Late this summer, James Story, who served as U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela for three years of Donald Trump’s first term and for two of Joe Biden’s, felt that anything was possible in the relationship between Washington and Caracas. It had been six years since the U.S. closed its Embassy in Venezuela, to protest the rule of the Socialist authoritarian Nicolás Maduro. The issue of how to dislodge Maduro’s regime has been an American political conundrum for at least a decade. Trump had wanted to overthrow it but couldn’t figure out how; Biden tried to find compromise, in large part because of a steady exodus of Venezuelan migrants coming to the U.S. But Maduro remained in power, despite appearing to have lost elections handily last year. “If you had asked me two months ago,” Story said, “I would have said it’s equally likely that we reopen the Embassy and restore some kind of relation as it is that we would bomb them.”
Since September 2nd, the Trump Administration has attacked seven boats off the coast of Venezuela, killing at least thirty-two people, on the grounds that they were drug traffickers transporting contraband to the U.S. The President has justified the strikes as a matter of national self-defense, claiming, without evidence, that drugs from the region are responsible for three hundred thousand deaths in the U.S. last year. “To every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America, please be warned that we will blow you out of existence,” Trump said at the United Nations last month. “Each boat that we sink carries drugs that would kill more than twenty-five thousand Americans.” There were about eighty thousand drug-overdose deaths in the U.S. last year. Fentanyl, which was responsible for the overwhelming majority of them, doesn’t come from Venezuela, and the Coast Guard has no record of seizing it in the Caribbean.
In late September, the White House sent a notification to Congress declaring that the U.S. was in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels, which the government has designated as “terrorist organizations.” Those it killed in international waters were deemed “unlawful combatants.” In an escalation of hostilities against Venezuela, the Department of Defense has recently moved some ten thousand troops into the region, mostly to former military bases in Puerto Rico. Eight American warships and a submarine are now in the Caribbean, and, according to the Times, the Trump Administration has secretly authorized the C.I.A. to conduct covert actions inside Venezuela. Last week, Alvin Holsey, the admiral in charge of the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees all military operations in Central and South America, abruptly resigned; the job is typically held for three years, but he had served for less than one.
Legal scholars and experts in the history of executive power have expressed alarm that Trump is acting well beyond the limits of national and international law. But, earlier this month, when Senate Democrats introduced a resolution to curb Trump’s ability to strike narco-traffickers without congressional approval, it failed on largely partisan lines. “This is basically U.S. propaganda through force,” a former senior national-security official who served in the first Trump White House told me. “This is not a counter-narcotics mission. It’s using a ten-ton truck to kill an ant.”
Venezuela’s Socialist government has, for years, propped up other leftist leaders across the region, chiefly in Cuba. There is a clear electoral constituency in South Florida, a vital Republican stronghold, that has opposed Maduro and demanded American action against his government. “If you solve the Venezuela problem, you get three for the price of one,” a state Republican operative told me in 2019. “You’ll make the Colombians, Nicaraguans, and Cubans in Florida very happy.” In 2019, Trump recognized Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó as the de-facto President of the country. But Guaidó was eventually sidelined in Miami, where he remains in exile. When Trump issued threats against Maduro, in the lead-up to the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, the intended audience included voters in South Florida and military officials in Caracas, who, the theory went, might be encouraged to break ranks if they felt the Americans would come to their aid. “Plan A was that the military would come in and save the day,” Frank Mora, a former Ambassador to the Organization of American States, told me at the time. “They don’t have a Plan B or C.”
Shortly after Trump was sworn in for his second term, he signed an executive order that labelled the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, along with several Mexican drug cartels, “foreign terrorist organizations.” In the case of Tren de Aragua, the White House made an argument that U.S. intelligence agencies largely disputed: namely, that Maduro was conspiring with the gang to smuggle drugs into the U.S. and spread crime through mass migration. In March, Trump authorized the government, under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, to transfer suspected Tren de Aragua members to a prison in El Salvador without due process. Of the two hundred and fifty-two men sent to El Salvador, the vast majority had no criminal record; many were either in the U.S. lawfully or had pending immigration cases. In July, after months of detention, which included routine beatings and other mistreatment, the men were released to Venezuela in a prisoner exchange. Three weeks later, the Administration doubled, to fifty million dollars, an existing bounty on Maduro that stemmed from a “narcoterrorism” case brought against him by the Justice Department in 2020.
