Caracas. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro said this afternoon that “no one believes the lies of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.” The Venezuelan leader asserted that the U.S. Secretary of State “has fabricated a story, a narrative about drug trafficking in Venezuela” to justify his actions against the country.

Maduro reiterated the accusation made yesterday that"the Miami mafia," led by Rubio, wants to"stain the name (of US President Donald) Trump with blood" through the military threat it has deployed in recent weeks in the Caribbean.

Hours earlier, Trump reported on the US military's attack on a vessel in international waters in the Caribbean that was allegedly transporting drugs.

"They're coming for Venezuelan oil and gas; they want it for free," Maduro said, pointing out that the alleged US war on drugs is completely false.

The country has been mobilized in recent weeks to prepare for the defense of its territory against possible foreign aggression.

Maduro reported yesterday that, as of the recent enlistment campaign for the Bolivarian National Militia, the fifth component of the Venezuelan armed forces made up of civilian reservists, the country has 8.2 million registered men and women. This represents an increase of approximately 3.7 million Venezuelans, since at the beginning of the registration campaign, the government reported 4.5 million militia members.

Trump said yesterday that U.S. military forces fired on a drug-laden boat coming from Venezuela. He said drugs are leaving that country"in large quantities" and that "there's more where this came from."

For his part, Rubio said the incident occurred in the southern Caribbean and was a"lethal attack."

Later, Trump himself posted a video on his social media platform, Truth Social, apparently shot from a military device. It shows a boat in the water with a group of people on board. The footage pans out, revealing an explosion and then the boat bursting into flames. In the post, Trump wrote:

"This morning, following my orders, U.S. military forces conducted a kinetic attack against positively identified Tren de Aragua (TDA) narco-terrorists in the Southern Command area of responsibility."

He added that the TDA is a designated foreign terrorist organization and that it "operates under the control of Nicolás Maduro." He also stated that the attack left 11 "terrorists" dead, occurred in international waters, and that the boat was preparing to"transport illegal narcotics bound for the United States."

Neither Trump, nor Rubio, nor the video presented provide any evidence that the aforementioned boat was transporting drugs, or that it originated in Venezuela, or that its destination was the United States. All of this is presented, at least so far, solely in the words of the president and his secretary of state. There is even no way to verify who the boat's crew members were, not even if there were eleven people, as Trump claimed.

Rubio evasively answered reporters' questions during a press conference yesterday afternoon. He said the Pentagon would provide more details about the operation in the coming hours.

His statements highlight a contradiction with the assertions of his boss, President Donald Trump. Marco Rubio, seeking to establish the idea that the drug trafficking they claim to be targeting also affects the entire region, said:"Those particular drugs were likely headed to Trinidad or some other Caribbean country, at which point they simply contribute to the instability those countries face."

Trump claimed the ship was headed to the United States, while Marco Rubio instead implicated a third country, Trinidad and Tobago.

On Tuesday night, Venezuelan Communications Minister Freddy Ñáñez claimed that the video posted by Trump could have been created using artificial intelligence."It seems Marco Rubio continues to lie to his president: after leading him into a dead end, he now offers him a video with AI as 'proof' (thus proven)," he wrote on his Telegram channel.

Ñáñez also showed a query to Gemini, Google's artificial intelligence, whom he asked to analyze the video, and the response was that"it is very likely that it was created using AI."

The false positive strategy

Venezuelan journalist Eligio Rojas, an expert on security issues, analyzing the announcements made by Trump and Rubio, points out that Washington's rhetoric suggests that the drugs allegedly carried on this vessel originated in Venezuela. However, this contrasts with recent information provided by Venezuelan Defense Minister General Vladimir Padrino López and the Strategic Operational Commander of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces, General Domingo Hernández Lárez, who reported that approximately 50,000 kilos of drugs, all originating in Colombia, have been seized in the country in recent days.

This is consistent with information from the United Nations. Reports from the world drug trafficking body show that several South American countries, including Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, reported higher cocaine seizures in 2022 than in 2021, but Venezuela is not assigned the disproportionate role the White House has pointed out in recent months.

According to the expert, this fact must be interpreted in relation to the accusation made just 24 hours earlier by President Maduro, who warned that Washington, with its military deployment in the Caribbean, is seeking to generate a false positive—that is, a false flag operation to justify an aggression against Venezuela. Maduro pointed to the Maine incident, which sparked the start of the Spanish-American War in 1898, and the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which served to justify the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War, as historical examples.

Psychological Operations and Unconventional Warfare

Writer José Negrón Valera, a Venezuelan specialist in geopolitical analysis and a doctor in the Philosophy of War, agrees with Rojas that the initial interpretation is that it could be a false positive."The most important thing in this case is to consider that the United States is the largest producer of false positives in the 20th and 21st centuries, all with the same excuse: shaping public opinion to intervene in countries considered military targets," he reflects.

However, he emphasizes that Washington's rhetoric should not be given credence, not because they aren't taking steps to destabilize Caracas, but because a formal military operation against the country, which is what they want to portray as imminent, is unlikely in the short and medium term. Instead, what could happen is an intensification of unconventional warfare.

"The scenario that could arise is an intensification of 'maximum pressure,' which includes an increase in psychological operations to cause unrest among the Venezuelan people," he explained.