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STEVE ELLNER, [email protected], @
Ellner is a retired professor at the Universidad de Oriente in Venezuela. He is now an associate managing editor of Latin American Perspectives. Ellner notes recent widespread reports that the U.S. government not only attacks boats, but has aimed to “kill all the men in them … amounting to extra-judicial killing without any legal justification.” He also stresses the attacks should be opposed on “ethical and humanitarian grounds, not just legal ones. … The murder of about 80 men in small boats in the Caribbean is more cold-blooded than was previously thought.” See his writing at NACLA.
Ellner was on the IPA news release “Trump’s Big Caribbean War Lie” in October, which stated “The evidence that the U.S. Navy’s buildup in the Caribbean is not about combating drugs but rather regime change in Venezuela is overwhelming.” Fortune magazine now reports: “President Donald Trump said Friday that he will be pardoning former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who in 2024 was convicted for drug trafficking and weapons charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison.”
MATTHEW HOH, matthew.hoh@
Hoh is the associate director of the Eisenhower Media Network. He is a former Marine Corps captain, an Afghanistan State Department officer and a disabled Iraq War veteran. See “The Donroe Doctrine” on his Substack. He highlights that the U.S. government declaring a no-fly zone, essentially “gives them an excuse to shoot down a Venezuelan aircraft, and this also sets up the case for a potential casus belli, a reason for war.”
He adds that the Pentagon strategy may be “akin to what you saw carried out in Libya, where the United States would provide airstrikes. There would be CIA and special operations forces on the ground. But the bulk of the ground force, the main effort would come from Venezuelan opposition figures, Venezuelan opposition groups. And the idea being that the United States would provide airstrikes, they provide special operations forces, cyber attacks, what have you, but that the Venezuela opposition would be the ones who would pull the government down and rebuild a new one. And, we can all look back and just consider how well that actually happened in places like Libya, or say in Syria, and other proxy wars.”