On 2 September, the Trump administration announced what it described as a “lethal strike” on an alleged drug smuggling vessel in the Caribbean. Details about the attack are still fuzzy at the time of publication. On Truth Social, U.S. President Donald Trump said the boat belonged to Tren de Aragua, a transnational criminal organisation of Venezuelan origin. A Republican member of the U.S. Congress, however, posted on the social media platform X that the vessel was operated by Cartel de los Soles, or the Cartel of the Suns, which Washington claims is a drug running organisation headed by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro along with top brass in the country’s military. Eleven people were killed in the strike, according to Trump. Whatever the truth of the U.S. allegations, the maritime operation stands in stark contrast to most drug interdiction efforts, which are generally conducted by the U.S. navy in conjunction with the U.S. coast guard and rarely result in fatalities.

The attack came after weeks of escalating tensions between the Trump administration and Maduro amid growing readiness in the U.S. to use armed force against Latin American criminal groups. On 7 August, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the doubling – to $50 million – of the existing bounty for information leading to the capture of the Venezuelan president, accusing him of being “one of the largest narco-traffickers in the world”. Bondi said the U.S. had seized 30 tonnes of cocaine linked to Cartel de los Soles, including seven tonnes directly connected to the president himself, as well as $700 million in assets belonging to Maduro. Declaring that his activities were a “threat to our national security”, she vowed that he would “not escape justice”. 

Bondi also accused Maduro of collaborating with Aragua train and the Sinaloa Cartel, both of them among the eight criminal groups Trump designated as foreign terrorist organisations soon after taking office in January. On 25 July, the U.S. Treasury Department included Cartel de los Soles on the list of “specially designated global terrorists”, a category that is less stringent that the Foreign Terrorist Organization label applied to Tren de Aragua and other Latin American criminal groups. On 8 August, The New York Times reported that Trump had “secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force against certain Latin American drug cartels that his administration has deemed terrorist organisations”.

The first harbinger of the 2 September strike came on 14 August, when a large U.S. naval task force – including three destroyers and an amphibious assault group – set out for the southern Caribbean from a base at Norfolk, Virginia, with 4,500 personnel, including 2,500 marines, on board. After a brief delay due to bad weather, this contingent was buttressed by a guided missile cruiser and at least one submarine, the nuclear-powered USS Newport News. The navy described the operation as a “regularly scheduled deployment”, but the task force’s unusual composition and the accompanying rhetoric from administration officials suggested that something more than drug interdiction was afoot. On 28 August, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to questions about the true objective by saying Trump was “prepared to use every element of American power” to stop drugs entering the U.S. “and to bring those responsible to justice”. She added that Washington did not regard Maduro as the legitimate president of Venezuela but rather as “the fugitive head” of a “narco-terror cartel”. 

Lying next door to Colombia, source of most of the world’s cocaine, Venezuela has long been a major transit country for drug shipments, but it is not a major producer in its own right. Journalists first made mention of Cartel de los Soles in the 1990s, before the chavista movement headed by Hugo Chávez (and later by Maduro) came to power. The term referred not to an actual drug “cartel” but rather to accusations that two national guard generals were involved in drug trafficking. In the early years of the Chávez government (1999-2013), there were strong indications not only that such practices had persisted among the military’s upper ranks, but also that these figures benefited from widespread impunity. In September 2004, for example, a hit man murdered journalist and town councillor Mauro Marcano outside his home in the eastern city of Maturín, just two weeks after he confided in then-Vice President José Vicente Rangel that he had information linking a national guard general, Alexis Maneiro, to drug trafficking. The hit man was eventually arrested but was later murdered in jail. The case against the general was not pursued. 

There is no doubt that high-level military officers have been profiting from the trade in illicit drugs for decades. In 2014, Mildred Camero, a Venezuelan judge who formerly was head of the National Commission against Illicit Drug Use, declared that there were “government officials who use the institutions of the state to engage in the drug business”. But experts have argued that efforts to portray Cartel de los Soles as a genuine entity are wide of the mark. Insight Crime, a media company specialising in the study of Latin American crime, says it is not a “hierarchical, ideologically driven drug trafficking organisation” but rather a “profit-based system of generalised corruption involving high-ranking military figures”.

