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By Mike Ludwig / Truthout
As former colleagues fumed about the administration’s failure to consult Congress, Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended President Donald Trump’s rapid escalation of the “war on drugs” in the Caribbean and Latin America before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 28. Rubio testified for almost three hours in his first congressional hearing since U.S. forces invaded Venezuela and abducted President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, in a deadly raid on January 3.
“This is the first public hearing we’ve had. Two hundred folks who were on secret designated combatant lists have been killed, U.S. troops have been injured, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent, an armada amassed, and the announcement of a new Monroe doctrine which does not land well in the Americas,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia), noting operations began nearly five months ago. “Democrats have asked over and over again, can we have a public hearing?”
After months of U.S. military belligerence in international waters without congressional oversight, Rubio claimed the U.S. is not at war with Venezuela but is at war with drug smugglers, which he called “enemy combatants” with advanced weapons. However, Rubio distanced himself from dozens of airstrikes on small boats that have killed at least 126 people since September, deferring questions to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, despite Rubio’s double role as Trump’s national security advisor. Rubio’s prepared remarks did not mention the boat strikes.
The administration has claimed the boats are operated by “designated terrorist groups” and transporting drugs but has not provided evidence to the public. Democrats are continuing to demand the White House declassify intelligence privately shared with lawmakers, including a video of a controversial follow-up strike that killed two survivors clinging to wreckage of a boat in September, which some Democrats have described as deeply disturbing.
Since October, the administration has pointed to a secret Office of Legal Counsel memo equating drugs with weapons of war and stating that the U.S. is in “non-international armed conflict” with unspecified smuggling groups. Legal experts have said Trump’s boat strikes amount to extrajudicial assassinations since the targets are civilians, not military, despite the administration’s posturing. But even if the administration’s justifications for treating the boats as military targets were taken at face value, legal scholars say the September follow-up strike was a likely war crime.
“Even five months in there is a lot we can’t talk about,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Virginia) during the hearing on Wednesday. “If it’s such a righteous operation, then why is the administration and the majority in this Senate so jealously protecting the details about it from being revealed to the American public?”
Rubio’s testimony came one day after the families of two Trinidadian men killed in a U.S. boat strike on October 14 filed a landmark wrongful death lawsuit against the Trump administration in federal court. Chad Joseph, 26, and Rishi Samaroo, 41, were among the six people killed when a U.S. missile struck a boat returning to Trinidad and Tobago from nearby Venezuela, where the men worked on farms and fishing boats to support their families, according to the lawsuit.
“We know this lawsuit won’t bring Chad back to us, but we’re trusting God to carry us through this, and we hope that speaking out will help get us some truth and closure,” said Lenore Burnley, Joseph’s mother, in a statement.
A massive naval deployment under U.S. Southern Command has continued to blow up small boats across the Caribbean Sea and off Latin America’s Pacific coast. The death toll from the international bombing campaign reached at least 126 on January 23, as the U.S. military reported that the latest strike destroyed a speedboat with three people on board. Two people were killed, and the U.S. Coast Guard suspended its search for the lone survivor a few days later.
Echoing many experts, the lawsuit argues there is no legal justification for the boat strikes, videos of which quickly became content for the Trump administration’s social media propaganda. “These are lawless killings in cold blood; killings for sport and killings for theater, which is why we need a court of law to proclaim what is true and constrain what is lawless,” said Baher Azmy, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a group representing the Trinidadian families, in a statement on January 27.
“It is absurd and dangerous for any state to just unilaterally proclaim that a ‘war’ exists in order to deploy lethal military force,” Azmy said.
At the Senate hearing, Kaine said the committee was unable to properly discuss the fatal boat strikes because the administration is keeping the intelligence behind them classified and out of public view — including any evidence that the people on the boats were smuggling drugs rather than fishing or traveling from one place to another as the families of Joseph and Samaroo have said.
“I would like to talk about the complete weakness of the legal rationale about striking boats in international waters, but I can’t, because the administration has only shared it with members in a classified setting,” Kaine said. “I can’t tell you the domestic rationale is hollow and the international rationale is hollow.”
Kaine was among the select members of Congress who attended private briefings that included classified videos of the strikes, including the “double tap” strike that killed two survivors in early September. He said the public deserves to know the “grim details of the murder of survivors” but the administration has refused to declassify the video, preventing lawmakers from discussing the attack outside of a classified setting.
