At a virtual press conference earlier on Friday, he acknowledged that his team did communicate with the US military to make them aware of their presence at sea. He said he wanted to avoid being targeted in the ongoing US operation against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean. "In this case, because the US military is conducting operations in this part of the world, " I was deeply concerned about being targeted by the US military," he told reporters. "We communicated in such a way where the US government, the US military, knew that we were doing something in the region. They did not know the details of it. They knew where we would be operating, where some of our rally points were, and then at the very highest levels and the very last minutes we disclosed what the objective was," he added.