Since January, two factions within the current Administration have been in open conflict over how to handle Maduro. One of them, led by Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State and acting national-security adviser, wanted regime change or, short of that, a policy of increased sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and further threats. Richard Grenell, the President’s envoy for “special missions,” represented the other, more conciliatory camp on the Venezuela issue. In January, Grenell travelled to Caracas to meet with Maduro. They held discreet negotiations over releasing Americans who’d been held in Venezuelan prisons and potentially easing restrictions on the country’s oil exports, which the Biden Administration had begun to do. One notable result of such diplomacy was that Venezuela started to accept deportees from the U.S., something the Maduro government had resisted for years. “Grenell was kind of doing a replay of some of the stuff that happened under Biden,” Story said. “Then you had Rubio coming in, saying, ‘No, we’re applying maximum pressure and we’re going to take that maximum pressure even further.’ ” By the summer, Story said, the Administration “had two very different approaches simultaneously.”
In August, however, the hard-liners began to win out, according to someone with knowledge of the Administration’s internal deliberations. The shift seemed to mark a victory for Rubio. But the change didn’t reflect Rubio’s influence so much as the involvement of a new player in the policy fight: Stephen Miller, the President’s deputy chief of staff and the head of the White House Homeland Security Council. “Miller sided with Rubio not because of regime change,” the source told me. Rather, it was because Venezuela presented “an outlet for the belief that the President can just kill these guys” as part of an open-ended war on drugs and crime. “Stephen is a lot of the energy behind the bombings,” the source said. “He is owning the Western Hemisphere portfolio: immigration, security issues, and going after the cartels. He convenes working groups almost every day. He’s been very top-down with the Department of Defense about what he wants to see. Hegseth’s team just says ‘yes.’ They don’t push back. Miller got told no for similar stuff in the first term. He doesn’t have people there to say ‘No, this isn’t a good idea’ anymore.”
For Miller, the military strikes help expand the President’s power, while also reinforcing the narrative of Venezuelan immigrants as “alien enemies.” As a former Trump Administration official put it, “this just feels like the militarization of domestic policy. How do you stay in power? You create an ‘other.’ You say that we’re under attack. You create a casus belli. You blame the other for everything. This is happening while you have the deployment of National Guardsmen to cities. You’re getting people used to these kinds of actions. This is expanding the definition of the use of force.”
The implications of Trump’s use of the military, the former White House official said, are not lost on other Latin American countries, either. “If you’re Panama, you think this is about you. If you’re Colombia, you think it’s about you,” he told me. “You prove to the Mexicans that you’ll do what you say. The Brazilians thought this was about them. If you think it’s a signal, it is a signal.”
In Trump’s first term, he asked his advisers whether the U.S. could conduct military strikes against Mexico, based on the premise that the country was principally to blame for America’s drug problems. “They don’t have control of their own country,” Trump told Mark Esper, his previous Secretary of Defense. As Esper later wrote in a memoir, Trump had repeatedly asked if he could “shoot missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs,” and proposed that, if necessary, it could be done “quietly.” “No one would know it was us,” Trump reportedly said.
Trump was ultimately forced to relent after staunch opposition from the Department of Defense: the Mexican government was the U.S.’s largest trade partner and a muscular ally in limiting the spread of regional migration. By the start of 2023, though, the prospect of drastic action was becoming an increasingly mainstream position in the Republican Party. G.O.P. lawmakers in the House introduced, but failed to pass, an authorization for the use of military force against cartels, and they argued that the federal government should designate them as foreign terrorist organizations. Adding Tren de Aragua to this particular cause was a by-product of the 2024 Presidential campaign. In August, after a video from a housing complex in Aurora, Colorado, went viral, showing armed men alleged to belong to the gang, Trump began talking about the group constantly.
