Operation Southern Spear has sunk roughly two dozen drug-cartel boats in recent weeks, while the Pentagon has built up the largest US military presence in the region in more than three decades — with Marines as well as Navy and Air Force assets deployed not just to US territory in the region, but in allied nations such as the Dominican Republic as well as Trinidad and Tobago. Without question, the regime headed by Nicolás Maduro is a menace to ordinary Venezuelans (more than 8 million have fled the country’s dire shortages, roving gangs and general chaos) and to the whole hemisphere: It’s long been deeply intertwined with the Cartel de los Soles and other international criminal organizations, smuggling fentanyl and other deadly drugs; it hosts Chinese, Russian and Iranian assets, enabling espionage and other hemisphere-wide meddling; and of course the refugees its misrule has produced are a burden on its neighbors all the way up to Canada. And it has zero legitimacy: Maduro’s minions blatantly fixed the 2024 presidential election (and likely several before that), while opposition leader María Corina Machado this year won the Nobel Peace Prize “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy” — at least her third global human-rights honor these last two years, a clear sign that the entire civilized world recognizes the regime’s evil.
Author: Post Editorial Board
Published at: 2025-11-30 23:04:19
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