Sumi Somaskanda

Yeah, that's an important question, isn't it, Matthew?

And we have a couple of answers to that question.

Indeed, what we've heard from President Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is that they saw Nicolás Maduro as the head of a drug trafficking organization that was directly a threat to the United States.

So the United States, the Secretary of State, had said that they had designated two drug trafficking organizations, the Tren de Aragua, as well as the Cartel de los Soles, the Cartel of the Suns, as drug trafficking organizations.

And because of that, they said that Nicolas Maduro, who they deemed as the head of one of those cartels, was trafficking drugs directly into the United States.

That was the official justification they gave for why there was a direct threat to the United States.

As a result of that, we saw strikes on what the US has said were drug trafficking boats off the coast of Venezuela, in the Pacific, in the Caribbean as well.

More than 30 strikes, more than 100 people killed.

After that, we also saw President Trump change the narrative a bit.

He then started talking about Venezuelan oil.

What he said was stolen oil and stolen land.

Now, it's not entirely clear what he means by stolen land, but by stolen oil, he's talking about Venezuela's large oil reserves and the American companies that were once a big part

of extracting that oil from Venezuela and processing it.

When Venezuela nationalized the oil companies, a few American companies that were involved in that process lost out a lot of money.

And this is what President Trump is talking about when he says those companies need to be reimbursed.

And last but not least, it's important to say that the Trump administration has cracked down on migration as well, migration across the southern border.

In the last few years, Venezuelans have made up a big part of the people who have been flowing across the U.S.

southern border into the United States.

President Trump has claimed that those are drug traffickers, but there is not proof that the vast majority of those who have entered are drug traffickers.

Regardless, they want to stop that flow as well.