Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that President Donald Trump gave the order to destroy a vessel off Venezuela’s coast on Tuesday rather than stopping it. “Instead of interdicting it, on the president’s orders, we blew it up,” Rubio said during a press conference in Mexico.
“And it will happen again,” Rubio added. Before visiting the neighboring country, he said he expected the Trump administration would “go on the offense” against drug cartels.
Trump is “going to use the full power of America and the full might of the U.S. to take on and eradicate these drug cartels no matter where they’re operating from and no matter how long they’ve been able to act with impunity,” Rubio said.
Top officials in the administration, including the president, have promoted the attack and warned that more actions may follow. When asked at the Oval Office on Wednesday why the boat and the 11 people on it were killed instead of captured, Trump replied:
“On the boat you have massive amounts of drugs. We have tapes of them talking about it. There are massive amounts of drugs coming into our country to kill a lot of people. You see bags of drugs all over the boat. A lot of other people won’t be doing it again after seeing that video,” Trump said.
“We have to protect our country and we’re going to. Venezuela has been a very bad actor. They’ve been sending millions of people into the country. Many of them are Tren de Aragua, some of the worst people anywhere in the world,” he added.
Earlier on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned Venezuela’s authoritarian President Nicolas Maduro, saying he “should be worried” after the incident.
“The only one who should be worried is Nicolas Maduro, who is acting as the kingpin of a narco state. Not actually elected and indicted for $50 million by the U.S. We know he’s involved in the kind of drug-running that has affected the American people directly,” Hegseth said during an interview on Fox News.
