We Have New Details of Trump’s Venezuela Attack—and They’re a Doozy

The CIA carried out a drone strike bombing on Venezuelan soil last week, making it the first U.S. attack inside the country that we know of.

The strike, reported first on Monday night by CNN, hit a dock on the Venezuelan coast that the U.S. administration claims was being used by Tren de Aragua for narcotrafficking. The Trump administration also claimed that the dock was empty when the strike was carried out, resulting in zero casualties.

While Donald Trump vastly expanded the CIA’s ability to act independently, they still do not have the authority to carry out land strikes in Venezuela—although that means nothing when they’ve already extrajudicially murdered dozens of fishermen in Venezuelan waters and quite literally stolen an oil tanker.

While Trump alluded to hitting a “big facility where ships come from” last week, he refused to confirm or deny whether that attack was the one we now know was carried out by the CIA.

This is yet another alarming escalation of aggression against Venezuela. The Trump administration has gone back and forth in its justifications for their acts of war. They’ve claimed that the Venezuelan government is a malicious narcostate, that they want to make Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro “cry uncle,” and that Venezuela was shipping their oil to “foreign terrorist organizations.” Either way, this reeks of classic U.S. intervention in Latin America that will likely further destabilize a country that we’ve been antagonizing for decades.