Caracas, Sept. 7 (Reuters) – Venezuela on Sunday promised a sharp boost to the coastal state’s military as it tackles drug trafficking.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro ordered more troops in the Guazila region of Zulia and the Paraguana Peninsula in Falcon, Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino said, adding that the region constitutes a “drug trafficking route.”
The presence of troops in the provinces of Nueva Esparta and Sucre and Delta Amacro is also expanding. Approximately 25,000 units will be deployed from 10,000 in the states of Zulia and Tachira, which border Colombia.
“No one is going to work for us. No one is going to step into this land and do what we should do,” Padrino said in a video uploaded to social media.
Tensions between Venezuela and the United States escalated in the wake of President Donald Trump’s new approach to combating the war on illegal drugs.
The jet deployment comes after a US military strike that added a build-up of US troops to the Caribbean, killing 11 people last week and sank a boat from Venezuela that Trump said was transporting drugs.
Maduro accused the US of seeking a change of government.
Trump said Friday that the US was not talking about a change of administration, but compared overdose deaths among hundreds of thousands of Americans to war deaths as they tried to justify military operations in the Caribbean muscle.
The US president is weighing further strike options, including the possibility of attacking suspected targets of drug cartels in Venezuela, CNN reported Friday, citing multiple sources that described the administration’s plans. Such a strike marks a major escalation.
(Reporting by Deisy Buitrago, Written by Stefanie Eschenbacher, Edited by Edwina Gibbs)
