The videos of carnage on the open seas have, by now, become almost routine: A small, fast-moving boat skips along the waves. Seconds later, it erupts into a ball of flame after munitions flying too quickly to be seen on camera strike their target. By the end of the short clip, huge clouds of smoke fill the screen. After one such air strike last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described the four people on board—who were alleged drug runners—the way the United States once depicted al-Qaeda operatives: They are, in Hegseth’s telling, “combatants,” foot soldiers in a foreign terrorist organization that is seeking to “poison our people” and who therefore must be eliminated by any means.
“These strikes will continue until the attacks on the American people are over!!!!” Hegseth wrote.
There are a few holes in the defense secretary’s account. For one thing, the boats—there have been four of them—have not been carrying enough fuel to travel from the South American coast directly to the United States. For another, the administration has not said what kind of drugs it is seeking, through the strikes, to stop from entering. But relative to some of its neighbors, Venezuela is neither a major producer nor a significant transit hub for drugs. (Fentanyl, the drug that the president said is “killing hundreds of thousands of our citizens and many very young, beautiful people,” doesn’t come through the Caribbean at all.) The U.S. has also not publicly revealed why it believes that those on board these boats are members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan prison gang and the cartel that is the ostensible target. Even some of the president’s supporters on Capitol Hill have said the legal case for military strikes seems dubious at best.
Yet White House officials have shrugged off questions about the strikes, believing the attacks have a legitimate security rationale and, importantly, are politically popular. “No one is going to mourn a murderous, drug-dealing gang member,” one told us.
Both hawkish and isolationist figures in Donald Trump’s orbit have found reasons to support the strikes. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for instance, is a hard-liner on Latin America who has advocated for the ouster of leftist strongmen, including in Cuba, Nicaragua, and, of course, Venezuela. Rubio—whose home state of Florida has a large Venezuelan population—has spoken against Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, who stole the country’s most recent election and is not recognized by the United States as the legitimate Venezuelan leader. In Rubio’s mind, perhaps, the strikes could weaken Maduro’s political and economic grip and bring about regime change.
Then there are the senior officials who see Venezuela as a means to project a tough-guy, defender-of-the-homeland image. Stephen Miller views the air strikes as an opportunity to paint immigrants as a dangerous menace, according to one of the White House officials. Vice President J. D. Vance, though often inclined toward isolationism, has pushed the necessity of defending U.S. borders. And Hegseth, who prefers to be known as the war secretary, is seeking a means of projecting military strength in a region where defense-department planners hope to reassert American primacy. Finally, there’s Trump himself, who wants to score a foreign-policy victory amid frustrations over his inability to end the war in Ukraine. One close ally of the president’s told us he was also drawn to the chance to take decisive action, as he did with June’s Iran bombings. “He can give the order and watch it explode. It’s clear-cut and simple and no American gets hurt,” that ally told us.
“The administration doesn’t see strength in deterrence but in action. This is about optics,” one former U.S. official told us. The administration posts video clips from the strikes on social media within hours of conducting them, the former official noted, an unusually fast turnaround.
Others in the administration—such as Richard Grenell, Trump’s special envoy to the regime—have favored trying to work with the Maduro government instead. But those efforts appear to be on hold for now after Trump ordered the end of diplomatic talks last week. (Grenell did not respond to a request for comment.) Administration officials have not decided whether they will try to push Maduro out, but the strikes are also a means to test what they can get away with in the region and whether Maduro has any means to respond. So far, the administration sees little downside.
“Whatever happens,” the former official said, “the administration will say they lessened the flow of drugs, no matter how slight or small or that we murdered people in international waters.”
The Paria Peninsula, on Venezuela’s eastern coast, is known for its golden-sand beaches, its forested hills, and its blue-green waters. It’s also a center of Venezuelan drug trafficking. Off its coasts, the U.S. has been hunting boats.