During Trump’s first administration, the U.S. Justice Department formally charged Maduro and top associates with a coordinated plot to “flood the United States with cocaine in order to undermine the health and well-being of our nation”, as well as to “line their pockets with drug money”. Also charged were Defence Minister and army chief General Vladimir Padrino López and then-Chief Justice Maikel Moreno, as well as leaders of the former guerrilla movement Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), with whom Venezuelan officials are alleged to have conspired to ship cocaine. The indictments were unsealed at a time when Washington was engaged in a “maximum pressure” campaign to unseat Maduro and replace him with a government led by the opposition. 

Further evidence of high-level criminal complicity emerged in 2015, when two nephews of first lady Cilia Flores were arrested and later found guilty of attempting to ship 800kg of cocaine to the U.S., allegedly to help keep the Maduro-Flores family in power. In October 2022, they were released in a prisoner exchange agreed to by the administration of President Joe Biden.

On 1 September, at a press conference a day before the strike, Maduro announced, “Mr. President, Donald Trump … watch out, because [U.S. Secretary of State Marco] Rubio wants to stain your hands with blood”. Previously, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Yvan Gil had responded to Bondi’s announcement of the increased bounty on Maduro’s head, characterising it as “pathetic and ridiculous”. He later accused Washington of wanting to convert Latin America and the Caribbean into a “region of permanent war”. 

On 19 August, Maduro announced he was activating a plan to mobilise 4.5 million members of the Bolivarian Militia, a controversial, civilian-based component of the armed forces whose members swear loyalty to the “revolution”. The government set up recruitment centres across the country, eventually claiming to have enlisted a total of 8.2 million milicianos. Military analysts, however, characterised the move as largely symbolic, saying the militia members are poorly armed and trained and far fewer in number than the government claims. The government also announced a special, nationwide military-civilian “offensive” – though Maduro gave no details of what it entailed – and the deployment of 15,000 troops to reinforce the border with Colombia, supposedly to combat drug trafficking. Defence Minister Padrino López, meanwhile, said the armed forces would deploy drones and patrol vessels along Venezuela’s coast and waterways, as well as “larger vessels” in territorial waters to the north. Venezuelan territorial waters extend deep into the Caribbean thanks to a number of offshore islets Caracas controls.

The wider region is deeply divided on the issue. Latin American and Caribbean countries aligned with Washington hastened to echo U.S. claims about the Maduro government. Argentina, Paraguay and Ecuador declared Cartel de los Soles a terrorist organisation. Venezuela’s neighbours Trinidad and Guyana both expressed support for the deployment of military assets against drug trafficking in the region. The recently elected government in Port of Spain went furtherwith Prime Minister Kamla Persad Bissessar declaring that if Venezuela were to attack Guyana – whose ESTIMQUIBE REGION it claims as its own – Trinidad would allow U.S. forces to use its territory for a military response. 

But the leaders of the region’s major left-leaning powers – namely Mexico and Venezuela’s biggest neighbours, Brazil and Colombia – all expressed opposition to any form of what they characterised as “interventionism”. Relations between Bogotá and Caracas have turned chilly since leftist Colombian President Gustavo Petro decided to not recognise Maduro’s 2024 re-election, in which the Venezuelan president claimed victory despite abundant evidence that he lost by a wide margin. That said, both countries have maintained day-to-day cooperation and diplomatic relations. Washington’s move led Petro on 10 August to declare on X that, as his country’s commander-in-chief, he was ordering the armed forces to consider “Colombia[ns] and Venezuela[ns] the same people”, adding that any attack on Venezuela against the wishes of “sister nations” would be considered an attack on the region. In early September, Colombia also convened the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States to discuss the issue.

