The deadly attack President Trump ordered early this month on what he said was a drug-smuggling Venezuelan boat was a “heinous crime,” Venezuela’s president said on Monday — just before Mr. Trump boasted of destroying a second boat.
Speaking to reporters in Caracas, the Venezuelan leader, Nicolás Maduro, said that the Sept. 2 attack, which killed 11 people, violated U.S. and international laws. If the United States believed that the boat’s passengers were drug traffickers — as Americans officials have claimed — they should have been captured, he said.
Mr. Maduro called the action “a military attack on civilians who were not at war and were not militarily threatening any country” and claimed that the United States was trying to goad Venezuela into a “major war.” The American goal, Mr. Maduro claimed, was “regime change for oil,” and not drug interdiction, which the Trump administration has said is a main goal in the region.
Not long after he spoke, Mr. Trump announced on social media that the U.S. military had conducted another strike on Monday morning “against positively identified, extraordinarily violent drug trafficking cartels and narcoterrorists” in international waters, heading from Venezuela. The attack killed three people, he said. He justified the second strike, like the first one, saying that the cartels transporting drugs pose a threat to U.S. national security.
The day’s events marked a continued escalation in tensions between the two nations. The United States began moving warships and troops into the Caribbean near Venezuela in late August, a move Mr. Trump has said is aimed at countering drug trafficking and protecting American lives from illicit narcotics, including cocaine and fentanyl.
“BE WARNED — IF YOU ARE TRANSPORTING DRUGS THAT CAN KILL AMERICANS, WE ARE HUNTING YOU!” he wrote on his site Truth Social.
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