Targeting Venezuela

Alan Macleod assesses Trump’s claims regarding Venezuelan drug trafficking and assesses the history of U.S. efforts to overthrow the Venezuelan government.

By Alan MacLeod
MintPress News

The United States is building up its military assets, sparking fears of another regime change attempt against Venezuela — and this one could be far more deadly than the others.

Citing an influx of Venezuelan drugs into the U.S., the Trump administration is rapidly building up its military forces, encircling the South American nation, one which has been in Washington’s crosshairs for over a quarter of a century.

MintPress News explores Trump’s extraordinary claims and assesses the history of U.S. efforts to overthrow the Venezuelan government.

Military Buildup

The Trump administration is once again setting its sights on Venezuela. In recent weeks, President Trump deployed additional naval and air assets to the Caribbean, including seven warships, a submarine and an amphibious assault ship, designed for maritime invasions.

A squadron of advanced F-35 fighter jets has also been relocated to Puerto Rico, bringing them within striking distance of Caracas. In total, around 4,500 personnel (including 2,500 combat-ready Marines) have been repositioned to the area.

In what could be the opening salvo of a major war, the military has already begun to flex its muscles. 

Earlier this month, it destroyed a small Venezuelan vessel, carrying out multiple attacks on the boat to ensure there were no survivors.

Trump celebrated the action in a post on Truth Social, claiming that the boat was carrying illicit drugs to the United States and that its crew were member of the Tren de Aragua cartel (TDA), a group, he said, is “operating under the control of [Venezuelan president] Nicolás Maduro” himself; one that is “responsible for mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence and terror across the United States.”

The provocations increased last week, as the Navy entered Venezuelan waters, raiding a Venezuelan fishing boat and detaining its crew. And on Tuesday, the U.S. carried out a strike on another small vessel, killing at least three people. 

Trump justified the attack, claiming that after the attack, “big bags of cocaine and fentanyl” were “spattered all over the ocean.”

Tren de Aragua has become something of an obsession for the Trump administration. 

On his first day in office in January, Trump designated the Venezuelan gang a “foreign terrorist organization,” claiming that they have sown “violence and terror” throughout the Western hemisphere and “flooded the United States with deadly drugs, violent criminals, and vicious gangs.”

In March, he invoked the 1789 Alien Enemies Act to declare that the United States had been “invaded” by Tren de Aragua. And in August, he put a $50 million bounty on the head of President Maduro, claiming that he directed both Tren de Aragua and the Cartel de los Soles (the Cartel of the Suns).

This, the announcement stated, made Maduro “one of the largest narco-traffickers in the world.”

While this is officially a counter-narcotics operation, few in Washington bother to hide their true intentions. “Dear Foreign Terrorist Leader Maduro, Your days are seriously numbered,” Former National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn stated publicly, advising Maduro to “take a vacation with your Syrian buddy Assad and get a one-way ticket to Moscow.”

Claims vs Evidence

The Trump administration’s extraordinary claims about Maduro and Venezuela have convinced few experts. Professor Julia Buxton of Liverpool John Moores University, a specialist in both global drug policy and Venezuelan politics, told MintPress:

“The claim that Venezuela is a major drugs producer has been an ongoing theme of the U.S. campaign against Venezuela dating back to the early 2000s. This kind of anti-drug messaging is really common in U.S. foreign policy and strategy for at least 100 years. What we have got here is essentially just recycled Ronald Reagan [talking points] … It is unsubstantiated and absurd, and it is really not backed by any official data.”

The data does indeed jar wildly with the administration’s accusations. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s World Drug Report 2025 explains that cocaine — the drug most associated with South America — is primarily produced in Colombia, Peru, or Bolivia and transported via ports in Ecuador to the United States.

Venezuela is not mentioned at all in the 98-page document, which catalogs producers, consumers, suppliers and supply lines of drugs.

The vast majority of lethal drugs produced in South America travel via the Pacific coastline from Ecuador. In terms of supply routes, a small amount of Colombian cocaine is trafficked through the country’s long and porous rainforest border with Venezuela and then transported via the Caribbean.

But this is minuscule in comparison to that transported via Pacific ships, over the land route through Central America and Mexico, or simply flown directly to the U.S. from the cocaine producing states.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency’s own 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment report essentially agrees with the U.N. Indeed, the 90-page document touches on Venezuela in only two paragraphs on a single page —- a clear indicator of the threat posed by the Caribbean nation to the U.S.

The section addresses Tren de Aragua’s criminal activities, but does not attempt to link them to the Venezuelan government.