Despite Petro’s reassurances, fears persist in Caracas that the U.S. might use Colombia (historically its closest military ally in the region) as a launching pad for a possible military attack on Venezuela. Though this scenario is unlikely in the short term – not least because of tensions between Washington and the Petro government – Colombia will elect a new president in the first half of 2026, potentially ushering in a right-wing government in Bogotá. It is still unclear who the candidates will be, but some in Colombian conservative sectors have close relations with Rubio and other high-level officials in the Trump administration. Under the government of right-leaning President Iván Duque (2018-2022), Bogotá gave full backing to the U.S.-led effort to overthrow Maduro. 

The possibility that the next Colombian president would permit the U.S. military access to the country in the event of an attack on Venezuela may be a reason Colombia’s last remaining leftist insurgency – the National Liberation Army (ELN) – began in January an orchestrated military push to seize control of much of the Venezuela-Colombia border. The organisation has maintained a presence on both sides of the frontier for years, and it enjoys strong support in Caracas. For the past few months, it has conducted a violent operation to oust competing rebel groups from Colombia’s Catatumbo region, bordering Venezuela’s Zulia and Táchira states. The ELN has now extended its push southward, into the Colombian department of Vichada, which borders Venezuela’s Apure and Amazonas states. In a bid to control the remote frontier, the ELN reportedly ambushed even their unsuspecting long-time allies in the region, a FARC dissident faction known as the Segunda Marquetalia. 

While it would be an exaggeration to say the Venezuelan government can give orders to the ELN, or vice versa, the two sides rely heavily on each other and certainly coordinate on occasion. The ELN has publicly committed to defending the “Bolivarian revolution” in Caracas, while the Maduro government has allowed the Colombian guerrillas a secure base of operations on its territory. It is probably not a coincidence that the ELN is sealing Venezuela’s border with Colombia precisely at a time when the U.S. is ratcheting up military pressure on Caracas.

Brazil is also experiencing a pronounced cooling of its relations with Washington since Trump imposed a 50 per cent tariff on its exports in reprisal for the prosecution of the far-right former president, Jair Bolsonaro. Now it faces similar dilemmas to those of Colombia. During a congressional hearing on 20 August, President Lula da Silva’s senior foreign policy adviser Celso Amorim expressed concern about U.S. military action in the Caribbean, saying non-intervention is a fundamental principle of Brazilian foreign policy. International cooperation, not unilateral action, is the way to combat the drug trade, he said. But Amorim also made it clear that, while Brasilia maintains diplomatic relations with Caracas, it does not recognise Maduro as a legitimately elected leader. At the same time, Brasilia has more leeway than Bogotá in the stance it takes, particularly since the instability on the Brazilian border with Venezuela is not comparable to that along the Colombia-Venezuela frontier. 

Mexico, of course, is comparatively far away from Venezuela. But it, too, faces the threat of U.S. military intervention against its drug cartels. Mexico places a high price on sovereignty and will be watching closely as events in the Caribbean unfold. “We will never be in favour of the intervention of a foreign government in a sovereign nation”, President Claudia Sheinbaum said on 26 August.

Talk of Maduro as a leading drug trafficker who must be “brought to justice” has inevitably conjured thoughts of a repeat of Operation Just Causethe 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama that toppled strongman General Manuel Noriega and delivered him to a U.S. court on drug charges. But despite the enthusiasm of some in the Venezuelan opposition for a dramatic move against the government, there are many reasons to dismiss the comparison. For one, the task force dispatched to the vicinity of Venezuela is a fraction of what would be required for a full-scale intervention. Almost 28,000 U.S. troops took part in the invasion of Panama, where the U.S. at the time maintained permanent military bases in what was then the Canal Zone. Venezuela is twenty times bigger than Panama and home to a variety of non-state armed groups, including Colombian guerrillas, which have a strong stake in maintaining the status quo. Unlike Panama, it is also in an economic meltdown and facing a complex humanitarian emergency. Washington is unlikely to be interested in having to take responsibility for its stabilisation and recovery. 

