EDITORIAL
A U.S. Warship Blows Up a Speedboat
—It’s an Act of War!

Sep 7, 2025

A 22-foot speedboat was blown out of the water near Venezuela’s coast by a U.S. warship.

Trump claims the 11 people on board were part of a Venezuelan gang smuggling drugs into the United States—a gang supposedly led by the president of Venezuela.

There are lots of reasons to doubt Trump’s story. First of all, the boat was so loaded down with people, there was no room for drugs. Second, Tren de Aragua, the gang Trump blamed, isn’t known to smuggle drugs. But it does smuggle people. Most of the 11 could have been migrants, trying to escape from the poverty and violence imposed on the region. Third, no one other than Trump and his sycophants seems to believe that the president of Venezuela is running Tren de Aragua.

But even if Trump’s concocted story were true, so what? He can’t change this fact: the most advanced weapons of war were used to incinerate 11 people riding in an open boat. That is war.

Make no mistake. There is a war going on around Venezuela today. Not a war against drugs, but a war to reinforce U.S. corporate domination over the Caribbean. It is an imperialist war.

The U.S. today has an armada in the Caribbean—eight warships, as well as a nuclear powered fast-attack submarine, a mobile lander for taking troops on shore, and a combat unit of 2200 marines, on standby to go ashore. Some of the ships carry helicopters; some, cruise missiles. All carry a full complement of sailors, 4500 in all. The whole battle group is reinforced by ten F-35 Stealth fighters based on Puerto Rico.

Maybe this is only a bluff, the kind of threat in which Trump delights, a warning the U.S. could blow up Venezuela’s oil platforms if it wanted.

Maybe it’s only Trump trying to puff up his tattered reputation, now that his tariff show has bombed and the U.S. economy is going to pieces.

But maybe it’s a way to provoke a coup in Venezuela, a country already on the verge of economic collapse, creating a pretext to justify a real U.S. invasion.

It would not be the first U.S. invasion of countries in the Caribbean. Ever since U.S. marines turned the countries of the Caribbean into “banana republics” in the early years of the 20th century, the region’s plantations have been owned by American companies like United Fruit.

U.S. troops kept profits flowing. Haiti was occupied from 1915 to 1934; the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924. Over the years, country after country felt the thunder of U.S. weapons: Haiti again in 1946 and 1959. Cuba in 1961, the Dominican Republic in 1965, Guatemala in 1966, El Salvador in 1966, Nicaragua in 1981, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, and, once again, Haiti in 1993 and 2004.

If today’s naval armada is not just a threat, but a serious act of war, it will be over oil. Oil has made Venezuela a target ever since 1910, when the Rockefeller family grabbed the right to exploit the country’s natural wealth. And new reserves have been discovered in Venezuela’s neighbor, Guyana.

But there’s a strange, more modern twist to this story. The foreign minister of Venezuela says there was no explosion—that it was only a fake video created by a U.S. spy agency, using Artificial Intelligence.

Well, maybe. We live in a world where politicians specialize in “made-up truths.”

But even if the explosion were only a clever algorithm, there still is a very real naval armada parked in the Caribbean.

Military force has always been used to keep the Caribbean as U.S. imperialism’s “backyard.” Military force imposes low wages and steals the region’s natural wealth. The disasters it creates, harm not only working people of the Caribbean, but also working people here.