Tensions between the United States and Venezuela have escalated as the U.S. military attacks boats in the Caribbean Sea that the Trump administration says are smuggling drugs.
There have been mounting signs that the administration may be engineering some kind of confrontation with Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, who was indicted by the U.S. Justice Department on drug trafficking and corruption charges in President Trump’s first term. Mr. Trump’s team has called Mr. Maduro an illegitimate leader.
But the endgame remains opaque. Here is what we know.
Trump aides are pushing for a regime-change operation.
Some top aides to Mr. Trump want him to approve a military operation to remove Mr. Maduro from power, The New York Times has reported. The proponents of a regime-change push include Marco Rubio, the secretary of state and national security adviser; John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director; and Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s chief domestic policy and homeland security policy aide.
Mr. Rubio in particular has been ratcheting up rhetoric about Mr. Maduro. The State Department in August doubled a reward for his capture, and in September Mr. Rubio told Fox News, “We’re not going to have a cartel, operating or masquerading as a government, operating in our own hemisphere.”
Trump says the United States is in an armed conflict with the cartels.
The Trump administration has made a series of disputed claims about Mr. Maduro and drug cartels.
The Trump administration has designated several Venezuelan criminal organizations as terrorist organizations. They include Tren de Aragua and the so-called Cartel de los Soles, which the U.S. government has described as a Venezuela-based criminal group.
Mr. Trump and his aides have accused Mr. Maduro of controlling Tren de Aragua and of heading Cartel de los Soles.
Last week, the administration told Congress that Mr. Trump had “determined” that the United States was engaged in a formal armed conflict with certain drug cartels his administration has deemed terrorists — without naming the groups.
The United States has built up military forces near Venezuela.
In late July, Mr. Trump signed a still-secret order directing the Pentagon to start using military force against the groups his administration had designated as terrorists. And since August, the U.S. military has built up a significant amount of naval forces in the south Caribbean Sea.
The military has deployed eight warships, several Navy P-8 surveillance planes, MQ-9 Reapers and one attack submarine to the region. The flotilla includes multiple guided-missile destroyers, attack aircraft and an expeditionary unit carrying thousands of Marines.
It has also moved advanced F-35 fighters to Puerto Rico, among other things. The total force in the region, ashore and afloat, is more than 6,500 personnel.
Military specialists say the forces go far beyond what would be necessary or useful for the purpose of interdicting small vessels suspected of smuggling drugs.
The United States has already attacked Venezuelans at sea.
The U.S. military has carried out four known strikes targeting go-fast-style boats in the Caribbean Sea that Mr. Trump or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have said were smuggling drugs for “narco-terrorists,” without offering evidence. The strikes were in international waters, they said, and killed a total of 21 people.
The first strike, on Sept. 2, remains the most disputed, not just because it was the first but also because of lingering questions about what happened. Mr. Trump said the boat was carrying 11 people, all of whom he declared were members of Tren de Aragua. In a report to Congress, Mr. Trump justified the strike as a matter of self-defense against drug traffickers.
That boat appeared to have turned around before it was attacked because the people onboard had apparently spotted a military aircraft stalking it, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The second boat strike, on Sept. 15, killed three Venezuelans, Mr. Trump said, without specifying a particular group. An administration notice to Congress called the three people “unlawful combatants.”
The third, on Sept. 19, also killed three people, he said, this time without specifying a nationality or group.
On Oct. 3, Mr. Hegseth announced the fourth such strike, which he said killed four people. He similarly asserted that they were “affiliated” with one of the cartels and gangs that the Trump administration had designated as foreign terrorist organizations, but did not specify which. He also did not identify the nationalities of the dead.
The Trump administration is weighing strikes inside Venezuela.
In response to a directive from the White House, the U.S. military has drawn up plans to expand the campaign with strikes inside Venezuela, according to people familiar with the matter. It is not clear whether a kill or capture operation targeting Mr. Maduro is among those options, nor if Mr. Trump has approved any type of strikes on Venezuelan soil.
Venezuelans are watching intently.
Mr. Maduro and his administration have denied that the people killed were drug traffickers and have accused Mr. Trump of trying to start a war.
Two figures in Venezuela’s opposition have said they have been making plans to try to take the reins should Mr. Maduro be ousted and have been talking with the Trump administration about it. Administration officials have been coy about the extent of their engagement with the opposition.
Trump’s assertions are contested.
Mr. Maduro and his administration are widely considered corrupt, and election observers and the Biden administration accused him of stealing the 2024 presidential election in Venezuela.
But many other claims by Mr. Trump and his team have come under sharp scrutiny.
The Trump administration calls various drug cartels “narco-terrorists” because it designated the groups terrorists. That was an unprecedented use of that authority. As a matter of the ordinary meaning in the English language, terrorists are violent groups that are motivated by ideological or religious ends, not the mere pursuit of illicit profits.
Mr. Trump says Mr. Maduro controls Tren de Aragua, but the U.S. intelligence community rejects that claim. The administration treats Cartel de los Soles as an actual group, but some specialists in Latin American crime portray it as more a metaphor for institutionalized networks of corruption in Venezuela’s military and broader government.
The Trump administration has justified its attacks on suspected drug smugglers as national self-defense at a time of high overdose deaths in the United States, but the surge in overdoses has been driven by fentanyl, which comes from Mexico, not South America.
Trump’s legal assertions are also contested.
A range of specialists in the laws governing the use of force have disputed the Trump administration’s claim that it can lawfully kill people suspected of drug trafficking like enemy troops instead of arresting them for prosecution.
As a matter of domestic law, Congress has not authorized any armed conflict.
As a matter of international law, for a nonstate group to qualify as a belligerent in an armed conflict — meaning its members can be targeted for killing based on their status alone, not because of anything they specifically do — it must be an “organized armed group” with a centralized command structure and that is engaging in hostilities.
The U.S. intelligence community has assessed that Tren de Aragua, at least, consists of “loosely organized cells of localized individual criminal networks” and is “decentralized.”
And the administration has not offered any analysis to back its assertion that trafficking in a dangerous product counts as “hostilities” as if it were an armed attack.
Charlie Savage writes about national security and legal policy for The Times.
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