Donald Trump’s military escalation against drug cartels and potentially the Venezuelan government itself won a prominent backer this weekend, even as members of the U.S. Congress in both parties continue to express skepticism about the administration’s plans in the region.
María Corina Machado, a Venezuelan opposition leader who recently fled the country in disguise to collect a Nobel Peace Prize in Europe, appeared Sunday on CBS’s Face the Nation and spoke in support of the president’s efforts. In recent months, the U.S. has killed at least 80 people in a continued pattern of military strikes targeting small vessels operating in the Caribbean Sea, which American officials have claimed are ferrying drugs, mostly cocaine, from Venezuela.
Those strikes have been condemned as illegal by some independent experts and international authorities, but Trump administration officials have leaned on the White House’s designation of drug smugglers as “narco-terrorists” for legal justification. In the latest escalation, the U.S. seized an oil tanker and accused its owners of illegally transporting sanctioned oil shipments from Venezuela and Iran. Reports indicate that U.S. officials are planning further seizures in the days to come.
Machado, on Sunday, backed any U.S.-levied pressure aimed at ousting the regime of Nicolas Maduro, whom international democracy watchdogs, including at the UN, accuse of clinging to power after fraudulently claiming an election victory last year. Machado was barred from standing as a candidate in that race, and Maduro remained in charge of the government he has run since 2013.
"What we're fighting for is precisely freedom in order to have democracy, and democracy in order to have peace. In order to maintain freedom and to achieve freedom, you do need strength,” Machado told CBS’s Margaret Brennan, while adding that it was “not the case” that the U.S. president had “promised” the exiled opposition leader or informed her of any plans for military action.
“I will welcome more and more pressure so that Maduro understands that he has to go,” she added.
Her remarks come several days after inferred to a gaggle of reporters that she supported the U.S. tanker seizure.
Opposition to the strikes among Republicans on Capitol Hill remains scarce, as most of the party is either openly supportive of the efforts or at a minimum hesitant to disagree publicly with the president. But a number of Republicans, including the former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, have joined the chorus of criticism against the strikes against small vessels, including one on September 2, which is now known to have involved a second targeted attack aimed at killing survivors clinging to the wreckage of a boat.
Rep. Mike Turner, the former Intel chair who was removed from the committee for his policy disagreements with conservatives in his party in January, told ABC’s This Week on Sunday that many in Congress harbored strong reluctance about supporting further escalation of military strikes, which polling shows are widely unpopular with the public.
"There is very grave concern in Congress about these strikes in general,” said Turner. “These individuals are not being subject to criminal prosecution, and if they were subject to criminal prosecution, there's no capital punishment."
He contrasted the treatment of what experts believe are vessels operated by low-level cartel members or hired associates to the pardoning of a former Honduran president convicted of aiding the drug trade.
Sen. Rand Paul, a libertarian Republican and one of the most frequent dissenters from the GOP mainstream, urged the president to take lessons from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in his own appearance this weekend on NBC’s Meet the Press.
"If we're gonna go and topple regime after regime in South America, there's no amount of money that could be printed to pay for that and I don't think lives should be lost without a vote by Congress,” said the Kentucky senator, responding to Trump’s quip that Venezuela’s neighbor Colombia “could be next”.
Democrats remain near-uniformly opposed to the escalation of pressure and deployment of military assets to the region, warning that an invasion would amount to a costly disaster that would claim the lives of both U.S. forces and many Venezuelans. Trump stated this past week that ground strikes in Venezuela would begin shortly, though he gave no details on the targets and did not explain whether his orders would include U.S. troops on the ground in the country. Some have accused the president of instigating efforts at regime change, the same foreign policy tactic he openly criticized in his 2016 run for president.
"It's going to be starting on land pretty soon," the president cryptically said.
Senators and House members introduced another attempt at checking the president’s powers via the War Powers Resolution earlier in December, which has yet to come to a vote in either chamber. A previous effort in the Senate failed in November. Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the upper chamber, but saw two of their members cross party lines to support the resolution.
At the White House, Trump has faced questions from reporters and wavered back and forth over whether the administration will release video of the Sept. 2 strike that independent experts and the president’s political rivals have called a potential war crime.
"What is President Trump's theory of the case? Is it regime change? asked Mark Warner, a Democratic senator from Virginia, on ABC’s This Week on Sunday. “I think the president needs to come to Congress and the American people if his goal is to further increase pressure on Maduro and potentially launch forces,"
"I do not know what this president's goal vis-à-vis Venezuela is," he said. "[But] we all know the history of American intervention in Central America and South America over the last 100 years has not been a great story."
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