Last month, the United States sent Navy ships to the Venezuelan coastline, invoking war powers for an anti-drug mission that would normally be a routine job of the U.S. Coast Guard. The extraordinary move left me with a nagging sense of déjà vu. A little while later, I understood why.
I’d interviewed the leader of Venezuela’s opposition movement, María Corina Machado, a few months earlier. She’d told me she would love to see a scenario remarkably similar to the one now developing. I confess that I didn’t pay much attention to this idea, which at the time seemed fantastically improbable. But when the flotilla was lined up, I figured I’d relisten to the recording I’d made of the interview.
I’d been speaking to Machado in the context of Venezuela’s unfolding electoral drama. She had not been permitted to run against the strongman president, Nicolás Maduro, in the summer of 2024, but by the tallies of electoral observers (an official count is still unavailable), her surrogate garnered a majority of the vote. Maduro made clear that he had no intention of ceding power, and anyway, no one could make him. In the months that followed, the still-popular Machado endeavored to keep the flame of hope alive.
“Maduro’s days are numbered,” she often said. The regime was in its “terminal phase.”
By winter, that flame had dimmed. Donald Trump had returned to the White House with little interest in Venezuela beyond deporting its people from the United States. Two weeks after the inauguration, I asked Machado on a video call what she hoped the guiding principle of the new administration’s Venezuela policy would be.
“Law enforcement,” she replied. The conversation was in Spanish, but she said those words in English, as if they were an American talking point.
In the past, Machado had mostly framed supporting the Venezuelan democratic opposition as a moral imperative. How would America go about treating Venezuela as a law-enforcement target instead? I asked for an example.
Machado told me that she wished the Trump administration would carry out a “big antinarcotics operation in the Caribbean,” given that, she said, Venezuela was the country through which most Colombian drugs make their way to the United States. After all, Machado added, Maduro is the leader of Tren de Aragua, a gang Trump often decries.
Six months after we spoke, the United States started sending warships to the Caribbean for what the White House has framed as an operation against a “narco-terror cartel”: Maduro’s regime. The Pentagon deployed a flotilla of eight vessels, along with surveillance planes and an attack submarine. On September 2, the U.S. military launched its first strike, taking down a speedboat that Trump said was carrying drugs to the United States and killing its 11 crew members, whom Trump identified as Tren de Aragua members and terrorists.
“We just, over the last few minutes, literally shot out a boat, a drug-carrying boat; lot of drugs in that boat,” Trump told reporters. “There’s more where that came from.”
Some Venezuelan observers have speculated that the Trump administration launched this mission at least partly with Machado’s encouragement. (Her spokesperson declined to comment for this story.) The notion is not far-fetched. The opposition leader maintains close ties with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, one of the most enthusiastic proponents in the Cabinet of this particular naval buildup. Administration officials have echoed many of Machado’s claims—that Maduro leads Tren de Aragua, for example—and embraced a Machado-like use of narco as a prefix (“narco-boat,” “narco-terrorists”).
No one can be certain that Machado had a role in convincing the administration to pursue these tactics, but she does appear to be welcoming them. Speaking to a Colombian cable-news channel last week, she marveled that the international community was finally recognizing Maduro as the head of a criminal organization. The American ships, she said, were guarding last year’s election results and, by extension, the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people. Maduro’s days are numbered, she has repeated again and again in the past few weeks.
The Venezuelan government’s faults abound. Maduro has unquestionably made himself a dictator. But does he moonlight as a kingpin at the center of a multinational cartel? Do Venezuela’s drug operations reach a magnitude that would justify the deployment, as the White House recently put it, of “every element of American power”?
Venezuela’s production of cocaine is modest; of fentanyl, virtually nonexistent. President Joe Biden’s State Department estimated the share of the world’s cocaine traffic that passes through Venezuela at 13 percent at most. That percentage is higher for some other Latin American countries, such as Guatemala.
A number of high-level Venezuelan officials and military men have been investigated for drug trafficking—not least Maduro’s infamous “narco-nephews,” relatives of the president who were arrested in 2015 for smuggling cocaine from Haiti. But the notion that the president himself is the leader of Tren de Aragua is a bit of stretch, according to Ronna Rísquez, the author of the book El Tren de Aragua. That the speedboat struck by the American military was headed to the U.S., as Trump claimed, is also unlikely. And in the grand scheme of international drug smuggling, Tren de Aragua isn’t even a major player: “You want to know if Tren de Aragua is a determinant group in the drug traffic of the world or even just Latin America? No, it’s not,” Rísquez told me.
Still, within the Trump administration’s cinematic universe, the claims are perfectly coherent. To deport Venezuelans to El Salvador in March, the United States government invoked war powers: the Alien Enemies Act, which allows the executive branch to detain or deport “natives and citizens” from an enemy nation. Now the United States seems to be toying with the idea of going to war with that nation.
“Well, you’re going to find out,” Trump said when a reporter asked if he’s considering attacks inside of Venezuela. Puerto Rico’s governor, Jenniffer González-Colón, thanked the administration for recognizing the island’s “strategic value” in the “fight against drug cartels in our hemisphere, perpetuated by narco-dictator Nicolas Maduro.” “It’s not training,” Secretary of State Pete Hegseth told Marines and sailors stationed in Puerto Rico for a counternarcotics operation.
For Machado and the Venezuelan opposition, embracing a narrative in which Maduro is a drug lord, not just a dictator, is a bit of a gamble. It could be construed as inviting an American military intervention. Maybe Machado sees an advantage in this for the Venezuelan opposition, but the region’s history is rife with examples of U.S. meddling that have ended unhappily.
Tomás Straka, a history professor at Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas, told me that euphoria around the possibility of an outside intervention animates the diaspora much more than it does people inside the country. Those living in Venezuela tend to express skepticism that the U.S. will take military action or that its doing so would improve their lives. Many members of the Venezuelan opposition, Straka said, have long relished calling out government supporters for treating Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s predecessor, as a messiah, but they can be faulted for believing, with similar fervor, that American salvation is coming.
Maybe Machado has something short of this in mind. When we spoke back in February, she told me that she was ready to negotiate a deal with the top brass in the Venezuelan military. Perhaps she is banking on using American threats to get military leaders to abandon Maduro and bring down his edifice of power. This would be a splendid outcome, but not necessarily the likeliest one. In keeping the flame of hope alive, Machado has begun to play with fire.
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