US Officials Contradicts Each Other over Deadly Boat Strike in Caribbean.

December 2025: While, US President Donald Trump and his advisers have met yesterday evening to discuss next steps needed to be taken with Venezuela as tensions continue to intensify as repeatedly asserted by the US Administration; the Trump administration has faced scrutiny over its strikes against what it alleges are drug boats traveling from Venezuela to the U.S. These strikes have killed dozens of people. On Friday 28th November official sources had briefed that U.S. forces struck a boat on September 02nd, wherein they had reiterated that US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth allegedly gave an order to kill those survivors, when some Congress members believe this may constitute a war crime.

But yesterday (02nd December), Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt although not denying that Hegseth ordered the second strike, but said in factuality he had authorised U.S. Navy Admiral Frank M. Bradley to take those actions, An US Official in anonymity disputed the White House’s account, stating that Hegseth issued the command for “two strikes to kill” and two additional strikes to “sink the boat”.

The much talked about development in these contexts is that the Venezuelans in Florida are pushing for Trump to bring down Nicholas Maduro. A pressure campaign against Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro is being amplified by the voices of Venezuelan exiles in America who support the anti-Maduro opposition. A lot of those exiles live in Doral, Florida, just outside Miami. The Venezuelan feel is evitable from their presence in Doral: people speaking Spanish at a public park during their kids’ soccer practice, the restaurants making arepas and tequeños. An estimated 2 in 5 people in Doral are from Venezuela, many with stories of persecution.

Gustavo Garagorry was born in Caracas. In the early 2000s, he spoke out against Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s predecessor. Then he got threatening phone calls. He says Chavez’s henchmen even assaulted him.

“One time, when I go back to my home from the movies, people in a car assaulted me”, Garagorry said. “And I asked the reason, And they said, You are a target of ours because you don’t support President Chavez”. Garagorry left Venezuela shortly afterwards. He’s been in the U.S. for 23 years and is now the President of the Miami-Dade Venezuelan American Republican Club.

To him, now is the time to take out not just Venezuela’s authoritarian socialist government but also Cuba’s communist regime. “Cuba has control over Venezuela. That’s the main reason the United States goes to Venezuela and Cuba and Nicaragua. Cuba happens to be the head of the snake”.

Cuban natives in Florida are closely allied with Venezuelan exiles. Cuban American Jorge Jaen also helps run the Venezuelan American Club in Doral. He visits Washington often to meet with members of Congress. He also reaches out to the Trump administration and says all military options against Maduro should be on the table.

“Maduro is a bully. He’s always been a bully. So how do you take care of a bully? You punch him as hard as you can on the nose and you give him a bloody nose. That’s what the United States is going to do to him”, Jaen said. “It’s up to him whether he wants to leave out peacefully or there’s going to be some sort of intervention there”. According to Jean, Trump is the man for the job.

“Donald Trump has no filter. I think that he’s a strong president. He’s the president that we needed a long time ago in this country”, Jean said. “What he says that he’s going to do, he’s going to deliver on it”.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio shares that family story. His parents left Cuba in the 1950s, and he’s a staunch anti-communist. Now, as a leading Trump administration voice on national security, Rubio just declared Maduro the head of a foreign terrorist group. Adding to this chorus is this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado, who heads the Venezuelan opposition from an undisclosed location in Caracas.

“Maduro started this war. And President Trump is ending that war”, Machado said to the American Business Forum in Miami earlier this month. “Iran has turned Venezuela into its satellite. They’re building drones, armed drones, in our country, and they have used Venezuelan financial system to launder their resources for groups like Hezbollah and other terrorist groups to operate”. Put these messages together, and you get claims of: Maduro the socialist, the authoritarian, the terrorist, the drug kingpin, according to the Trump administration.

It all comes at the right political moment in Washington, according to David Smilde, a longtime Venezuela scholar at Tulane University. “They had this message that fit in with what Donald Trump wanted”, Smilde said. “Trump was campaigning on this idea that immigrants were the source of crime, violence, and drugs. And along comes this narrative that says, ‘Hey, Nicholas Maduro is sending the Tren de Aragua to the United States’. It fits really well with that, and it fits really well with Marco Rubio’s long-term desire for regime change”.

Team Maverick.