The USA is increasing its already substantial military presence in Latin America, sending Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighters to the US island territory Puerto Rico.
The deployment will include 10 F-35s of an unspecified variant, according to reporting from Reuters, which cites unidentified government sources.
The move comes less than 24h after Venezuelan fighters conducted a low pass over a US Navy warship in the southern Caribbean.
The Pentagon decried that manoeuvre as “proactive”, while Venezuela’s authoritarian leader Nicolas Maduro has called out the Trump Administration’s military build-up in the waters around his South American country as a prelude to regime change.
That flyover by two of Venezuela’s aged Lockheed F-16As occurred a few days after Washington carried out a lethal air strike against a small boat in the Caribbean, which the administration says was ferrying drugs from Venezuela.
Several US guided-missile destroyers have been positioned in the region, along with an “amphibious ready group” consisting of some 2,000 combat troops and a handful of Boeing AV-8B Harrier II fighters, stationed aboard the assault ship USS Iwo Jima.
The White House says the purpose of the unusual deployment of forces is to address the flow of drugs from Latin America into the USA. Trump and his advisers have repeatedly described Maduro as leader of a narcotics cartel.
Adding F-35s to the US armada provides a significant increase to the force’s combat power. Stealthy F-35s are one of the Pentagon’s best assets for penetrating and destroying ground-based air defences.
Puerto Rico sits just 465nm (860km) from the Venezuelan capital – a distance F-35s can traverse in less than an hour, and return without refuelling.
If the jets are the short take-off and vertical landing F-35B variant, they could also operate from the forward-deployed Iwo Jima, much closer to the South American coast.
Any large scale combat operation would likely involve a substantially larger force of air assets and troops.
Venezuela’s air force includes at least four, but as many 21 F-16s in an unknown state of repair, plus six Northrop F-5As and 21 Russian-supplied Sukhoi Su-30MKV interceptors.
Trump is set to make a televised address from Washington, DC at 16:00 local time on 5 September.
