The U.S. Navy is slated to deploy a hospital ship to Latin America next month to provide humanitarian medical support to countries hosting Venezuelans who have fled their home country, the Pentagon announced Tuesday.
The U.S. Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort will engage in a five-month humanitarian mission in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, but it has yet to be determined which countries will host the Comfort during the mission.
The move comes as tensions in Venezuela escalate. While the U.S. and other allies have backed opposition leader Juan Guaidó as interim president, his recent attempt to oust Venezuela strongman Nicolás Maduro last week was unsuccessful.
“U.S. Southern Command is committed to the region in support of our Caribbean and Latin American partners, as well as displaced Venezuelans who continue to flee the brutal oppression of the former Maduro regime and its interlocking, man-made political, economic and humanitarian crises,” U.S. Navy Adm. Craig Faller, commander of U.S. Southern Command, said in a statement.
Acting Secretary of Defense Pat Shanahan, who met with Colombian Vice President Marta Ramírez at the Pentagon Tuesday, said that the deployment was part “of ongoing planning that we are doing here in the department.”
“The message I want to make sure comes across is that we are very well coordinated and disciplined and have a broad set of contingency plans,” Shanahan told reporters Tuesday. “It’s very hard to predict the future, right? And so for every single option, you want to have a plan. I think we’ll do some good coordination and communication today and just really kind of validate the work that’s in front of us.”
“It’s not about sending a ship down,” Shanahan said. “You have to get doctors and nurses, so it’s very highly choreographed in terms of the people that you have to put in place. So, that gives you a sense of the planning that we are doing.”
The Comfort, whose home port is in Norfolk, Va., was deployed to Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, and Honduras last fall to conduct a similar mission.
