardo Fordthe largest and most modern of the US fleet, is heading towards the Caribbean to join in the coming days the dozen US naval vessels already standing guard in international waters off the coast of Venezuela. When it arrives, 20% of US warships mobilized worldwide will be in Latin American waters, according to an analysis by the trade journal Stars and Stripes. But Donald Trump is keeping his cards close to himself as to what his intentions are regarding this deployment and whether he will end up opting, as many suspect, for an attack against targets in the Caribbean country’s territory. At the moment he has not yet made a decision.
The American wages a war of nerves with Caracas and increases the pressure by removing leaves: deploying ships and more than 10,000 soldiers; One day he talks about a “new phase” in his campaign against drug trafficking involving action on the ground and the other he denies there will be a war with Venezuela. He acknowledges having authorized the CIA’s covert operations and declares that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s days leading the country are numbered, while at the same time refusing to answer whether he plans to intervene there. An entire campaign of military and psychological pressure to intimidate the Chavistas.
“I have no doubt that this campaign is intended to intimidate and bring about the downfall of the Maduro regime,” said John Walsh, director of drug policy at the NGO Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), in a conversation with reporters this week.
For now, Trump has yet to decide whether and how to proceed in Venezuela. Consider several options and the legal justifications you can make for each of them, according to several American media outlets. The newspaper New York Times According to him, direct attacks against military units protecting Maduro and the seizure of the country’s oil fields are among the scenarios taken into consideration.
Trump is reluctant to approve missions that could endanger American troops, which could anger his non-interventionist bases. Nor does he want to launch an operation that could end in failure: he is well aware of the fiasco of his first term, when he tried to force Maduro’s departure by supporting the opposition led by Juan Guaidó. “But many of his top advisors are pushing for one of the most aggressive options: ousting Maduro from power,” the paper notes.
Only 18% of Americans favor using force to force Maduro’s downfall, while nearly half reject that option, according to a YouGov poll. The others don’t know or don’t respond.
The Republican administration has already accused the Venezuelan president of being one of the leaders of the Suns cartel and has doubled the reward offered for his capture to $50 million. It is possible that the White House, which claims to be in a “non-international armed conflict” against drug cartels, will try to use this alleged link to justify some kind of measure, according to experts.
A full-blown intervention in Venezuela “would violate Article 2-4 of the United Nations Charter, which prohibits the use of force that violates the territory of another sovereign country. It would constitute an illegal invasion, like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It would also violate Congress’s authority to declare war, contained in the Constitution,” attorney Heather Brandon-Smith, of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, warns in a video conference.
The White House maintains that everything it does in Latin America’s international waters complies with the law. “President Trump was clear in his message to Maduro: Stop sending drugs and criminals to our countries,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement. “The president has made it clear that he wants to continue attacking narco-terrorists who traffic illicit narcotics – anything else is pure speculation.”
It is likely that, for the moment, things will remain as they are, awaiting the arrival of Gerard Ford and your support group. It is expected at least next week: on Tuesday it crossed the Strait of Gibraltar towards the Atlantic, escorted according to protocol by the Spanish frigate Numancia during their crossing. For security reasons, the Pentagon does not communicate the location of its ships on active missions.
This Wednesday Trump moved to the most favorable place to speak. In Miami, the heart of the opposition to Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro in the United States, to participate in a meeting of the American Business Forum which was also attended by the leader of the Venezuelan opposition and this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, María Corina Machado. But he would not discuss the issue, except to defend the extrajudicial attacks on alleged drug boats that his country’s ships have carried out in the Pacific and Caribbean, which have left at least 66 dead: “We are blowing up cartel terrorists. We are blowing them up – linked to the Maduro regime in Venezuela and others,” he said.
For his part, Machado reiterated, in his teleconference speech, his unconditional support for this type of measure. According to the complaint, Maduro is “the leader of this narco-terrorist structure that has declared war on the Venezuelan people and on the democratic nations of the region, where criminal networks support the Chavista regime with the trafficking of drugs, gold, weapons and people”. “Maduro started this war and President Trump will end it.”
