President Trump on Friday announced the US launched an airstrike in Venezuela that he claimed killed Guerrero Flores, the leader of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, marking an escalation of the expanding US military campaign in Latin America.
Trump said that the strike was launched in coordination with the Venezuelan government, and the cooperation was confirmed by Venezuela’s communications ministry, which said the attack was carried out in the southeastern part of the country’s Bolivar state.
The US released a video of the strike showing a building being blown up, and it’s unclear how many total casualties were caused by the bombing. “At my direction, the United States Southern Command delivered a swift and lethal kinetic strike to successfully execute Nino Guerrero, the infamous leader of Tren De Aragua, one of the most bloodthirsty Terrorist Organizations on Planet Earth,” the president added.
Venezuela’s communications ministry said that the attack was “carried out through mechanisms of cooperation and exchange of intelligence information between the authorities of both countries.”
During the lead-up to the US attack on Venezuela, one of the many pretexts put forward by the US was the claim that Tren de Aragua was under the control of the Maduro government, which was contradicted by a declassified US intelligence memo that said the “Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.”
While Maduro has been abducted by the US and removed from power, his government remains intact, with Decly Rodriguez, his vice president, now serving as acting president.
Tren de Aragua was one of the criminal gangs designated by the US as a “terrorist organization” last year, as the Trump administration has merged the War on Terror with the War on Drugs, which has included the bombing campaign against alleged drug-running boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific Ocean. The boat strikes have killed more than 200 people, all civilians, and the Pentagon has not once provided evidence to back up its claims that the small vessels were carrying drugs.
