The US State De­part­ment is not mov­ing from its po­si­tion that Nico­las Maduro is not the le­git­i­mate leader of Venezuela.

An ar­ti­cle in the El Na­cional pub­li­ca­tion yes­ter­day quot­ed the agency’s chief deputy spokesman Tom­my Pig­ott, as say­ing Maduro was a “fugi­tive from US jus­tice who un­der­mines re­gion­al se­cu­ri­ty and poi­sons Amer­i­cans.”

The orig­i­nal in­ter­view was first pub­lished on the NTN24 news site. The com­ment came a day af­ter US Sec­re­tary of State Mar­co Ru­bio gave Trinidad and To­ba­go the ap­proval for the Of­fice of For­eign As­sets Con­trol (OFAC) li­cences to be­gin dis­cus­sions to­wards de­vel­op­ing its cross-bor­der hy­dro­car­bons.

Pig­ott al­so said of Maduro, “We want him to be brought to jus­tice. The Unit­ed States is car­ry­ing out a spe­cif­ic op­er­a­tion against drug car­tels.”

Wash­ing­ton has de­ployed sev­er­al naval war­ships in­to south­ern Caribbean wa­ters, along­side over 2,000 marines. The de­ploy­ment was meant to in­ten­si­fy the fight against Latin Amer­i­can drug car­tels.

Al­ready, three dead­ly strikes have been made against ves­sels de­scribed as drug smug­gling boats.