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us militarism
Wife of Man Aboard Venezuelan Ship Bombed by Trump Says Husband Was a Fisher
The Trump administration has offered no concrete evidence to support its claim that the boats destroyed by the US military were carrying drugs.
Sep 29, 2025
A woman who identified herself as the wife of one of the at least 17 people extrajudicially murdered by US military strikes on boats off the coast of Venezuela said her slain husband was a fisher, contradicting the Trump administration's claim that the vessels were trafficking cocaine and other drugs.
The New York Times reported Sunday that the unnamed woman said her husband left one day and never returned to her and their four children. The US has attacked at least two Venezuelan boats this month, prompting allegations of criminality.
The Trump administration has offered no hard evidence—such as drugs or weapons recovered from the targeted boats—to support its assertion that the vessels were smuggling narcotics. While the area where the boats were bombed is a notorious drug-running route, it is also frequented by migrants, human traffickers, and people selling subsidized Venezuelan gasoline in nearby Trinidad and Tobago.
Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump's deputy chief of staff who reportedly once pushed for drone strikes on unarmed migrants, played a key role in directing the strikes on the boats, according to reporting by The Guardian.
The attacks on the boats came amid the US deployment of numerous US warships and thousands of sailors and Marines off the coast of Venezuela, a country Trump has repeatedly threatened with regime change in the face of defiant anti-imperialist resistance from Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The US has a more than century-long history of meddling in the affairs of Venezuela, one of the world's leading oil producers.
Sources told NBC News last week that Pentagon officials are weighing options for attacks on drug traffickers inside Venezuela, with strikes possible within the next few weeks.
"More mass murder on the cards?” the news outlet Venezuelanalysis wrote in response. "Lots of speculation and anonymous sources, but it shows that no war crimes are off limits.”Keep ReadingShow Less
'Enough Words': Colombia's Petro Urges Armed UN Force to End Gaza Genocide
Such a force could be authorized under the UN General Assembly's veto-proof United for Peace resolution.
Sep 24, 2025
In his stirring final speech to a United Nations General Assembly, Colombian President Gustavo Petro on Tuesday called for an international armed intervention to end Israel's nearly two-year genocide in Gaza.
"We need a powerful army of the countries that do not accept genocide," Petro, who is in his last year in office and is limited under Colombian law to a single presidential term, told world leaders gathered in New York. "That is why I invite nations of the world and their peoples more than anything, as an integral part of humanity, to bring together weapons and armies."
"We must liberate Palestine," he asserted. "I invite the armies of Asia, the great Slavic people who defeated Hitler with great heroism, and the Latin American armies of Bolívar."
"We’ve had enough words; it’s time for Bolívar’s sword of liberty or death,” Petro argued, referring to the 19th century Latin American independence hero Simón Bolívar.
(Petro's remarks onGaza begin shortly after the 34:00 mark in the following video)
Connecting Israel's obliteration of Gaza to renewed US militarism in the Western Hemisphere, Petro said that “they will not just bomb Gaza, not just the Caribbean as they are doing already, but all of humanity that demands freedom. Washington and NATO are killing democracy and helping to revive tyranny and totalitarianism on a global scale."
“[US President Donald] Trump not only lets missiles fall on young people in the Caribbean; he not only imprisons and chains migrants, but he also allows missiles to be launched at children, young people, women, and the elderly in Gaza," he added. "He becomes complicit in genocide—because it is genocide, and we must shout it again and again. This chamber is a silent witness and an accomplice to a genocide in today’s world.”
Petro's "enough words" rallying cry is complicated by the fact that Israel's allies Britain, France, and the United States—which largely arms Israel's genocide—wield veto power at the UN Security Council.
However, there is veto-proof action the world can take by invoking the United for Peace resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in 1950. The measure is designed to empower action when at least one of the five permanent Security Council members uses a veto to thwart functions mandated under the UN Charter.
The resolution—which has been implemented more than a dozen times—allows the UNGA to take actions ranging from rejecting Israel's UN credentials to mandating an armed protection force for Gaza, if approved by two-thirds of UN member states.
There are also examples of nations acting unilaterally to end genocides and other human rights crises, although Colombia is obviously in no position to do so in Gaza. These include Vietnam's 1978-79 invasion of Cambodia during Pol Pot's reign of terror and, to a lesser extent, the contemporaneous Tanzanian invasion of Uganda to end the murderous rule of dictator Idi Amin.
India's 1971 invasion of Bangladesh during a US-backed Pakistani genocide and NATO's 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia to ostensibly protect Kosovar Albanians were also couched as anti-genocide interventions by their perpetrators, although critics ascribed ulterior motives to both wars.
Petro's speech came as Israeli forces continued Operation Gideon's Chariots 2, a campaign to conquer, occupy, and ethically cleanse around 1 million Palestinians from the Gaza City area. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes including forced starvation and murder—and other officials have vowed to take control of all of Gaza, where Trump has proposed ethnically cleansing Palestinians and transforming the strip into the "Riviera of the Middle East."
Gaza officials said that least 84 Palestinians were killed throughout the strip on Wednesday, including at least 22 people massacred in an Israeli strike on a warehouse near Firas Market in Gaza City, where forcibly displaced civilians were sheltering. At least 15 of the victims were women and children.
Early this morning, an Israeli airstrike on the Firas Market in Gaza City’s Al-Daraj neighborhood massacred at least 22 Palestinians, among them 9 children and 6 women.
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— Josep Goded (New Main Account) (@josepgoded2.bsky.social) September 24, 2025 at 5:05 AM
Throughout the course of Israel's genocidal war on Gaza, Petro and Colombia have backed up their rhetoric with action. In April 2024, Colombia asked to join South Africa's genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague and subsequently did so. The following month, Petro announced Colombia's suspension of diplomatic relations with Israel.
Colombia, along with South Africa, also co-chairs the Hague Group, a coalition of more than 30 nations whose representatives gathered in the Colombian capital Bogotá in July for an emergency summit and issued a joint action plan for “coordinated diplomatic, legal, and economic measures to restrain Israel’s assault on the occupied Palestinian territories and defend international law at large.”
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