In fact, a declassified U.S. National Intelligence Council report from April 2025 concedes that:

“The Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States. The IC [intelligence community] bases this judgment on Venezuelan law enforcement actions demonstrating the regime treats TDA as a threat.”

It goes on to note that Venezuelan intelligence, military and police services have been “engaged in armed confrontations” with Tren de Aragua and that it “has not observed the regime directing TDA, including to push migrants to the United States, which probably would require extensive [REDACTED] coordination.”

“FBI analysts agree with the above assessment,” the document concludes. The National Intelligence Council, an official government body, serves to deliver data gathered by intelligence services to lawmakers and the private sector.

Moreover, both Tren de Aragua’s size and scope have been vastly overstated by Trump and the media. The gang was born in a Venezuelan prison and is known to carry out smuggling and run extortion rackets. However, it was never on the scale of other criminal organizations such as the Sinaloa Cartel or MS-13. 

Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan investigative journalist (and fierce critic of Maduro) who wrote the first book on the cartel, estimated its peak size at just 3,000 members. “It’s not a group that has the capacity to be an enemy, not just of the United States, but of any country,” she said.

Buxton agreed, characterizing the group as “small, minor, and urban” and thriving in the disorder of Venezuela’s sanctions-hit economic malaise. “Tren de Aragua is a very nasty organization,” she said, but added that,

“The notion that the Tren de Aragua has a hemispheric reach, capacity, penetration and presence in the United States is something of a myth. The U.S. really is facing far more significant challenges from transnationally organized gangs than anything presented from Venezuela.”

Furthermore, for the best part of a decade, the Maduro administration has been suppressing Tren de Aragua, leading to the gang’s destruction inside Venezuela, forcing remaining members to leave the country.

Its founder and leader, Niño Guerrero, is widely suspected to reside in Chile. And although some groups continue to use the Tren de Aragua moniker outside of Venezuela, it is far from clear the extent of the connections they have to both the original organization and to one another.

While Tren de Aragua might be far less powerful than it is often depicted, it at least exists, something which cannot be said for the Cartel of the Suns, the drug-running syndicate supposedly headed by Maduro himself. Experts largely agree that the group is fictional. “The idea of the Cartel de los Soles is nonsense,” Buxton said, adding that,

“The notion that somehow the Maduro government and the military are surviving on cocaine revenues is nonsense, because the value of cocaine is really low in Latin America. It is only when it has gone through the supply routes and the value added of cross border movements that cocaine becomes of any value.”

Buxton’s latest book, What Is Drug Policy For?, is published later this month.

President Trump’s claim that the Venezuelan boats his administration targeted were packed with fentanyl is also inconsistent with DEA reporting, which does not list Venezuela as a producer or principal vector for fentanyl. In fact, neither the DEA’s “Fentanyl Flow to the United States,” intelligence report, nor the recent Congressional investigation into fentanyl trafficking mentions Venezuela at all.

The US and Drugs: a Dirty History

The illicit drug market in the U.S. is worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually. The U.S. is the largest consumer of illegal drugs, as well as a major supplier of the chemicals and fertilizers needed to produce them in the first place.

In a recent interview, President Maduro claimed that most of the profits from the trade stay in the U.S. 

“Eighty-five percent of the billions from international drug trafficking each year are in banks in the United States. That is where the cartel is; let them investigate and uncover it,” he said, adding:

“There is $500 billion in the U.S. banking system, in reputable banks. If they want to investigate a cartel, let them investigate the one up north. It is from the United States that all drug trafficking is directed towards South America and the rest of the world. They also control the opium trade, and more. It is in the United States where the mafias are, where the real cartels operate.”

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio responded during a visit to Ecuador, telling reporters, “I don’t care what the U.N. says. The U.N. doesn’t know what they are talking about.” In his explanation, he implied that local U.S. laws supersede international law, stating that:

“Maduro has been indicted by a grand jury in the Southern District of New York. That means that the Southern District of New York presented the evidence to a grand jury, and a grand jury indicted him … Let there be no doubt, Nicolás Maduro is an indicted drug trafficker, and he is a fugitive of American justice.”

Rubio’s comments were particularly noteworthy, as he made them while in Ecuador, where he was meeting with President Daniel Noboa. As previously noted, the vast majority of South American drugs enter the U.S. via ships from Ecuador.

Even more pertinent is that Noboa himself is directly implicated in the process. The son of the country’s wealthiest billionaire, the young Noboa built his political career on the largesse of his family’s gigantic banana-exporting business.

