The Latin American Report # 641

Venezuelan authorities, including (de facto) President Nicolás Maduro, are calling daily for restraint from Washington, quite alarmed in my opinion by the extraordinary and potentially lethal deployment of US Armed Forces in the Caribbean. This Saturday, the Vice Presidency of International Affairs of the ruling United Socialist Party denounced that the Trump administration seeks "to unleash violent actions and sow a conflict", and called on political and civil society organizations and bodies worldwide to mobilize in a public opinion campaign "to counter the enormous psychological warfare operation implicit in the so-called Operation Southern Spear."

It is true that the White House's approach in this sense reflects all the characteristics of a textbook psychological warfare operation, fueling rumors in the press of "imminent" attacks on land military units inside Venezuela, which, incidentally, some Cuban-origin Republican representatives do not rule out and on the contrary also seem to predict. Very aware of the impact of his words, the head of the Oval Office said yesterday that he has already "decided" what he will do with Caracas.

Secretary Pete Hegseth announces “Operation Southern Spear,” a military campaign targeting alleged drug smugglers at sea. @LMartinezABC has the latest. pic.twitter.com/E5gRw5YyBx

— ABC News Live (@ABCNewsLive) November 14, 2025

With the official launch of Operation Southern Spear, which follows the arrival of the most destructive aircraft carrier to the region this past Tuesday, the United States also incorporates "an unprecedented mix of robotic air and sea vessels" to its already enhanced military muscle there. "What is its aim? To plague Latin America and the Caribbean with death, destruction, and hatred? To extend to our America the denatured practices that brutally exterminate families and children in the Gaza Strip? To normalize the unjustified bombings with which it carries out selective assassinations?," continued the PSUV in its statement from today.

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Since the attacks against vessels supposedly loaded with drugs—mostly cocaine in any case, not fentanyl, as Trump usually claims—began in September, the US War Department has claimed responsibility for 20 lethal ones that have resulted in the death of 80 alleged traffickers, mostly low-level ranks in the opaque structure of drug trafficking. However, and also in contradiction with official statements about the soundness of interdiction as a good strategy to contain the problem, the US Coast Guard speaks of record levels of cocaine seizures, that amount so far to more than 200 metric tons over those seized in 2024.

The cutter Hamilton seized this year the record figure—for a single Coast Guard ship during a deployment—of 38 tons of cocaine, while the Attorney General herself boasted in the now distant month of April about the haul recovered by another cutter returning from patrolling the sea, amounting to "half a billion dollars of pure, uncut cocaine." How far will Trump go in the Venezuelan case by appealing to the narrative of the Cartel of the Suns and the Tren de Aragua as criminal structures commanded from (or colluded with, respectively) the Miraflores Palace? The answer lies in the Resolute desk.

On Nov. 10, at the direction of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Joint Task Force Southern Spear conducted a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel operated by a Designated Terrorist Organization. Intelligence confirmed that the vessel was involved in illicit narcotics smuggling,… pic.twitter.com/eptSZvVF6x

— U.S. Southern Command (@Southcom) November 14, 2025

Argentina

"Without glaciers, there is no water. And without water, there is no future. We will not allow advances on the water reserves that sustain life in our country. Protecting these bodies of ice is protecting the water that millions of people need to live today and tomorrow," an environmental activist told the Spanish agency EFE in relation to a legislative initiative from Javier Milei's Pink House that seeks to promote mining in an area near the glaciers of the Andes Mountains. "Environmentalists prefer that one die of hunger but not touch anything, with a very primitive attitude," the Argentine leader has said about this another contentious issue.

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Mexico

A piece of national history 👇

Why a centuries-old Mexica myth became Mexico’s enduring symbolhttps://t.co/hFUp3Aa552

— Larry Ferlazzo (@Larryferlazzo) November 15, 2025

This is all for today’s report.