On the 11th local time, Venezuelan President Maduro announced through social platforms that he would activate the Integrated Defense Command Organization (ODDI) and carry out the "Independence 200" integrated activation exercise in Anzoateji, Monagas and Bolivar states that day.
Maduro said the exercises had been launched in the regional defense operational zones of the three states and stressed that “the people are winning peace”, while Maduro pointed out that the exercises aimed at fully exercising national sovereignty and safeguarding the right of citizens to life.
On the same day, Venezuelan Interior Minister Cavallo, who presided over the deployment in Matulín, the capital of the state of Monaco, said that President Maduro had ordered the exercise to be pushed across the country to address all kinds of threats from “imperialism.”
It is reported that the subjects promoted simultaneously by the three states on the 11th include command coordination, social force linkage and communication logistics inspection, etc. The drill aims to maintain the daily operation of society and avoid "strategic paralysis" of the country under the situation of "external threats".
Since the beginning of September, the United States has deployed several warships in the Caribbean waters near Venezuela to "fight the Latin American drug trafficking group", claiming to have destroyed at least four so-called "drug ships" and killed more than 20 "drug traffickers".