A recent investigation from Colombian magazine, Revista Raya, found that Noboa banana boats were being used to transport vast quantities of cocaine around the world. At just one port in Ecuador, police seized 700 kilograms of cocaine from Noboa family ships.

Yet, unlike Maduro, Noboa is a key U.S. ally and has ensured, when governing, to prioritize Washington’s interests above all.

These connections are unlikely to trouble Rubio, whose own family is deeply intertwined with the world of drug smuggling. Rubio’s brother-in-law, Orlando Cicilia, is a former drug runner who served 12 years in a Florida prison for crimes related to the smuggling and distribution of cocaine. 

Rubio maintains a close relationship with Cicilia: after the latter’s release from prison, he used his political position to pressure a Florida regulator to grant him a real estate license. Across much of Latin America, the Secretary of State has long been known by critics as “Narco Rubio.”

The history of drugs and U.S. regime change operations is well documented, with Washington using the illicit drug trade to topple governments it does not approve of and turning a blind eye to the actions of those under its control.

In 2014, Juan Orlando Hernández came to power in Honduras following a U.S.-backed coup that removed the democratically elected leftist president, Manuel Zelaya, from power. 

Hernández quickly began using his position to enrich himself, allying with the infamous Sinaloa Cartel. Last year, he was sentenced to 45 years in prison for distributing more than 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. Throughout his crimes, the U.S. government supported his administration, working to ensure the left did not return to power.

Going further back, the Reagan administration funded, trained and armed the Contra death squads in Nicaragua, in an attempt to overthrow the leftist Sandinista Party.

Allegations reported by journalists and later examined in official inquiries linked Contra-related networks to cocaine flows into the United States during the 1980s, contributing to the crack epidemic. The Contras used this money to terrorize the country and eventually ousted the Sandinistas in 1990.

At the same time as it was supporting the Contras, the U.S. was arming and training the mujahideen to overthrow the left-wing, Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan.

In order to help fund its $2 billion program, the C.I.A. encouraged its allies to grow and traffic opium, leading to a massive spike in consumption around the world. Professor Alfred McCoy, author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, explained to MintPress the staggering transformation the country went through:

“Afghanistan had about 100 tons of opium produced every year in the 1970s. By 1989-1990, at the end of that 10-year CIA operation, that minimal amount of opium–100 tons per annum–had turned into a major amount, 2,000 tons a year, and was already about 75% of the world’s illicit opium trade.”

Thus, across the world, a template emerges; the United States frequently uses drugs and its supposed war against them as a way of supporting its allies and ousting anti-imperial governments.

Rarely does failure to cooperate with U.S. authorities lead to increased levels of drug production. Indeed, the three governments in the region — Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua — which the first Trump administration labeled a “troika of tyranny” (a deliberate allusion to Bush’s “Axis of Evil” designation) are notable as islands of sobriety in a region notorious for its drug production.

Additionally, in 2008, Bolivia, then led by socialist president Evo Morales, expelled the DEA from the country, leading to a significant drop in the production of cocaine.

“U.S. allegations are not only laughable but look like projection,” said Joe Emersberger, co-author of Extraordinary Threat: The U.S. Empire, the Media, and Twenty Years of Coup Attempts in Venezuela, adding:

 “The CIA fuelled the drug trade in the streets of Los Angeles in the 1980s to fund the Contras, who were U.S.-backed terrorists it used to attack Nicaragua. And in Afghanistan, under direct U.S. military occupation, opium production exploded after having been eradicated by the Taliban.”

Emesberger was highly skeptical of the U.S.’s stated intentions against Venezuela, telling MintPress that:

“Quite simply, step one for Maduro’s government to become a player in the illegal drug trade would be to sell out to Washington. Marco Rubio just travelled to Ecuador, which has become a playground for drug lords, and where President Noboa’s family has been shown to be linked to the drug trade, in order to repeat his allegations against Maduro.”

Venezuela in the Crosshairs

The U.S.’s intentions for Venezuela appear even more dubious, given its quarter-century-long history of regime change attempts against the government. The election of socialist, anti-imperialist president Hugo Chávez in 1998 immediately put Venezuela on Washington’s radar, and the United States soon began preparing for a coup d’état attempt against him. 

Right-wing leaders were flown back and forth from Caracas to Washington, D.C. for meetings with top American officials. The U.S., through the NED and USAID, began funding anti-Chávez forces who would spearhead an April 2002 coup.

On the day of the putsch, U.S. Ambassador Charles Shapiro was present at the coup headquarters in Caracas and an American warship entered Venezuelan waters. The Bush administration immediately recognized the right-wing government, only for it to fall to a counter-insurrection two days later.

