Warns that communication with Washington is “broken down”
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro denounced this Monday the US judicial, political, and diplomatic “aggression” and warned that it is “on the way to becoming military” following the actions of the warships and their “cowboys” deployed by Washington in the Caribbean Sea.
“It’s not tension, it’s aggression across the board. It’s judicial aggression when they criminalize us, it’s political aggression with their daily threatening statements, it’s diplomatic aggression, and it’s aggression on the way to becoming military,” he stated during a press conference in Caracas, during which he noted that the warships are “aiming 1,200 missiles at Venezuela.”
However, he warned that “Venezuela is empowered by international law to comprehensively confront this aggression.” Thus, he is exercising his “legitimate right” to “prepare for the defense of peace.”
“We have faced various circumstances over these five weeks, and we have treated each one of them appropriately to preserve with dignity and obey the constitutional mandate to guarantee territorial integrity and the full exercise of our sovereignty, preserving the peace of all Venezuelans,” he emphasized.
Regarding the relationship with the United States, he indicated that it is “broken.” “Communications with the United States government are destroyed by them, with their bomb threats and blackmail. That’s not how we operate. Threats will be nothing. They have gone from a period of battered relations to a broken one, and history will continue,” he added.
Maduro stated on September 1 that he maintained open channels of communication with Washington, despite feeling attacked by the military threat.
The Venezuelan president has asserted that the conflict is based on “pure lies” by the United States to justify military aggression. He denied that Venezuela is sending drugs to the United States and argued that the supposed fight against drug trafficking actually seeks “regime change in Venezuela.”
He specifically referred to the US military attack on a boat that killed eleven people on September 2 and noted that an investigation is underway. “I have distanced myself from the debate about the boat. The video was modified by artificial intelligence, that’s true. Then there are similar videos of that boat’s trajectory, from other years and places,” he explained.
He called the attack a “heinous crime” for directly imposing the death penalty without any judicial process and therefore called on the White House to investigate what happened.
