Marco Rubio warned in his statement that “the United States will continue to use all available tools to protect its national security interests and deny funding and resources to narcoterrorists.”
The United States Department of State announced this Sunday, November 17, that it will designate the Cartel of the Suns as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), a group that Washington links to Nicolás Maduro, amid the growing military deployment in the Caribbean.
This designation, as of November 24, occurs after the US Treasury Department classified the Cartel of the Suns as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Group (SDGT) in July, although the Maduro administration asserted in August that this organization is an “invention” of the United States.
“Based in Venezuela, the Cartel of the Suns is led by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking individuals in the illegitimate Maduro regime who have corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement.
The announcement occurs hours after the arrival in the Caribbean this Sunday of the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford, the largest in the US fleet, as part of the military deployment that Trump has ordered in the region.
In addition, the United States announced this Sunday the destruction of another ship that was supposedly transporting drugs in the Pacific Ocean, where it killed three men on board whom it accused of being “narcoterrorists”, bringing the total to 21 similar bombings and more than 80 deaths since September.
Without mentioning these attacks, Rubio warned in his statement that “the United States will continue to use all available tools to protect its national security interests and deny funding and resources to narcoterrorists.”
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The Secretary of State also asserted that “neither Maduro nor his cronies represent the legitimate government of Venezuela.”
“The Cartel of the Suns, and other designated FTOs, including the Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa Cartel, are responsible for terrorist violence throughout the hemisphere, as well as drug trafficking to the United States and Europe,” said the leader of US diplomacy.
The State Department Office in charge of Latin America had advanced this designation on July 25, when it explained then that this would allow the United States to use “all the resources at its disposal to prevent President Nicolás Maduro from continuing to benefit from the destruction of American lives.”
After that announcement, the Minister of the Interior, Justice and Peace, Diosdado Cabello, maintained in August that the “Cartel of the Suns is an invention”, that the Americans “invented that and in that time it has had about 300 bosses, every time someone bothers them they put him as the head of the Cartel of the Suns.”
With information from the EFE agency
*Journalism in Venezuela is carried out in a hostile environment for the press with dozens of legal instruments in place to punish the word, especially the laws “against hate”, “against fascism” and “against the blockade.” This content was written taking into consideration the threats and limits that, consequently, have been imposed on the dissemination of information from within the country.
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