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The US is deploying an aircraft carrier strike group to Latin America in the most significant escalation of its military build-up in the Caribbean Sea.
Defence secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered the nuclear-powered USS Gerald R Ford, the US’s largest and most advanced aircraft carrier, along with its air wing, to the region, the Pentagon said on Friday. The carrier will be joined by other warships to form the strike group.
The deployment comes after the US launched its tenth strike against alleged drug trafficking boats in the region since September — eight in the Caribbean and two in the eastern Pacific that have killed a total of 43 people.
Donald Trump’s administration has said the build-up is a counter-narcotics operation but it has been widely seen as an effort to push Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro to step down.
Washington has also expanded its campaign to include President Gustavo Petro of Colombia, who Trump last week accused of being an illegal “drug dealer”. The US Treasury on Friday announced it had imposed sanctions on Petro and members of his family.
Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said the strike group would “bolster US capacity to detect, monitor and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States homeland and our security in the western hemisphere”.
Deploying a carrier strike is a major military move, and signals the potential for larger-scale operations than Washington’s attacks on speedboats.
Trump this week said he would expand the regional operation to include attacks on land.
“The land is going to be next,” he said on Thursday, though he did not specify inside which countries he could hit.
The US has 10,000 troops, eight warships, a nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine, a special operations ship and F-35 fighter jets in the region. Military helicopters, Reaper drones and spy planes have also been spotted, while B-52 bombers have flown off Venezuela’s coast.
Announcing the tenth boat strike — the first to take place at night — Hegseth on Friday said the vessel was operated by the Tren de Aragua gang, which the US has designated as a foreign terrorist organisation.
“If you are a narco-terrorist smuggling drugs in our hemisphere, we will treat you like we treat al-Qaeda. Day or NIGHT, we will map your networks, track your people, hunt you down, and kill you,” he wrote on X.
The Pentagon did not say when the carrier strike group would arrive in the region. It was in the Adriatic Sea earlier this week, according to a marine tracker from the US Naval Institute.
In August, the USS Gerald R Ford was in Europe accompanied by three destroyers as part of the strike group, and had 4,500 troops on board.
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