Mattis to Send US Navy Hospital Ship to Aid Venezuelan Migrants

Military Daily reports Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said he would dispatch a U.S. Navy hospital ship to the Colombian coast to help treat Venezuelan refugees that have overwhelmed the Colombian medical system — the first U.S. military foray into the Venezuela crisis.

“It is absolutely a humanitarian mission. We’re not sending soldiers, we’re sending doctors,” Mattis told reporters of his plans to send the gleaming white, former freighter with a Red Cross painted on its side to help treat refugees in Colombia and probably other Latin American nations.

No timetable was given for when a ship, probably USNS Comfort home ported in Norfolk Virginia, would set sail for Columbia.

U.S. defense officials have yet to say how the ship would be outfitted for the Venezuelan refugee health care relief mission. In times of war, the Comfort can carry 1,215 military medical personnel, conduct 12 simultaneous surgeries, operate 1,000 hospital beds and ferry casualties by helicopter. Typically, it has carried a smaller crew with lesser capabilities aimed at providing basic humanitarian relief in hard-to-reach areas or places stricken by natural disaster.

More than a million Venezuelans have fled food shortages and poverty in their homeland in the past 18 months, often traveling by foot and bus to neighboring Colombia and in smaller numbers to Brazil in what the United Nations sees as a refugee crisis. Both countries have tried to shore up security along their land borders while taking in migrants.

The decision to deploy U.S. medical troops to the worst migration crisis in South American history is a significant departure from Trump administration policy. Defense officials have left the response to civilian and international humanitarian relief organizations to deny Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro the possibility of casting it as a U.S. military intervention in the region.

So far, the United States has provided at least $55 million in overall assistance, something defense officials have emphasized particularly since President Donald Trump announced last summer that he was not “ruling out a military option” to solve the Venezuelan crisis.

Mattis said he had hoped to announce the hospital ship mission in its entirety at the close of his week-long visit, during which the Venezuelan migration crisis came up in every stop.

Venezuela is in a death spiral with unimaginable inflation. Their real GDP is expected to shrink by 18 percent this year, marking five consecutive years of economic decline. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) compared the hyperinflation to that of post-WWI Germany. I’ll just leave that there.

One of the richest countries in South America brought to this in just a few short years. Yeah, give me none of that Socialist Kool-Aid, thanks.

Category: "Teh Stoopid"