By Andrea Shalal, Steve Holland and Gram Slattery
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -President Donald Trump said on Monday he has not ruled out putting American forces on the ground in Venezuela, while expressing a willingness to hear directly from Nicolas Maduro regarding the Venezuelan leader’s proposals to avert further U.S. military escalation.
Asked if he would rule out U.S. troops on the ground in the South American country, Trump said: “No, I don’t rule out that, I don’t rule out anything.”
Still, questioned if he would speak to Maduro directly, Trump told reporters at the White House: “I probably would talk to him, yeah. I talk to everybody.”
Maduro, when asked about Trump’s comments on Monday, said differences should be resolved through diplomacy and that he is willing to hold face-to-face talks with anyone interested.
“In the United States, whoever wants to talk with Venezuela will talk, face to face, without any problem,” Maduro said on his weekly state television program.
The U.S. has been waging a campaign of deadly strikes against suspected drug trafficking boats off the Venezuelan coast and the Pacific coast of Latin America.
Maduro has repeatedly alleged that a U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean is designed to drive him from power.
Taken as a whole, Trump’s comments suggest he is willing to dramatically escalate his administration’s confrontation with Venezuela, even as he is open to seeking an off-ramp if presented with an interesting enough proposal from the Venezuelan government.
The U.S. president also said he would like to knock out cocaine factories in Colombia, while stopping short of announcing any direct military intervention there.
While Trump has focused his Venezuela-related efforts on tamping down the flow of narcotics, he is also aware that the nation – which holds the world’s greatest known oil reserves – is “a very resource-rich country,” a senior White House official told Reuters.
“Just because the president is perhaps interested in hearing what Venezuela has to say does not take off his military options from the table,” cautioned the official, who requested anonymity to discuss diplomatic conversations.
The official said there were many advantages that Venezuela could offer U.S. firms, though the main priority now is stopping drugs.
On Sunday, the Trump administration designated the Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist organization. The U.S. has alleged that the group is made up of high-ranking Venezuelan officials, including Maduro.
Some independent researchers have said that while Venezuelan officials are involved in drug trafficking, there is little proof of a top-down, hierarchical organization that could be traditionally called a cartel.
The Pentagon said on Sunday before Trump’s latest comments that the U.S. Navy’s largest aircraft carrier, the Gerald R. Ford, with 5,000 military personnel and dozens of warplanes on board, and its strike group moved into the Caribbean. That added to the eight warships, a nuclear submarine and F-35 aircraft already sent to the region.
So far, the Trump administration has focused its efforts on bombing boats allegedly carrying drugs that have departed from the shoreline of Venezuela and other Latin American countries.
Human rights groups have condemned those strikes as extrajudicial killings of civilians. The White House says the U.S. is at war with drug cartels and courts aren’t needed in armed conflicts.
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal, Gram Slattery and Steve Holland; Writing by Gram Slattery; Editing by Ross Colvin, Caitlin Webber and Leslie Adler)
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