Trump’s Venezuela military option gains backers as millions flee

Bloomberg

When President Donald Trump said a year ago that the US was considering a “military option” for Venezuela, hardly anyone in Washington thought it was a good idea.
Today, as Venezuela slides towards dictatorship and collapse, triggering a millions-strong migration crisis, support for such a move is being discussed openly. The notion of using force to topple the government of President Nicolas Maduro is gaining adherents—although it remains a distinctly minority view.
Marco Rubio, a Republican senator from Florida, said last month that for years he sought a peaceful solution to Venezuela, but now there’s a “very strong argument” that it’s a security threat to the region and the US that calls for the use of the American military.
This month, speaking in Cucuta, the Colombian border town that’s the biggest crossing point for migrants, the secretary-general of the Organization of American States, Luis Almagro, said military intervention shouldn’t be ruled out, though he later suggested he’d been misunderstood.
‘Could Be Toppled’
Trump himself hasn’t walked anything back. On Tuesday at the United Nations, he told reporters who asked him about military intervention that he had no intention of broadcasting his plans, adding, “It’s a regime that frankly could be toppled very quickly by the military, if the military decides to do that.”
Fernando Cutz, who served as adviser on South America until last year on the National Security Council, said at Washington’s Wilson Center on Monday that a multilateral military intervention could be the best solution for Venezuela.
Part of what is driving the changing conversation is that the Venezuelan military, long viewed as the backbone of government support, is showing widening cracks of dissent. In the past year, there have been several minor military attempts to overthrow Maduro, including by use of an armed drone at a military parade.
Some prominent Venezuelan exiles are also backing the idea. Opposition leader Antonio Ledezma has called for “humanitarian intervention” while professor Ricardo Hausmann, a Harvard economist who served as the nation’s planning minister in the 1990s says that a solution to the crisis is “contingent on regime change.”
In turn, the government has stepped up repression, using the coup attempts and perceived threat of an attack as a pretext for jailing opposition leaders.

Security Hawks
Adding to a sense that Washington may be warming to intervention, security hawks with an interest in Latin America are taking positions in the administration. Mauricio Claver-Carone, an opponent of rapprochement with Cuba, is expected to be named senior director for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the National Security Council. Jose Cardenas, who’s being considered for a position in the State Department, wrote an op-ed in June titled “It’s Time for a Coup in Venezuela.”