Undeterred, the U.S. ramped up its financial support to the Venezuelan opposition. In December 2002, it backed an opposition attempt to shut down the country’s oil industry, hoping that the government would fall.

It has consistently rejected the validity of Venezuelan elections, even when all relevant bodies (often including the local opposition itself) accepted the results. In 2013, for example, it refused to recognize the electoral contest that brought Nicolás Maduro to power — the only country in the world to do so.

These rejections of the popular vote set the stage for violent actions from U.S.-backed organizations. 

In 2014, for example, far-right groups carried out waves of attacks against food stores, hospitals, ambulances, kindergartens and the Caracas Metro system, killing 43 people and causing an estimated $15 billion worth of property damage. They also shut down major highways with barricades, attacking anyone who attempted to pass through.

The U.S. government strongly supported the events. Then-Vice-President Joe Biden described those involved as “peaceful protestors” who were being “demonized” by the Maduro “regime”—one that was trying to “distract” Venezuelans from internal issues by “concocting totally false and outlandish conspiracy theories about the United States.”

When these actions did not produce the desired outcome, the United States turned to a new tactic: economic warfare. In 2015, President Obama declared an official State of National Emergency due to the “extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela.” 

This was a legal necessity for his administration to impose a wide range of unilateral coercive measures. U.S. sanctions, the State Department freely admits, are designed to “decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

Studies and U.N. rapporteurs describe the sanctions’ effects as severe, citing shortages and economic collapse. Without spare parts and supplies, the country’s oil industry collapsed, resulting in a 99% decline in foreign revenues. Shortages of food, medicines and other critical commodities became widespread. 

A report released by the Washington, D.C.-based think tank, the Center for Economic and Policy Research, estimated that the sanctions caused the deaths of more than 40,000 Venezuelans in a 12-month period between 2017 and 2018. Millions of Venezuelans simply left the country.

The United Nations formally condemned the sanctions, urged all member states to break them, and even discussed reparations the U.S. should pay to Venezuela. One (American) U.N. rapporteur visited the country and compared the U.S.’s actions to a “medieval siege” and called for Washington to be investigated for possible “crimes against humanity.”

Outside of small independent media websites, this was not reported anywhere in the American press.

Once in office, Trump ramped up the economic warfare, sensing his chance to, in his own words, “take all that oil.” Trump, according to those in the White House at the time, was fixated on an all-out invasion, declaring that it would be “cool” to do so, as Venezuela is “really part of the United States.” 

Some, such as National Security Advisor John Bolton, were in favor of the plan, but more “moderate” voices won the day, arguing that merely organizing waves of terrorist attacks inside the country would bring Venezuela back into American hands.

In 2018, Maduro narrowly survived an assassination attempt. The Venezuelan president accused the United States of being behind the plot. Bolton’s memoir, The Room Where It Happened, strongly insinuates that Maduro had reason to suspect the White House was indeed involved.

Throughout the period, the Trump administration instructed the Venezuelan opposition to boycott elections, preferring to attempt to unseat Maduro through force.

In 2019, it supported a bizarre attempt by Juan Guaidó, a relatively unknown leader of a smaller, far-right party, to declare himself the true president of Venezuela on a technicality. Trump immediately recognized Guaidó and pressured dozens of Western countries to do the same.

Members of Trump’s inner team piled the pressure on Maduro. Bolton allowed himself to be seen with a notepad reading “5000 troops to Colombia,” while Marco Rubio tweeted images of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s mutilated corpse to Maduro, a clear threat of what the U.S. had planned for him.

Three times throughout 2019, U.S. officials released statements telling Venezuelans that today was the day they would win their liberty, urging them to get out on the streets, and instructing Venezuelan military officers to rebel and march on the presidential palace.

Venezuelans, however, rejected these calls, and Guaidó was unable to go anywhere inside the country without being accosted, jeered, and attacked. Fewer than 0.1% of the armed forces defected, leading to the movement’s collapse.

Unable to spark a popular revolt or a military rebellion, Washington resorted to a more direct approach. In May 2020, an amphibious mercenary invasion force, led by ex-U.S. Green Berets, attempted to shoot their way to the presidential palace and install Guaidó as dictator. 

The operation — planned in the U.S. and greenlit by the White House after meetings at the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C., and the Trump Doral Resort in Florida — ended in complete failure, with the ringleaders surrendering upon encountering the first signs of resistance. Critics dubbed the failed operation Trump’s “Bay of Piglets.” 

