The United States has deployed several Navy ships and thousands of troops near Venezuelan waters. The Trump administration says the military buildup is intended to target Venezuelan drug shipments to the United States.
This week, the moves took a drastic turn. President Trump said Tuesday that U.S. forces had killed 11 people in a strike on a boat in the southern Caribbean that he said was transporting drugs from Venezuela. He posted a video that he said depicted the attack. Venezuela’s government claimed, without offering evidence, that the video was made with artificial intelligence.
U.S. officials have said that Venezuelan cocaine shipments are contributing to overdose deaths in the United States and that cocaine is often laced with fentanyl. They accuse the country’s autocratic leader, Nicolás Maduro, of overseeing a narcotics cartel.
Mr. Maduro, at a news conference on Monday in the capital, Caracas, called the naval buildup “the greatest threat our continent has seen in the last 100 years.”
What exactly is Venezuela’s role in the drug trade? And does Mr. Maduro have links to the illicit business?
Venezuela doesn’t produce much cocaine, but it helps move it around the world.
Venezuela is not a major producer of cocaine but serves as a transit hub for it. The country’s long, porous border with Colombia — the world’s largest producer — and long coastline provides traffickers access to global markets.
Weak state institutions and widespread corruption have entrenched the trade. U.S. indictments and leaked Colombian records describe Venezuelan security forces as overseeing drug shipments worth billions of dollars.
Estimates by the United States in 2020 said that 200 to 250 metric tons of cocaine flowed through Venezuela annually — roughly 10 to 13 percent of the global supply.
But other countries have a much bigger hand in moving cocaine. In 2018, 1,400 metric tons of cocaine moved through Guatemala, U.S. data shows. And Venezuela’s domestic cocaine cultivation is negligible, experts said.
Unlike Mexican cartels, Venezuelan gangs rely more on local extortion than on drug trafficking to generate money, according to David A. Smilde, a sociologist who studies violence in Venezuela at Tulane University.
Venezuela plays virtually no role in the fentanyl trade.
Fentanyl is almost entirely produced in Mexico with chemicals imported from China, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the Justice Department and the Congressional Research Service. Mexico is close to the U.S. market, and Mexican cartels already control many fentanyl smuggling routes.
There is no proof that it is manufactured or trafficked from Venezuela or anywhere else in South America.
While U.S. cocaine sometimes shows traces of fentanyl, according to the D.E.A. and academic studies, experts say any mixing would happen in Mexico or inside the United States, not in South America.
Maduro has been charged with drug trafficking.
U.S. prosecutors have accused Venezuela’s president of leading the Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns), a term used to describe networks of military and political elites who profit from drug smuggling and other illicit trades.
In 2020, the Justice Department charged Mr. Maduro and 14 accomplices with conspiring with Colombian armed groups to ship cocaine to the United States, claiming he personally negotiated shipments and supplied weapons to traffickers.
Mr. Maduro has not faced trial, and many of the charges remain unproven. But analysts say illicit revenues — from corrupt contracts, drug trafficking, illegal gold mining and the diversion of funds meant for state programs — help secure their loyalty and sustain his rule. These funds flow to Mr. Maduro and his inner circle, experts say, including the armed forces and party elites — an example of how the Cartel de los Soles functions.
“If there’s one thing that Maduro is good at, it’s keeping the upper ranks fat and happy,” said Geoff Ramsey, a senior fellow for Venezuela at the Atlantic Council, a Washington research institute. “He’s bought off the military leadership and party apparatus through massive patronage schemes and a nationwide web of corruption.”
Experts say the Cartel de los Soles is not a cartel in the conventional sense, but shorthand for Venezuela’s criminal patronage system. The phrase, used since the 1990s, refers to the sun insignia worn by Venezuelan generals who have been implicated in trafficking.
“There’s nobody that would say ‘I’m part of the Cartel de Los Soles,’” Mr. Smilde said. “It’s really just a sort of fiction that’s become an urban legend.”
Venezuelan officials have long had ties, experts say, to Colombian armed groups involved in cocaine, first with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and more recently with the National Liberation Army, or ELN, which has operations inside Venezuela.
Several former senior officials who have broken with the government have accused top leaders of allowing or directly participating in the trade.
Attorney General Pam Bondi recently announced a $50 million reward for information leading to Mr. Maduro’s arrest.
“He is one of the largest narcotraffickers in the world and a threat to our national security,” she said last month.
The U.S. naval buildup isn’t likely to prevent much smuggling.
Most cocaine bound for the United States moves through the Pacific, not the Caribbean, according to data from Colombia, the United States and the United Nations.
About 74 percent of cocaine shipments in 2019 were transported through the Pacific, mostly from Colombia and Ecuador, compared with 24 percent through the Caribbean, according to D.E.A. data.
“The Pacific Corridor has established itself as the main cocaine transit route to North America,” the Colombian Navy reported this year.
Cocaine routes are diffuse and resilient, and the United States has failed at disrupting them despite decades of effort and billions of dollars.
The strike seems intended to make a point.
Analysts said the deployment was more a show of force than an antidrug strategy. Mr. Ramsey said that Mr. Trump, who campaigned on ending wars, was unlikely to attack Venezuela.
“This is less of a counternarcotics operation, more of a show of strength,” Mr. Ramsey said. “This is ultimately an attempt to saber-rattle and see what comes out of it.”
The move also plays to domestic politics, he added. Many Venezuelan and Cuban voters in South Florida who oppose any business ties between Venezuela and the United States were angered by the Trump administration’s decision to allow Chevron to restart oil operations in Venezuela, and by direct negotiations that led to the resumption of deportation flights to Caracas. Oil is a major source of revenue for Venezuela.
Both developments were seen as a sign of warming relations that conferred legitimacy on Mr. Maduro.
The naval buildup provides a way to demonstrate toughness without jeopardizing U.S. policy, analysts said.
The move could also provide another advantage. Mr. Trump has invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law, to deport Venezuelans without due process.
A U.S. federal appeals court on Tuesday rejected the use of the act to expel the Venezuelans, saying the act did not apply given that the United States was not at war with Venezuela.
The Supreme Court is likely to make the final ruling on the issue.
The administration could use the naval deployment and the attack on the boat to justify the use of the law, Mr. Smilde said — particularly if Venezuela retaliates.
“Then that’s plausible for them to say, oh, we have this open conflict with Venezuela,” he said.
Julie Turkewitz contributed reporting from Bogotá.
Genevieve Glatsky is a reporter for The Times, based in Bogotá, Colombia.
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