Transcription
When it comes to the Western Hemisphere, the single most serious threat to the United States from the Western Hemisphere is from transnational terrorist criminal groups, primarily focused on narco trafficking, but they're in all sides businesses as well. So, the good news is we have a lot of countries in the region that openly cooperate and work with us to confront these challenges.
Mexico, their level of cooperation with us is the highest it's ever been in their history. Throughout Central America, for the most part, except for maybe Nicaragua and to some extent Honduras, um, we've had great cooperation from Ecuador, from El Salvador, from Ecuador being in South America, but across the Pacific coast where we're also undertaking efforts, um, Guatemala, uh, Costa Rica, Panama, these are all nations that cooperate with us openly in in in search of stability in the region.
You move to the Caribbean basin in Trinidad, in Guyana, in in in Jamaica, in the Dominican Republic, countries that openly cooperate with us. Even Colombia, despite its unusual president, has institutions in that country that work very closely with us, and those ties remain unimpeded and unaffected. So all of this is very positive.
There's one place that doesn't cooperate, and it's the illegitimate regime in Venezuela. Not only do they not cooperate with us, they openly cooperate with terrorist and and criminal elements. For example, they invite Hezbollah and Iran to operate from their territory, but they also allow the ELN and the FARC dissident not just to operate from inside of Venezuelan territory to control Venezuelan territory unencumbered, unimpeded. On top of that, um, we know that they are in cahoots with drug trafficking organizations. It's not that they don't, it's not just that they don't work with us against these organizations, okay? It's that they openly, you know, cooperate with these guys and allow them to operate. So these guys are, you know, you know, marching in and out doing whatever they want from Venezuelan territory and and and it's a challenge. And so that's why that's received so much attention.
Now, do we consider Maduro legitimate? No. And by the way, guys, when I say these things about Maduro and his role in narco trafficking, it's not I I hear his reports, Marco Rubio says it. I don't. It's not me. A grand jury in New York, in the Southern District of New York, okay? A grand jury in the Southern District of New York was presented evidence and came back with an indictment not just against Maduro, by the way, but against a bunch of people in his government for narco trafficking. A bunch. He had, uh, you know, his nephews or the nephews of the of his wife indicted, convicted in the United States for narco trafficking. Like this was until President Trump started doing something about these narco trafficking links. Nobody disputed that Maduro and his regime was in cahoots with narco traffickers. Not to mention the fact that they unleashed trained daragua gangs on the United States. They they've unleashed, you know, a mass migration event, perhaps the largest in history. 8 million people have left Venezuela since 2014.