PDB Afternoon Bulletin | October 20th, 2025: Maduro’s Navy Suffers EMBARASSING Disaster & Houthis Target UN Employees
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It's Monday, the 20th of October. Welcome to the PDB Afternoon Bulletin. I'm Mike Baker, your eyes and ears on the world stage. All right, let's get briefed. First up, an embarrassing moment for Venezuela's Navy. A Venezuelan warship has partially sunk during training drills off the country's northern coast, just as Nicolas Maduro orders civilians to prepare for war. Hmm. We'll explain how a botched exercise exposed the regime's somewhat shaky military readiness. Later in the show, the Houthis are back. Remember them? And this time they're targeting the U.N. The Iranian-backed group detained two dozen U.N. employees, part of a growing campaign of intimidation inside areas that they control. But first, today's afternoon spotlight.
An effort to project power went sideways for the Maduro regime. An amphibious transport ship from the Venezuelan Navy partially sank during a coastal training exercise off the country's northern coast. The vessel, known as the Capana, began taking on water near the town of Cumarebo in Falcón State, listing sharply forward as its bow slipped beneath the surface. Photos shared on social media, where else, show the decades-old warship nearly half-submerged. According to reports gathered by the outlet InfoBay, the ship ran aground during a coastal maneuver, flooding its forward compartment and losing buoyancy, which, as you know, is a key part of any boat. It's good for a boat to be buoyant. Observers said the hull may have suffered structural damage significant enough to render the vessel inoperable.
Now, the Kapana isn't just any ship. Built in South Korea in the early 1980s, it's one of only four Kapana-class landing craft capable of ferrying tanks and vehicles and troops. It had just completed a three-year refit in 2023 to modernize its propulsion and weapons systems. Losing it now, obviously during heightened tensions, is more than just embarrassing. It's a blow to a Navy already struggling to maintain readiness after years of economic decay and corruption. The mishap came just days after Kapano took part in war games simulating defense against a U.S. naval invasion. Those exercises were part of Plan Independencia 200. That's President Maduro's sweeping military mobilization aimed at showcasing Venezuela's preparedness against what he calls, quote, external aggression.
And as this incident played out, Maduro's regime was already ratcheting up its rhetoric and its readiness. Last week, Venezuela's defense minister, Vladimir Padrino Lopez, issued a stark warning to citizens, quote, prepare for the worst. State television showed troops crawling through mud, crossing rivers and firing weapons under soldier supervision, but also civilians in evacuation drills, learning to move supplies and documents out of military bases. Maduro claims the nation is under imminent threat. His government says the new wave of training is a defensive response to what it calls U.S. provocations, including the deployment of American bombers and naval assets to the Caribbean. As we've been tracking here, those U.S.
operations are officially part of regional deterrence activities aimed at disrupting drug trafficking networks. But American officials privately acknowledge the campaign's real pressure point, pushing the Maduro regime toward collapse. In response, Maduro has ordered the creation of new defense zones across the country and called on civilians to enlist in newly formed militias. At a televised ceremony in the northern port city of La Guara, powerful regime insider Diosdado Cabello swore in what he called a peasant militia, saying, quote, anyone who thinks this can be resolved by dropping two bombs and everyone surrenders doesn't know us, end quote.
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