Venezuela blamed the United States for the attacks in the capital Caracas and the states of Miranda, Aragua and La Guaira.
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According to media reports, the United States launched a military operation against Venezuela on the night of January 3rd.
The explosion came after a U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean and threats by President Donald Trump against the Venezuelan government and President Nicolas Maduro.
The Venezuelan government condemned what it called “an extremely serious military invasion committed by the current United States government against the territory and people of Venezuela.”
The Pentagon and U.S. Southern Command declined to comment to USA TODAY and referred inquiries to the White House, which did not immediately respond to inquiries. The scope of the operation and its objectives were not immediately clear.
The night’s explosions follow a series of attacks by the U.S. military on drug-trafficking ships in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean that began in early September.
A sizable U.S. fleet is amassing in the Southern Caribbean, including multiple guided missile destroyers, missile cruisers, and an amphibious ready group of Marines aboard naval landing ships. The United States has publicly moved the world’s largest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, to the region in recent months.
Days before the apparent attack, President Donald Trump acknowledged that the CIA had conducted ground attacks on port facilities across the country.
The regime attacked at least 35 boats in international waters, killing at least 115 people, many of them Venezuelans. Trump and other officials have defended the boat attack as an attempt to stop illegal drugs, particularly fentanyl, from entering the country.
“The Biden administration has preferred a kid-gloves approach, allowing millions of people, including dangerous cartels and unsupervised Afghans, to flood our communities with drugs and violence,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said in a Nov. 29 post on X, slamming reports that he ordered U.S. military officials to leave no survivors in one of the attacks in the Caribbean.
Lawmakers from both parties have criticized the Trump administration’s military strikes for not providing any intelligence reports or other evidence about what the ships were carrying. Some parliamentarians, former military officials and legal analysts have said the strikes were illegal and amounted to extrajudicial killings in violation of international human rights law.
Some of these lawmakers criticized Saturday’s strike and the administration’s silence in its immediate aftermath.
“Venezuela has no vital national interests that would justify war,” Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, told X. “We should all have learned by now not to stumble into another stupid adventure, and he hasn’t even bothered to tell the American people what the hell is going on.”
Trump said Maduro, who has been in power since 2013 after the death of populist Hugo Chavez, is running Venezuela like a “narco-terrorist” drug cartel directly responsible for the deaths of Americans.