Before Rubio had a chance to respond, the conversation shifted to the future of Venezuela’s lucrative oil reserves — and Trump’s desire to control them on behalf of U.S. oil companies. The drug trade loomed in the background, with members of both parties pressing Rubio on the decision to invade and bomb Venezuela and abduct Maduro and Flores without consulting Congress. After being captured by U.S. forces on January 3 in a high-risk raid that killed dozens of people, Maduro and his wife were taken to the U.S. where they have been indicted with cocaine trafficking in federal court, among other charges. Both pleaded not guilty.
“There is no war against Venezuela, and we did not occupy a country,” Rubio said.
GOP Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky asked Rubio whether it would be an act of war if a foreign nation attacked and abducted the U.S. president. Rubio said Maduro is a drug trafficker and no longer recognized as head of state by the U.S. because he is accused of stealing the last election in Venezuela. While Maduro’s victory may be a farce, Paul pointed out that Trump has called into question U.S. elections and also accused President Joe Biden of being illegitimate.
“But would it be an act of war if someone did it to us? Nobody dies, a few casualties, they are in and out and boom, it’s a perfect military operation,” Rand said. “Would that be an act of war? Of course it would be an act of war!”
In his prepared remarks during the Senate hearing, Rubio accused Maduro of running the “Cartel de los Soles,” a so-called drug trafficking ring the Trump administration has repeatedly claimed operates within the Venezuelan security establishment, despite the fact that the Department of Justice indictment of Maduro backs off that claim entirely. “Cartel de los Soles” is a general euphemism for corruption, not an actual organization.
“Maduro is an indicted drug trafficker, not a legal head of state,” Rubio said.
A former GOP senator, Rubio has long promoted U.S. intervention against the socialist governments of Cuba and Venezuela. During the hearing, Rubio repeated his claim that the abduction of Maduro was a “law enforcement” operation aided by the U.S. military and echoed Trump-style rhetoric blending the “war on drugs” with the “war on terror.”
When Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Illinois) said voters are worried Trump has started another “forever war” in Latin America, Rubio said the U.S. is “confronting terrorist and criminal organizations” smuggling drugs in the Western hemisphere without identifying any specific groups besides Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan prison gang that experts say has a smaller presence in the U.S. than the administration has repeatedly claimed.
“We know that in President Trump’s mind, opposing Maduro was not about stopping the flow of fentanyl or drugs in the United States,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland), pointing to the fact that Trump had previously pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving a federal sentence in the U.S. on drug charges. Rubio said he was not involved in the decision to pardon the former Honduran president.
As the top official at the State Department, Rubio also appeared to distance himself from the boat strikes and repeatedly deferred questions from members of both parties about the legal justification to the Department of Defense, where Hegseth reportedly ordered the strikes under Trump’s authority.
However, in a separate exchange with Sen. Jacklyn Rosen (D-Nevada), Rubio said “my job is to coordinate the interagency function of foreign policy” as Trump’s national security advisor. Rosen had asked about the rotating cast of characters making allegedly corrupt deals overseas on behalf of the White House, including real estate developer Steve Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. From overseas tech deals running alongside foreign policy to cryptocurrency, a recent investigation by The New York Times reveals a “culture of corruption” within the administration.
“No single individual other than the president has the ability to dictate our foreign policy,” Rubio said.
The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, not the president, but this standard has eroded over decades of U.S. imperialism and the “war on drugs.”
During Rubio’s testimony, lawmakers in both parties expressed frustration with the administration’s unwillingness to inform them about the military action in Latin America, including the large naval armada amassed off the coast of Venezuela. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) and a handful of other Republicans broke with Trump over the invasion.
On January 14, the Senate’s GOP majority narrowly blocked a war powers resolution that would have required the president receive permission from Congress before taking further military action. Republicans also blocked an resolution to prohibit the deadly boat strikes and reign in Trump’s war on drug cartels shortly before breaking for the holidays in December.
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Mike Ludwig
Mike Ludwig is a staff reporter at Truthout based in New Orleans. He is also the writer and host of “Climate Front Lines,” a podcast about the people, places and ecosystems on the front lines of the climate crisis. Follow him on Twitter: @ludwig_mike.