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Policy experts and advocates on Saturday denounced President Donald Trump’s claim that he had ordered the airspace above and around Venezuela “to be closed in its entirety” — an authority the US president does not have but that one analyst said signaled a “scorched earth” policy in the South American country and that others warned could portend imminent airstrikes.

Francisco Rodriguez, a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, said that after months of escalating tensions driven by Trump’s strikes on boats in the Caribbean and other aggressive actions, the US government was treating the Venezuelan people as “chess pieces.”

“A country subject to air isolation is a country where medicine and essential supplies cannot enter, and whose citizens cannot travel even for emergency reasons,” Rodriguez told Al Jazeera.

US strikes on vessels in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific have killed at least 83 people since early September, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly ordering US military officers to “kill everybody” on board when he directed the first........

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