Venezuela

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro indicated Monday that he is open to direct talks with the Trump administration, calling for diplomacy rather than confrontation, as the U.S. Navy’s most advanced aircraft carrier joined nearly a dozen other U.S. warships off his country’s coast in a tense standoff.

The administration accuses Maduro of facilitating drug trafficking into the United States, but the Venezuelan leader says the United States is trying to overthrow him.

“Those who want to talk to Venezuela will speak,” Maduro said in Spanish, adding in English: “Face to face.”

The Venezuelan leader made these statements on his television program, which aired in Venezuela on Monday. An interviewer asked him about reports that President Trump was considering speaking with him.

“Venezuela’s position is unwavering: Absolute respect for international law. We firmly reject the threat or use of force to impose rules between countries,” Maduro stated. “We reaffirm what the United Nations Charter, our Constitution and our people say: only through diplomacy should free nations understand each other. Governments should seek common ground on mutual interests only through dialogue.”

Maduro’s comments came hours after President Trump said he would be willing to speak with the Venezuelan leader, without ruling out the deployment of US troops on the ground in Venezuela.

Trump accuses Maduro of working in conjunction with drug cartels that traffic narcotics into the United States, and the Venezuelan leader has been formally charged in a US court with narcoterrorism. President Trump he recently told News themezone’ 60 Minutes who believed that Maduro’s days in power were numbered.

Maduro has denied all accusations that he works with cartels and said he believes the drug trafficking accusations are a pretext for a U.S. military operation to remove him from power.

Maduro has “done tremendous damage to our country, primarily because of drugs, but really because we have that problem with other countries as well, but more than any other country, the release of prisoners in our country has been a disaster,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Monday. “He has emptied his prisons. Others have done it too. He has not been good to America. So we will see what happens. In a certain period of time, I will be talking to him.”

The Trump administration has presented no evidence to date to substantiate claims that Venezuela deliberately sent criminals to the United States.

On Sunday, Trump told reporters that “we may be having some conversations with Maduro, and we’ll see how that goes. They would like, they would like to talk.”

U.S. forces have been ramping up military exercises across the Caribbean for weeks, and News themezone national security correspondent Charlie D’Agata said the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s most advanced aircraft carrier, was within striking distance of Venezuela on Tuesday morning.

The Ford arrived when the United States moved to designate the “Los Soles Cartel” group as a foreign terrorist organization, a change that Trump said could open the door to attacking Venezuelan assets and infrastructure.

D’Agata reported Tuesday that there are now about 15,000 U.S. troops at sea in the region and on land in Puerto Rico, where F-35 stealth fighter jets have been seen flying nearly 24 hours a day.

The US military has carried out Strikes against at least 22 ships. which, according to the Trump administration, transported drugs to the United States from South America, killing at least 83 people.

Maduro has condemned these attacks, whose legality has also been questioned by human rights groups, the United Nations, other countries in the regionand some legislators in the US, since they started in September.