Amid the US push toward a war to oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL) has made the argument that the US must “go in” to Venezuela so American oil companies can have a “field day” since the country sits on the largest proven oil reserves in the world.
“Venezuela, for those Americans who do not understand why we need to go in … Venezuela, for the American oil companies, will be a field day, because it will be more than a trillion dollars in economic activity,” Salazar, a Miami-born daughter of Cuban exiles, told Fox Business.
Salazar also said that the US must go to war with Venezuela because it has become the “launching pad” for people who “hate” the US, claiming Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas are active in the country. In one of the more absurd claims she made in the interview, Salazar said Maduro was “giving uranium to Hamas, and to Iran, and to North Korea, and Nicaragua.”
Salazar’s third reason for going to war with Venezuela is the claim that Maduro is the leader of the so-called Cartel of the Suns, or Cartel de los Soles, a group that doesn’t actually exist. The term was first used in the early 1990s to describe Venezuelan generals with sun insignias on their uniforms who were involved in cocaine trafficking and were actually working with the CIA at the time.
Today, the Cartel of the Suns is used to describe a network of Venezuelan officials allegedly involved in the drug trade, but it doesn’t exist as a structured organization. Regardless, the US State Department has labeled the Cartel of the Suns a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” and claims Maduro is its leader, giving the administration a potential pretext to launch a war, though any attack on Venezuela without congressional authorization would be illegal, per the US Constitution.
Maria Corina Machado, a Venezuelan opposition leader and this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, has also been spreading false and unsubstantiated claims about Maduro and his government to get the US to invade. In an effort to appeal to President Trump, Machado has claimed that Maduro “rigged elections” in the US.
