White House officials have sought to walk back President Donald Trump’s repeated threats against Venezuela in recent days—even as the Department of Defense has continue to strike boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific—but officials in the South American country on Tuesday took the arrival of a US aircraft carrier in the region seriously despite the administration’s claims that it won’t target Venezuela directly.

As the USS Gerald R. Ford entered waters near Latin America, accompanied by three warships, Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López said Venezuela’s entire military arsenal had been placed on “full operational readiness,” with President Nicolás Maduro ordering the deployment of nearly 200,000 soldiers.

The government also approved the “massive deployment of ground, aerial, naval, riverine, and missile forces," López announced.

Venezuela’s military deployment comes weeks after US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the Ford to relocate from Europe to Latin America following several military strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific that the Trump administration has claimed are meant to stop drug trafficking out of Venezuela—despite the fact that US intelligence agencies and United Nations experts agree that the country plays virtually no role in the trafficking of fentanyl, the top cause of drug overdoses in the US.

At least 76 people have been killed in the strikes so far, and the Associated Press reported last week that the victims have included an out-of-work bus driver and and a struggling fisherman—people who in some cases had turned to helping drug traffickers transport cocaine across the Caribbean, but were hardly the high-level “narco-terrorists” that Hegseth and Trump have insisted they’ve killed in the region.

With the carrier strike group entering the Caribbean region, the US now has about 15,000 troops in the area where tensions have escalated since the boat strikes began in September.

Mark Cancian, a senior defense adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Washington Post that Venezuelan officials had good reason to mobilize forces.

“The only reason to move it there is to use it against Venezuela,” Cancian said of the Ford deployment. “The shot clock has started because this is not an asset they can just keep there indefinitely. They have to use it or move it.”

Since beginning the boat bombings, Trump has signaled the US attacks could move to Venezuela directly, with the Wall Street Journal reporting late last month that the administration was preparing to target “ports and airports controlled by the military that are allegedly used to traffic drugs, including naval facilities and airstrips.”

Trump also authorized Central Intelligence Agency operations last month, falsely claiming the country has “emptied” its prisons into the US and again asserting that “we have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela.”

Democratic senators have introduced two war powers resolutions aimed at stopping the US from striking inside Venezuela and at halting the boat-bombing campaign—but Republicans have voted them down after administration officials assured the caucus that the White House was not currently planning to attack Venezuela.

Maduro said last month that Trump’s actions in the region in recent months amount to attempts at “regime change,” adding that “if Venezuela did not possess oil, gas, gold, fertile land, and water, the imperialists wouldn’t even look at our country.”

Trump himself said publicly in 2023 that if he had won the 2020 presidential election, “we would have taken [Venezuela] over, we would have gotten all that oil.”

Trump: When I left, Venezuela was ready to collapse. We would have taken it over, we would have gotten all that oil. pic.twitter.com/5q3Jr1j1Ho
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 10, 2023

On Tuesday, both the United Kingdom and Colombia announced that they were halting intelligence sharing with the US in the region, saying that working with the US as it attacks small vessels in the Caribbean could make the countries complicit in violations of international law.

“All levels of law enforcement intelligence are ordered to suspend communications and other agreements with US security agencies,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro said. “This measure will remain in place as long as missile attacks on boats in the Caribbean continue. The fight against drugs must be subordinate to the human rights of the Caribbean people.”

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