FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The U.S. Coast Guard celebrated a “historic milestone” after crews unloaded over 76,140 pounds of illegal drugs -- most of it cocaine -- that the feds planned to investigate and destroy.
On Monday, at Port Everglades, USCG Rear Adm. Adam Chamie described it as “the largest drug offload” in USCG history and the result of a team effort in the eastern Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean.
The USCG announced the offloads in Fort Lauderdale valued at $473 million were part of the $2.2 billion in drugs that had been seized and offloaded so far this year after interdictions at sea.
“Many of the interdicted vessels we are talking about left Venezuela,” Gregory W. Kehoe, U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Florida, said while reading a statement at Port Everglades.
Chamie said the USCG achievement was part of a partnership between the U.S. Justice and Defense departments. Rear Adm. Charles “Chase” Sargeant, the deputy director of the Joint Interagency Task Force-South, said multi-national air and maritime forces were involved.
SOUTHERN CARIBBEAN
Chamie thanked the Netherlands, which has Dutch Caribbean territory that includes Bonaire, Aruba, and Curaçao, three islands in the southern Caribbean, near the coast of Venezuela.
“The Dutch remain a steadfast partner to the United States as they battle the cartels right alongside us,” Chamie said.
Kehoe, who U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi appointed as interim in April, described Venezuela as a “haven” for two foreign terrorist organizations plaguing the U.S. with drugs and violence.
“They are a threat to national security on a daily basis,” Kehoe said about the Tren De Aragua, a transnational gang involved in street-level drug distribution, and the Cártel de Los Soles, a narco-trafficking organization with connections to criminal organizations in Colombia and Mexico.
President Donald Trump made both a priority of his administration after designating cartels and other transnational organizations as foreign terrorists in February.
Before Trump’s designation, the Drug Enforcement Administration had warned that the Venezuelan cartel, named after the sun-shaped insignias that Venezuelan generals wear, had partnered with far-left Marxist–Leninist guerrillas turned narco-terrorists.
The DEA described Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, a former union leader who became Hugo Chávez’s successor in 2013, as a cartel leader. Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, recently described Maduro as a fugitive and not a legitimate president.
The U.S. first offered a $15 million reward for information leading to his arrest and conviction in 2020. The Trump administration has increased the reward twice this year. It went up to $25 million on Jan. 10. The U.S. Treasury sanctioned the cartel on July 25. The State Department increased the reward again to $50 million on Aug. 7.
VENEZUELA’S CONNECTIONS
Terrance “Terry” Cole, the DEA administrator since July, told Fox News on Thursday that there were criminal connections between Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela, and he referred to Maduro as a corrupt narco terrorist.
“They continue to send us poison to the United States -- killing hundreds of thousands of Americans,” Cole told Fox News about the increased U.S. Navy presence in the southern Caribbean.
At home, Maduro has had the support of the PSUV, or Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela, which human rights activists report politicized the judicial branch. On the foreign diplomatic stage, Maduro’s military partners include Russia, China, Iran, and Cuba.
“This was given to me by President Xi Jinping, of China,” Maduro recently said in Spanish while holding a phone during a public event. “I have it here. I communicate by satellite with him.”
The DEA has identified China as “the primary source of fentanyl and fentanyl-related substances.” The U.S. Chinese government officials have described it as a product of organized crime and cooperated with U.S. authorities last year in a case related to a pharmaceutical company based in Wuhan.
The U.S. Treasury has warned about Chinese and Russian money laundering organizations’ ability to evade sanctions, the FBI has warned about the use of networks of money mules, and the DEA has linked Chinese underground bankers to Mexican cartels.
The DEA also connected Mexican cartels, such as Sinaloa, to the smuggling routes from remote areas where farmers grow coca in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, and most recently to the proliferation of Tusi, a pink drug mixture that sometimes includes Chinese fentanyl and ketamine, in U.S. cities.
“The drugs fuel and enable cartels and transnational criminal organizations -- the very same groups that are pushing fentanyl and other deadly substances to our communities,” Chamie said on Monday about the impact of the USCG drug seizures at sea.
Also on Monday, hundreds of DOD leaders were at the Washington Navy Yard during U.S. Navy Adm. Daryl Caudle’s assumption of office ceremony as the new chief of naval operations.
Related document: DEA’s threat assessment
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