Is Trump Plotting An Anti-Venezuelan False Flag In Colombia?

A presidential memorandum released by the White House last week brought Trump’s new policy to light, in which the American leader decrees that – quote – “I hereby certify, with respect to Colombia, that interdiction of aircraft reasonably suspected to be primarily engaged in illicit drug trafficking in that country’s airspace is necessary, because of the extraordinary threat posed by illicit drug trafficking to the national security of that country” – end quote. That’s the official reason for this new policy, but peeling back a few strategic layers, it becomes clear that this probably has more to do with the Hybrid War on Venezuela than Colombia’s security. It’s admittedly true, however, that Trump might be interested in supporting the US’ closest regional ally in South America as it deals a death blow to some of the last remaining narcotraffickers active in the country following the FARC peace deal, as this escalation of the War on Drugs would ensure both Colombia’s, and to an extent, even the US’ own, security.

But the way that I see it is that Trump is putting American forces in the country on alert to engage in proactive measures such as flying air patrols and dramatically shooting down planes that US forces subjectively determine via unclear criteria and uncertain timeframes are allegedly involved in the illegal drug trade. Up until now, the US had pretty much been “Leading From Behind” in Colombia by serving as advisors and strategists for the country’s anti-guerrilla campaigns, some of which are accused of descending into support for right-wing death squads, but they never really took the initiative to go out on their own in unilaterally engaging against their non-state adversaries. It’s curious that they would decide to do so at this particular time in Colombia’s decades-long civil war when the conflict is all but over and drug trafficking is on the downturn, but that’s why this is probably related more to events in neighboring Venezuela than anything else.

The US regularly accuses the Bolivarian government of participating in the narcotics trade, so there’s a chance that the US might shoot down some Venezuelan-originating drug planes and try to pin the blame on Caracas, even if none of its authorities were involved in the incident. Given the US’ historical track record of false flags, particularly those conditioned on justifying further American involvement in a given conflict or regime change operation, it’s indeed possible that something of the sort might transpire as a result of Trump’s decree in order to legitimize further sanctions against Venezuela and/or create the pretext for more direct support to the anti-government insurgents on the grounds that they’re fighting to topple a “drug-dealing dictatorship”. The US wants Maduro to go just as badly as they want Assad to, so just like they hatched a Syrian chemical weapons false flag to try and unsuccessfully engineer the conditions for the Mideast leader’s removal, so too might they seek to do something similar as regards shooting down a supposed drug trafficking aircraft in the Amazon in order to advance the South American leader’s ouster, though with potentially greater success.

The post presented is the partial transcript of the CONTEXT COUNTDOWN radio program on Sputnik News, aired on Friday Jul 28, 2017:

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