WASHINGTON: The United States sent 10 F-35 fighter jets to Puerto Rico as part of its war on drug cartels amid mounting tensions with Venezuela over Washington’s military build-up in the Caribbean.
The planes will join US warships already deployed to the southern Caribbean as President Donald Trump steps up pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whom the United States accuses of leading a drug cartel.
The standoff has grown in recent days as the Pentagon said two Venezuelan military planes flew near a US Navy vessel in international waters on Thursday in a “highly provocative” move.
US forces on Tuesday blew up an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean that Trump said belonged to the Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan criminal organisation he tied to Maduro, killing 11 people.
The high-tech F-35 jets will be deployed to an airfield in Puerto Rico, a US Caribbean island territory of more than three million people.
Maduro — a leftist firebrand whose election victory last year was seen by Washington as illegitimate — has denounced the US build-up as “the greatest threat our continent has seen in the last 100 years”.
Declaring his country prepared for “armed struggle in defence of the national territory”, he has mobilised Venezuela’s military, which numbers 340,000, and ‘eight million reservists’.
Published in Dawn, September 6th, 2025