Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the U.S. government’s decision to designate Venezuela’s Cartel de los Soles a foreign terrorist organization provides the Defense Department with “new options” to go after the alleged drug cartel, which officials alleged is headed by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
“Well, it brings a whole bunch of new options to the United States,” Hegseth said in an interview with One America News Network (OAN), which aired on Thursday.
The Defense secretary said the classification, which was announced by the State Department over the weekend and takes effect next Monday, gives “more tools to our department to give options to the president to ultimately say our hemisphere will not be controlled by narco-terrorists.”
“It will not be controlled by cartels,” Hegseth added. “It will not be controlled by what illegitimate regimes try to push toward the American people.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other U.S. officials have argued that Maduro is the head of Cartel de los Soles — an accusation that the Venezuelan leader has denied — and that the group works with Tren de Aragua, a transnational criminal organization also designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department.
The Trump administration has amassed a massive military presence in the U.S. Southern Command region, positioning fighter jets, Marines, at least one submarine and spy planes. The USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, arrived in the Caribbean in recent days.
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The U.S. has utilized its military force in the region, taking out 21 alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and in the Eastern Pacific, killing at least 83 people whom the administration has called “narco-terrorists.”
“It’s just about options, and we plan better than any organization in the world here; we want to make sure the president has options to include doing a whole lot, to include doing, you know, the cartel mission that we’re doing there as well,” Hegseth said of the terrorist designation. “So nothing’s off the table, but nothing’s automatically on the table.”
Like other U.S. officials have, the Defense secretary called Maduro — who was accused of committing widespread election fraud during the 2024 election by the international community — an “illegitimate leader” and reiterated that the reward for information that leads to his arrest was doubled to $50 million this summer.
Hegseth has raised the possibility of expanding strikes against drug cartels in what the administration argues are efforts to combat drug trafficking and defend the U.S.
“If we need to apply that inside our own hemisphere against narco-terrorists who are terrorizing and poisoning the American people, nobody would do it better,” Hegseth said during the interview. “Whether it’s on land or in the maritime.”