Once he was back in office, Trump wanted to see more dramatic military action on the international stage. “There’s been an urge, an energy to do something aggressive and different,” the person with knowledge of the Administration told me. “It had to go somewhere. We were going to start killing cartel members. But there was a feeling that if we started to go kinetic in Mexico then that would have second- and third-order consequences that would be bad.”
The Mexican government, for its part, was being quietly coöperative at the border, and the country’s President, Claudia Sheinbaum, was managing to balance public opposition to Trump with greater flexibility in private. Venezuela, by contrast, was an obvious target. “There wasn’t a direct risk because Venezuela isn’t on our border,” the person said. Maduro has viciously attacked political opponents and presided over the country’s economic collapse. During the past decade, nearly eight million people have fled. On October 10th, the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. She promptly dedicated it to Trump, whom she’s been trying to enlist for years to oust Maduro. “We all know that the head of Tren de Aragua is Maduro,” Machado told Donald Trump, Jr., on his podcast in February. “The regime has created, promoted, and financed Tren de Aragua.” Under Maduro, she added, the country has become a “refuge for terrorists, drug cartels, and groups like Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and China.”
When the U.S. struck the first Venezuelan boat, in September, one detail immediately caught the attention of former government officials: eleven people were said to have been on board. In drug-running operations, it is highly unusual for so many passengers to be on a single vessel. “There’s almost always three or four: a navigator, a pilot, and a person to put gas in the boat,” Story told me. “There are never eleven people on a drug boat because each person is drugs that you can’t transport.”
It was possible that some men on the boat were involved in trafficking and that others were simply hitching a ride. The boat was intercepted off the northern coast of Venezuela, near a small fishing town called San Juan de Unare, which, in the past two decades, has become a transit point for the smuggling of cocaine and marijuana. One Venezuelan woman told the Times that her husband, a fisherman, left for work and never returned. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, the families of the men killed posted testimonials on social-media accounts. But the Venezuelan government, for reasons that remain unclear, appears to have pressured them to take down their accounts. “This is the problem with the situation,” Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan crime journalist, told me. “Both governments”—the U.S. and Venezuela—“like to lie.”
The other vessels struck by the U.S.—five speedboats and a semi-submersible—have had fewer passengers, but they were said to have been intercepted in coastal areas that are not typically associated with large-scale drug smuggling. According to Gustavo Petro, the President of Colombia, a Colombian fisherman was killed in one of the strikes, in mid-September. “U.S. government officials have committed a murder and violated our sovereignty in territorial waters,” he said. After another bombing, late last week, the U.S. Navy apprehended two survivors whom Trump later said were citizens of Colombia and Ecuador. On Saturday, he announced that they would be repatriated. Had they remained in U.S. custody, as the first to be captured under the new “armed conflict” against international cartels, it would have brought legal scrutiny to Trump’s whole gambit, either by a military tribunal or a civilian court. Apparently, this wasn’t yet worth the risk.
The Trump Administration has shared videos of the bombings, but it has failed to provide any additional evidence that the targets were, in fact, drug traffickers. Such evasiveness, in some ways, is almost a secondary concern. The more pressing question, which the Administration has most adamantly refused to answer, is why it is attacking these boats when merely intercepting them, in accordance with past practice, could help avoid a wider war. If the U.S. could return the survivors of the last strike to their home countries, for potential prosecution there, what was the rationale for trying to kill them and others in the first place?
Last week, after the Times reported that the Administration had rejected a diplomatic overture from Maduro, in which he offered up his country’s oil and mineral deposits to U.S. companies, I asked the former White House official if it was far-fetched to imagine an actual U.S. invasion of Venezuela. His answer, for now, was yes. “A real all-out invasion requires probably sixty thousand more ground forces than what we currently have,” he said. “That is not to say that Trump wouldn’t agree to some attention-getting operation or presence. That’s more his style.” ♦