Eventually, the U.S. gave up on Guaidó, withdrawing its recognition of him in 2023. Today, he resides in Miami, where he has been appointed to a role at Florida Atlantic University.

A few months after the 2020 maritime incursion, Matthew Heath, a former Marine Corps veteran, C.I.A. operative, and counter-narcotics official for the State Department in Afghanistan, was arrested outside Venezuela’s largest oil refinery, carrying a submachine gun, a grenade launcher, four blocks of C4 explosives, a satellite phone and stacks of U.S. dollars. 

Authorities accused him of planning to sabotage the country’s petroleum industry.

In recent years, the U.S. turned to other extralegal methods to destabilize Venezuela. It seized Iranian tankers traveling to Venezuela, attempting to break the U.S.-imposed blockade. It expropriated the Venezuelan state-owned CITGO chain of gas stations across the U.S. It impounded a Venezuelan government plane after it landed in the Dominican Republic. 

It arrested Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab, while he was flying back from an official meeting in Iran, boarding his aircraft after it stopped off in Cabo Verde. Saab was held for over three years in American prisons. Today, he is Venezuela’s Minister of Industry and National Production.

The U.S. government also leaned heavily on the United Kingdom, which confiscated $2 billion worth of Venezuelan gold reserves in the Bank of England.

Summing up America’s actions in Venezuela, Emersberger stated:

“Since 2001, when the U.S. decided Chávez could not be bought, it has sought to overthrow him or, by imposing hardships through economic warfare, to at least make sure Venezuela’s socialist government could never be seen as a model for others in the region. U.S. impunity gives it all the time in the world to pursue both those objectives at once. And U.S. impunity stems from the lack of any significant organized political opposition at home.”

Despite all this, however, Maduro has managed to survive. Last year, he won re-election, beating American-backed candidate Edmundo Gonzalez by seven points. The U.S. refused to recognize the results. The government’s continued support is based in part on what it has been able to achieve for its people.

Hugo Chávez, in power from 1999 until 2013, renationalized the country’s oil industry and used the proceeds to fund massive social welfare programs, including free healthcare, education and subsidized transportation. 

Under his rule, poverty and extreme poverty were reduced by half and three-quarters, respectively. Illiteracy was eradicated, and the student population grew to become the fourth largest in the world. Previously marginalized groups also saw a marked rise in political participation.

Chávez promoted the vision of an anti-imperialist, independent future for Global South nations, spearheading initiatives aimed at Latin American unity. He used the country’s oil wealth to fund medical surgeries for people across the region, and even to heat the homes of hundreds of thousands of underprivileged or marginalized families in the United States.

On the issue of Palestine, he was particularly vocal, declaring Israel to be a “terrorist state,” and breaking ties with the nation over its 2008-2009 attack on Gaza.

Today, Palestinian murals can be seen all over Caracas, and solidarity with the oppressed is a key facet of the government’s ideology. As Nicolas Maduro cast his vote in the 2024 election, he announced, “Long live a free Palestine!”

Maduro has undoubtedly presided over extremely tough times in Venezuela, in no small part due to U.S. actions against his country. Yet even as the economy cratered, a significant section of the public continued to support the socialist project. 

Today, Venezuela appears to have weathered the worst of the storm. Stores are full again, and the country now produces a large percentage of the food it eats. Maduro’s signature social housing policy, Misión Gran Vivienda Venezuela, has delivered more than 5.2 million homes to citizens, greatly improving the country’s problem with slum housing.

Another factor that kept Maduro in power is the military. The large majority of the Army has stayed loyal and rejected calls for a coup d’état. Venezuela counts hundreds of thousands of men in uniform, as well as millions more in armed left-wing militias.

Facing the threat of an American attack, the government has deployed 4.5 million people to defensive positions, making an imminent U.S. invasion less likely. The 1,200 missiles the U.S. task force has on hand, however, could easily destroy much of the country.

Moreover, the Trump administration has clearly made Venezuela a top priority. And the news that the U.S. is planning to withdraw its forces from Asia to prioritize control over the homeland and its Latin American “backyard” makes some sort of action against Maduro and Venezuela all the more possible.

The military buildup along Venezuela’s coastline, the increased reward for the arrest of Maduro, and the claim that he is a major drug kingpin all serve as ominous harbingers of coming conflict. The accusations about Tren de Aragua and the Cartel de los Soles may be fictional, but so were the lies about weapons of mass destruction. And with the U.S. eager to find any casus belli, they may serve as the justification for an Iraq War 2.0.

Alan MacLeod is senior staff writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

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