'If it happens we're ready' Venezuela on edge over fears of a US invasion

The mayor of Caracas had come to one of her city’s busiest tube stations wearing a camouflage T-shirt declaring herself a card-carrying combatant - and with a message to match.

- Tom Phillips Patricia Torres Caracas

“They think they’re the owners of the world,” Carmen Meléndez said of the Trump administration and its pressure campaign against Venezuela’s government. “But if they dare [to invade] we'll be waiting for them here.”

Meléndez said she hoped a US invasion was not on the horizon, even though they had shown themselves to be “a bunch of crazies, who are capable of anything”. She added: “But if it does happen we are ready, and we will use all of the weapons we have to defend the homeland.”

Meléndez was at La Rinconada station to supervise an early morning drill: a practice response to a fictitious cyber-attack on the Caracas underground that had brought its trains to a halt.

The rehearsal, ordered by Nicolás Maduro as part of a nationwide “civil protection and preparation of the people” exercise, came as Donald Trump turned the heat up on Venezuela’s president to levels rarely seen before.

Since early August, when Trump signed a secret directive authorising military action against Latin American drug cartels, the US president has labelled Maduro a “narco-terrorist” fugitive and advertised a $50m reward for his arrest; deployed marines and warships off Venezuela’s Caribbean coast; and ordered four deadly strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats which have killed at least 21.

Last week Trump again upped the ante, declaring a “non-international armed conflict” against drug cartels whose members were now considered “unlawful combatants”.

Washington has said its strikes are part of a crackdown on Venezuelan narco-traffickers whom the US accuses of flooding its streets with drugs, supposedly at Maduro’s behest. “They're the enemies of all humanity,’ Trump told the UN last month, vowing to blow such “terrorist thugs ... out of existence”.