"If you are a narco-terrorist smuggling drugs in our hemisphere, we will treat you like we treat Al-Qaeda.”
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. military is sending an aircraft carrier to the waters off South America, in the latest escalation and buildup of military forces in the region, the Pentagon announced Friday.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford and its strike group to deploy to U.S. Southern Command 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 in a social media post.
The USS Ford is currently deployed to the Mediterranean Sea along with three destroyers. It would likely take several days for the ships to make the journey to South America.
Deploying an aircraft carrier is a major escalation of military power in a region that has already seen an unusually large U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean Sea and the waters off Venezuela.
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 strikes that began in early September to at least 43 people.
The Pentagon told reporters it had nothing further to add beyond the statement.
Hegseth said 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.
The pace of the strikes has quickened in recent days from one every few weeks when they first began to three this week, killing a total of at least 43 people since September. 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 from the world’s largest producers is smuggled.
In a 20-second black and white video of the strike posted to social media, a small boat can be seen apparently sitting motionless on the water when a long thin projectile descends, triggering an explosion. The video ends before the blast dies down enough for the remains of the boat to be seen again.
Hegseth said the strike happened in international waters and boasted that it was the first one conducted at night.
“If you are a narco-terrorist smuggling drugs in our hemisphere, we will treat you like we treat Al-Qaeda,” Hegseth said in the post. “Day or NIGHT, we will map your networks, track your people, hunt you down, and kill you.”
The strike also came hours after the U.S. military flew a pair of supersonic heavy bombers up to the coast of Venezuela on Thursday. The flight was just the most recent move in what has been an unusually large military buildup in the Caribbean Sea and the waters off Venezuela that has raised speculation that President Donald Trump could try to topple Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Maduro faces charges of narcoterrorism in the U.S.
Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino has told his military leaders that the U.S. government knows the drug-trafficking accusations used to support the recent actions in the Caribbean are false, with its true intent being to “force a regime change” in the South American country.
Hegseth’s remarks around the strikes have recently begun to draw a direct comparison between the war on terrorism that the U.S. declared after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the Trump administration’s crackdown on drug traffickers.
When reporters asked Trump on Thursday whether he would request Congress issue a declaration of war against the cartels, he said that wasn’t the plan.
“I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK? We’re going to kill them, you know? They’re going to be like, dead,” Trump said during a roundtable at the White House with homeland security officials.
Lawmakers from both major political parties have expressed concerns about Trump ordering the military actions without receiving authorization from Congress or providing many details. Democrats have insisted the strikes violate international law.
Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democratic member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said this week that “expanding the geography simply expands the lawlessness and the recklessness in the use of the American military without seeming legal or practical justification."
Trump this month declared drug cartels to be unlawful combatants and said the U.S. was in an “armed conflict” with them.
Despite the concerns from some lawmakers, the Republican-controlled Senate has voted down a Democratic-sponsored war powers resolution that would have required the president to seek authorization from Congress before further military strikes.