The Miami Herald and the Wall Street Journal reported. The Soles cartel is in the crosshairs, which Washington says is directly linked to the regime of Nicolas Maduro.
Airstrikes on Venezuela are imminent, even though Donald Trump denied it yesterday. It's a matter of days, perhaps even hours, according to American media."The Trump administration has made the decision to target military installations inside Venezuela, and the attacks could come at any moment," the Miami Herald reports, citing anonymous sources"informed of the facts." The campaign against the Soles cartel, but also against the militarized regime of Nicolas Maduro, would thus enter Phase II, as the American president himself had announced.
US, Trump denies attacks on Venezuela and glosses over nuclear tests: You'll find out soon
In what now appears to be a desperate attempt to gain international support from increasingly lukewarm allies, yesterday Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro wrote a letter to Vladimir Putin asking for help. According to Venezuelan sources contacted by the Washington Post, Caracas has also appealed to China and Iran, requesting equipment and military assistance to strengthen its national defenses.
Responding to a question from journalists aboard Air Force One, Trump said yesterday that he was not currently considering attacks against Venezuela, even though last week he had said he was ready to order ground strikes. Military analysts confirm that such a large naval deployment in the Caribbean cannot be limited to hitting the boats of suspected narcos at sea, even though the most widely accepted hypothesis is that attacks on sites inside Venezuela will only be launched after the arrival, off the coast of the South American country, of the USS Gerald Ford, the US Navy's most lethal vessel, scheduled for next week.
Even the Wall Street Journal now considers the attack against the facilities used by narcos to be a given, which Washington believes are under the supervision of Maduro's paramilitary regime. The Soles Cartel exports around 500 tons of cocaine a year to Europe and the United States and, according to US investigators, is led by none other than Venezuela's extremely powerful Interior Minister, Diosdado Cabello , who has always been considered the regime's hawk and even Maduro's puppet master.
Maduro himself could also be targeted, whom the Republican senator from Florida recently urged to flee to China or Russia as soon as possible. A $50 million bounty has been placed on the Venezuelan president's head, the highest ever offered by the United States for a wanted criminal. Cabello and the Defense Minister have been placed on $25 million.
Maduro is about to find himself trapped and may soon discover he can't flee the country even if he decides to, the source said. Worse still, there's now more than one general willing to capture and hand him over, fully aware that it's one thing to talk about death and another to see it coming.
One of Trump's first moves after returning to the White House in January 2025 was to push the State Department to designate several drug cartels as terrorist and transnational criminal organizations, including the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua and, later, the Soles Cartel.
In August, the United States began assembling a large-scale deployment in the southern Caribbean Sea near northern Venezuela, creating a joint task force that, with the arrival of the aircraft carrier USS Ford, will comprise 14 naval vessels, the largest military deployment in international waters since the Gulf War.
An armada of up to 10,000 soldiers and military personnel. Furthermore, the United States could use significant numbers of fighter jets and strategic bombers stationed at nearby U.S. bases. In recent weeks, the United States has attacked and sunk vessels in international waters—both in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean—allegedly carrying cocaine. The UN reiterated today that these raids are unacceptable.
