Puerto Rico’s governor has called on President-elect Donald Trump to respond after Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro threatened to invade the U.S. territory.
Governor Jenniffer González-Colón called on Trump’s administration to “swiftly respond and make clear to the Maduro narco-regime that the U.S. will protect American lives and sovereignty and won’t bow down to petty, murderous thugs” in a letter addressed to the president-elect Monday.
González-Colón called Maduro’s threat “an open threat to the United States, our national security and stability in the region.”
Puerto Rico “hosts critical U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Customs and Border Protection assets and units that help secure our borders and combat the drug trafficking networks that fund the Maduro narco-regime,” she wrote. “In fact, the United States shares a maritime boundary with Venezuela in Puerto Rico.”
The call to Trump comes at an awkward time for the president-elect, who recently refused to rule out military force in his own stated global expansion aims to take over the Pananama Canal and Greenland.
“We need Greenland for national security purposes,” Trump said. “I’ve been told that for a long time.” He emphasized that Denmark should “give up the country to the U.S. “because we need it for national security.”
Maduro made the threat against Puerto Rico during a speech Sunday in Caracas.
“As in the north they have an agenda of colonization, we have an agenda of liberation,” Maduro said. “That agenda was written for us by Simón Bolívar,” who led six South American countries to independence from Spain.
“The liberty of Puerto Rico is pending, and we will achieve it with Brazilian troops,” he added.
Puerto Ricans have consistently voted against independence as González noted in her letter. She also highlighted a nonbinding referendum from November, in which voters overwhelmingly opted for Puerto Rico to become a state.
“We have voted to strengthen our union with the United States through statehood,” González-Colón wrote.
Maduro was sworn in for his third term just last week after he was re-elected in an election that was widely viewed as illegitimate.