The geopolitical and U.S. domestic climates are also very different. In 1989, a confident U.S., about to declare victory in the Cold War, faced no serious challenge to its regional hegemony, even though many Latin American governments repudiated the invasion. While Trump has spoken of retaking the Panama Canal, buying Greenland and even turning Canada into the fifty-first state, he has shown a marked reluctance to get bogged down in protracted conflict, preferring missile strikes to boots on the ground. 

In addition, the Trump administration itself is divided on how to deal with Maduro. Senior officials have underlined in recent months, apropos of Venezuela, that the administration is not seeking “regime change”. Indeed, the administration has hitherto put migration and energy ahead of considerations of human rights and democracy on its priority list, despite the wishes of Rubio, who has long coveted Maduro’s scalp. As a result of direct negotiations between Trump’s envoy Richard Grenell and Maduro, the Chevron Corporation is once again allowed to pump Venezuelan oil, on the basis of a licence whose details have not been made public. In March, Caracas began to once again receive migrants deported from the U.S. Though Maduro on 1 September described the channels of communication between the two countries as somewhat “battered”, they still exist, hostile rhetoric notwithstanding. These factors also count against a direct U.S. military attack on Venezuela.

A second hypothesis, derived from the above, is that rather than preparation for an invasion of Venezuela, the U.S. military deployment may be an exercise in old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy driven by Rubio. Speaking to the press in August, he said “at some point, we’ve got to say we’re going to take these people on, and we’ve got to take them on with more than just rewards, by the way”. According to anonymous administration sources, quoted in various media outlets, Washington would not be displeased if threats of military force and a partial blockade were to cause fractures in Venezuela’s ruling clique, leading to Maduro’s ouster. To this end, Washington’s moves have been warmly welcomed by Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, in hiding since the July 2024 election fraud, who has predicted Maduro’s prompt demise followed by an era of unprecedented prosperity. “I think things are going to move really fast”, Machado told Fox News on 10 August. “The message has not only reached Maduro”, she added. Machado has long advocated treating the Venezuelan crisis as a “law enforcement” issue rather than a political one.
A few spectacular maritime strikes or interdiction operations, especially if these were to demonstrate criminal complicity on the part of Caracas, could conceivably exacerbate existing tensions within the ruling circle. (It is likely, though, that traffickers themselves will adjust their routes to avoid the U.S. deployment.) More than one analyst has also speculated that the naval presence could serve not just to stem the flow of cocaine but also to disrupt the sanctions-busting oil trade with China, which relies on a “shadow fleet” whose routes and destinations are deliberately disguised. 

But inside Venezuela, the Trump administration’s portrayal of foreign drug trafficking groups as terrorist organisations engaged in an undercover “invasion” of the U.S. also bolsters the Maduro administration’s efforts to justify repressive measures and foster a wartime mentality. 

In either event, whether Maduro is dislodged from power or stays put, it remains particularly worrying that there seems to be no coherent plan in Washington or Latin America to deal with the aftermath. If the removal of Maduro and his closest associates were to occur, it would be reckless to assume that a seamless transition to a government led by Machado and the winner of the 2024 election, exiled former diplomat Edmundo González, would follow. A negotiated transition, in which Maduro might agree to leave power and go into exile following talks with senior military and civilian officials, might be the least turbulent route forward. In this scenario, other members of the government could well retain a degree of state control and the right to continue their political activity, on condition of holding credible, fresh elections.

While this scenario would perhaps be the least bloody, it is unlikely to gain the favour of an opposition leadership intent on flushing out not only Maduro but also the entire chavista movement that has ruled Venezuela since 1999 – or, indeed, of hardliners in the U.S. Congress. Without some sort of deal, on the other hand, Venezuela could slide into violent chaos, which would have an impact outside the country’s borders. Despite the Trump administration’s evident willingness to use deadly force against alleged drug traffickers, it has neither the appetite nor even – arguably – the ability to guarantee internal security in a post-Maduro Venezuela. Before acting to destabilise the existing government, Washington should first give serious consideration to what might come next.