The U.S. military is sending an aircraft carrier to the waters off South America, the Pentagon announced Friday, in the latest escalation of military firepower in a region where the Trump administration has unleashed more rapid strikes in recent days against boats it accuses of carrying drugs.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford and its strike group to deploy to the U.S. Southern Command region to “bolster U.S. capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said on social media.
The USS Ford, which has five destroyers in its strike group, is now deployed to the Mediterranean Sea. One of its destroyers is in the Arabian Sea and another is in the Red Sea, a person familiar with the operation told The Associated Press. As of Friday, the aircraft carrier was in port in Croatia on the Adriatic Sea.
The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations, would not say how long it would take for the strike group to arrive in the waters off South America or if all five destroyers would make the journey.
Deploying an aircraft carrier will surge major additional resources to a region that has already seen an unusually large U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean Sea and the waters off Venezuela. The latest deployment and the quickening pace of the U.S. strikes, including one Friday, raised new speculation about how far the Trump administration may go in operations it says are targeted at drug trafficking, including whether it could try to topple Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. He faces charges of narcoterrorism in the U.S.
Moving thousands more troops into the region
There are already more than 6,000 sailors and Marines on eight warships in the region. If the entire USS Ford strike group arrives, that could bring nearly 4,500 more sailors as well as the nine squadrons of aircraft assigned to the carrier.
Complicating the situation is Tropical Storm Melissa, which has been nearly stationary in the central Caribbean with forecasters warning it could soon strengthen into a powerful hurricane.
Hours before Parnell announced the news, Hegseth said the military had conducted the 10th strike on a suspected drug-running boat, leaving six people dead and bringing the death count for the attacks that began in early September to at least 43 people.
Hegseth said on social media that the vessel struck overnight was operated by the Tren de Aragua gang. It was the second time the Trump administration has tied one of its operations to the gang that originated in a Venezuelan prison.
“If you are a narco-terrorist smuggling drugs in our hemisphere, we will treat you like we treat Al-Qaeda,” Hegseth said in his post. “Day or NIGHT, we will map your networks, track your people, hunt you down, and kill you.”
The strikes have ramped up from one every few weeks when they first began last month to three this week, killing a total of at least 43 people. Two of the most recent strikes were carried out in the eastern Pacific Ocean, expanding the area where the military has launched attacks and shifting to where much of the cocaine is smuggled from the world’s largest producers, including Colombia.
Escalating tensions with Colombia, the Trump administration imposed sanctions Friday on Colombian President Gustavo Petro, his family and a member of his government over accusations of involvement in the global drug trade.
US focus on Venezuela and Tren de Aragua
Friday’s strike drew parallels to the first announced by the U.S. last month by focusing on Tren de Aragua, which the Trump administration has designated a foreign terrorist organization and blamed for being at the root of the violence and drug dealing that plague some cities.
While not mentioning the origin of the latest boat, the Republican administration says at least four of the boats it has hit have come from Venezuela. On Thursday, the U.S. military flew a pair of supersonic heavy bombers up to the coast of Venezuela.
Maduro argues that the U.S. operations are the latest effort to force him out of office.
Maduro on Thursday praised security forces and a civilian militia for defense exercises along some 2,000 kilometers (about 1,200 miles) of coastline to prepare for the possibility of a U.S. attack.
In the span of six hours, “100% of all the country’s coastline was covered in real time, with all the equipment and heavy weapons to defend all of Venezuela’s coasts if necessary,” Maduro said during a government event shown on state television.
The U.S. military’s presence is less about drugs than sending a message to countries in the region to align with U.S. interests, according to Elizabeth Dickinson, the International Crisis Group’s senior analyst for the Andes region.
“An expression that I’m hearing a lot is ‘Drugs are the excuse.’ And everyone knows that,” Dickinson said. “And I think that message is very clear in regional capitals. So the messaging here is that the U.S. is intent on pursuing specific objectives. And it will use military force against leaders and countries that don’t fall in line.”
Comparing the drug crackdown to the war on terror
Hegseth’s remarks around the strikes have recently begun to draw a direct comparison between the war on terrorism that the U.S. declared after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the Trump administration’s crackdown on drug traffickers.
President Donald Trump this month declared drug cartels to be unlawful combatants and said the U.S. was in an “armed conflict” with them, relying on the same legal authority used by the Bush administration after 9/11.
When reporters asked Trump on Thursday whether he would request that Congress issue a declaration of war against the cartels, he said that wasn’t the plan.
“I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK? We’re going to kill them, you know? They’re going to be like, dead,” Trump said during a roundtable at the White House.
Lawmakers from both major political parties have expressed concerns about Trump ordering the military actions without receiving authorization from Congress or providing many details.
“I’ve never seen anything quite like this before,” said Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., who previously worked in the Pentagon and the State Department, including as an adviser in Afghanistan.
“We have no idea how far this is going, how this could potentially bring in, you know, is it going to be boots on the ground? Is it going to be escalatory in a way where we could see us get bogged down for a long time?” he said.
Republican Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida, who has long been involved in foreign affairs in the hemisphere, said of Trump’s approach: “It’s about time.”
While Trump “obviously hates war,” he also is not afraid to use the U.S. military in targeted operations, Diaz-Balart said. “I would not want to be in the shoes of any of these narco-cartels.”