Maduro: ‘If the gringos attack, we will respond’

Nicolás Maduro assured this Wednesday that the Venezuelan army will not stand idly by in the event of a U.S. military attack on his country. “If the gringos threaten us, we will work harder. If the gringos attack, we will respond, but nothing will stop our work,” he said during the inauguration of a hospital in Caracas.

The Venezuelan president is seeking to convey calm at a time of heightened tension. A U.S. military detachment composed of ships, planes, and submarines remains anchored in the Caribbean and has fired on vessels it said it suspected of transporting drugs off the Venezuelan coast. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has insisted that Maduro is behind these shipments destined for U.S. soil, and that he must therefore be overthrown and brought before his country’s judicial authorities.

Fearing an attack, the Chavista government has deployed troops to the border and is training the civilian population in military tactics. Venezuela and the United States have been negotiating intermittently for at least six years, trying to resolve Venezuelan domestic politics. Maduro, the successor to popular leader Hugo Chávez, won his first election in 2013 in a controversial manner, although there was no clear evidence of fraud. However, he has never provided evidence that he won last year’s presidential election, despite requests from international institutions and even allied countries such as Brazil and Colombia. The opposition, meanwhile, presented certified vote tallies that have been validated, granting them a landslide victory.

The feeling over the past two weeks is that something is going to happen. At first, the Chavista leadership was skeptical and thought it was just a ruse by Washington to push them to negotiate their departure from power, but as the days pass, the threat seems increasingly real. Maduro is appearing almost daily on television, trying to make a show of strength and unity. “We are ordinary, everyday people. We are neither magnates nor billionaires, and we govern from the people, with the people, and by the people. Our interest is not in trying to govern the world,” he said, clearly alluding to Trump and U.S. foreign policy.

The Venezuelan president is very careful not to address Trump directly. Rubio, whom Maduro accuses of poisoning the Republican and leading him into war, is the main target of his accusations. However, on Wednesday, he did refer to the White House resident indirectly: “Can anyone believe themselves to be the emperor of the world? No. A president is elected to rule his own country.”

On Wednesday, more than 60 NGOs sent a letter to the United States Congress urging it to halt the Trump administration’s military escalation in the Caribbean, and to express their “concern over the repeated extrajudicial killings of unidentified civilians.” They also expressed their concern regarding the growing risk of war in the region caused by the operations that have destroyed at least four boats from Venezuela. These attacks have killed 21 people, according to information provided by the White House since the start of the deployment in early September.

At the beginning of the year, a Trump advisor, Richard Grenell, was tasked with approaching Chavismo and reaching a few agreements, such as maintaining Chevron’s oil license, carrying out a prisoner exchange, and agreeing to the deportation of Venezuelans. Maduro and Jorge Rodríguez, his main political operative, accepted and believed they had signed a peace treaty with Washington. In the long run, it turned out that this was not the case. Trump, according to The New York Times, has ordered the suspension of all diplomatic ties with Chavismo. Right now, they are two nations without dialogue and on the verge of a military escalation.

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