The USS Gerald R. Ford arrives in Halifax in October 2022. The U.S. is sending the aircraft carrier to South America in the latest escalation of military firepower in a region where the Trump administration has unleashed more rapid strikes in recent days against boats it accuses of carrying drugs. (Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press)
The U.S. military is sending an aircraft carrier to the waters off South America, the Pentagon announced Friday, in the latest escalation of military firepower in a region where the Trump administration has unleashed more rapid strikes in recent days against boats it accuses of carrying drugs.
Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford and its strike group to deploy to the U.S. Southern Command region to “bolster U.S. capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said on social media.
The USS Ford, which has five destroyers in its strike group, is now deployed to the Mediterranean Sea. One of its destroyers is in the Arabian Sea and another is in the Red Sea, a person familiar with the operation told The Associated Press. As of Friday, the aircraft carrier was in port in Croatia on the Adriatic Sea.
The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations, would not say how long it would take for the strike group to arrive in the waters off South America or if all five destroyers would make the journey.
Deploying an aircraft carrier will surge major additional resources to a region that has already seen an unusually large U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean Sea and the waters off Venezuela. The latest deployment and the quickening pace of the U.S. strikes, including one Friday, raised new speculation about how far the Trump administration may go in operations it says are targeted at drug trafficking, including whether it could try to topple Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. He faces charges of narcoterrorism in the U.S.
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There are already more than 6,000 sailors and Marines on eight warships in the region. If the entire USS Ford strike group arrives, that could bring nearly 4,500 more sailors as well as the nine squadrons of aircraft assigned to the carrier.
Complicating the situation is Tropical Storm Melissa, which has been nearly stationary in the central Caribbean with forecasters warning it could soon strengthen into a powerful hurricane.
10 strikes launched so far
Hours before Parnell announced the news, Hegseth said the military had conducted the 10th strike on a suspected drug-running boat, leaving six people dead and bringing the death count for the attacks that began in early September to at least 43 people.
Hegseth said on social media that the vessel struck overnight was operated by the Tren de Aragua gang. It was the second time the Trump administration has tied one of its operations to the gang that originated in a Venezuelan prison.
“If you are a narco-terrorist smuggling drugs in our hemisphere, we will treat you like we treat Al-Qaeda,” Hegseth said in his post. “Day or NIGHT, we will map your networks, track your people, hunt you down, and kill you.”
The strikes have ramped up from one every few weeks when they first began last month to three this week. Two of the most recent strikes were carried out in the eastern Pacific Ocean, expanding the area where the military has launched attacks and shifting to where much of the cocaine is smuggled from the world’s largest producers, including Colombia.
This combination image shows two screen captures from a video posted on social media by the White House on Set. 15 depicting what U.S. President Donald Trump said was a U.S. military strike on a Venezuelan drug cartel vessel. (Reuters)
Escalating tensions with Colombia, the Trump administration imposed sanctions Friday on Colombian President Gustavo Petro, his family and a member of his government over accusations of involvement in the global drug trade.
Friday’s strike drew parallels to the first announced by the U.S. last month by focusing on Tren de Aragua, which the Trump administration has designated a foreign terrorist organization and blamed for being at the root of the violence and drug dealing that plague some cities.
While not mentioning the origin of the latest boat, the Republican administration says at least four of the boats it has hit have come from Venezuela. On Thursday, the U.S. military flew a pair of supersonic heavy bombers up to the coast of Venezuela.
Venezuela shores up coastline
Maduro argues that the U.S. operations are the latest effort to force him out of office.
Maduro on Thursday praised security forces and a civilian militia for defence exercises along some 2,000 kilometres of coastline to prepare for the possibility of a U.S. attack.
In the span of six hours, “100 per cent of all the country’s coastline was covered in real time, with all the equipment and heavy weapons to defend all of Venezuela’s coasts if necessary,” Maduro said during a government event shown on state television.
The U.S. military’s presence is less about drugs than sending a message to countries in the region to align with U.S. interests, according to Elizabeth Dickinson, the International Crisis Group’s senior analyst for the Andes region.
“An expression that I’m hearing a lot is ‘Drugs are the excuse.’ And everyone knows that,” Dickinson said. “And I think that message is very clear in regional capitals. So the messaging here is that the U.S. is intent on pursuing specific objectives. And it will use military force against leaders and countries that don’t fall in line.”
