Venezuelan Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello has warned that anyone who enters Venezuela will face “a 100-year war,” in response to the increased US military presence in the nearby Caribbean region.
“If they ever set foot here in Venezuela, they should prepare for a 100-year war. They should know that after 100 years, the Bolivarians will be the victors: it will be the homeland, and they must be very clear about that. Whoever attempts to attack our country is winning a 100-year war. We must be implacable in defending the homeland,” he stated this Saturday from the Abelardo Mérida barracks in Maracay, Aragua state.
“Through the United States’ psychological battlefield, they seek to divide the revolutionary forces,” but they will not succeed because it is “impossible at this stage of the game,” he stated.
The minister, dressed in military uniform, emphasized that they are in a phase of organizing and coordinating the militia with the Bolivarian National Armed Forces in a “perfect popular-military-police union.”
“This is not about instilling fear in anyone. We Venezuelans are not afraid. Even if they are set on fire, they don’t scare us. But we must be prepared for whoever it may be, whatever their name, wherever they come from. We must fulfill the fundamental task of protecting the homeland, and whoever messes with Venezuela will pay dearly,” he insisted.
Cabello, who also serves as secretary general of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), urged “relentlessness” in the “defense of the homeland” because only three percent of the Venezuelan population would support an attack against the country. “What does that mean? There are many Venezuelans who, without belonging to the revolution, without being Chavistas by training, say: ‘Don’t touch my country, you won’t mess with my country, if you mess with my country, you’ll find me face to face,'” he emphasized.
The United States has deployed at least four warships to Caribbean waters as part of an escalation of tensions that led US forces to bomb a suspected drug boat last week, in an unprecedented attack that left eleven dead. On Saturday, soldiers from a US destroyer boarded a Venezuelan fishing vessel in its Exclusive Economic Zone.