We talked by phone with Beatriz, who has lived in the area most of her life. The 37-year-old recalled that when she was a girl, her classmates laughed at her for not knowing that the colorful fishing boats in the harbor, known as peñeros, were in fact carrying drugs. (She asked to be identified only by her first name for fear of retribution.) The drug traffickers Beatriz knows run small operations. They might pay extortion fees to government officials, but they don’t strike her as big players in an international crime syndicate. One man she knows from her village is a young father and fisherman who has no qualms about moving cocaine instead of fish when the opportunity presents itself and the money to be made is good.
On September 2, one of those peñeros was blown up by the United States military en route to Trinidad and Tobago, which lies about seven miles offshore. Since the first strike, military camps have become ubiquitous in the area as Maduro’s regime prepares for a potential invasion.
In the past decade, a number of high-level Venezuelan officials have been convicted by American courts for trafficking cocaine to the United States—among them a Venezuelan general known as “El Pollo” and a couple of notorious relatives of Venezuela’s first lady known as the “narco-nephews.” Also in the past decade, Tren de Aragua, which engages in drug trafficking, among other activities, has expanded beyond the country’s borders and acquired a fearsome reputation.
Shortly after taking office, Trump declared Tren de Aragua to be a foreign terrorist organization that had “flooded the United States with deadly drugs, violent criminals, and vicious gangs.” In July, the president ordered the Pentagon to target certain Latin American drug cartels. By August, there were eight naval vessels—including destroyers, a cruiser, and a littoral-combat ship—operating in the Caribbean Sea. By September, the first of four boats had been struck, and 21 alleged drug traffickers have now been killed. Last week, the administration sent a confidential notice to Congress signaling its intent to carry out more strikes. The campaign could extend inside Venezuelan territorial waters or include drone strikes inside its land borders, defense officials told us.
“The President determined these cartels are non-state armed groups, designated them as terrorist organizations, and determined that their actions constitute an armed attack against the United States,” the administration wrote in the confidential notice, which we reviewed. “The President directed the Department of War to conduct operations against them pursuant to the law of armed conflict.”
But it is far from clear that the ties between Maduro’s government and Tren de Aragua are as extensive as the Trump administration has suggested, or that they exist at all. Ronna Risquez, author of the book El Tren De Aragua, told us there was “no evidence” that Maduro leads gang or drug-smuggling operations; an internal memo from the U.S. National Intelligence Council arrived at a similar conclusion. It’s also not clear that Venezuelan drug operations, centralized or otherwise, are significant enough to merit the country being singled out as a threat to American lives. Venezuela is not a major cocaine or fentanyl producer. And even though most of the world’s cocaine grows in neighboring Colombia, Venezuela is also not a major transit hub. As of 2020, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration estimated that three-quarters of South American cocaine reached the United States through the Pacific, one-sixth through Colombia’s Caribbean shore, and only one-twelfth through Venezuela’s Caribbean shore. (Of the four strikes, at least three targeted boats departed from Venezuela; a fourth may have left from Colombia.) And the drugs that do pass through Venezuela will typically also pass through other countries on their way to the United States. “A Venezuelan boat arriving all the way to the United States? To Miami? I have never seen that,” Risquez said, although she acknowledged that some boats have made it to Puerto Rico.
And yet, the idea that Maduro is a major drug lord is a key justification for the strikes. Maduro is “one of the largest narco-traffickers in the world and a threat to our national security,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said recently. She added that Maduro “uses” Tren de Aragua to “bring deadly drugs and violence” to the United States. During a Tuesday hearing on Capitol Hill, Bondi refused to give a legal justification for the strikes.
The idea that Maduro’s regime runs a drug enterprise big enough to endanger American lives is also viewed skeptically in Venezuela, and not just among Maduro apologists. “If the argument is that drug trafficking is a good reason to threaten to invade a country, you’d have to invade Mexico first,” says Jose Guerra, who worked as an economist for Venezuela’s central bank and then as an opposition lawmaker. The Venezuelan government, Guerra told us, has little incentive to engage in a risky, complex operation like drug trafficking when the country sits on the largest oil reserves in the world: “How many tons of drug would the Venezuelan government have to export to make the same amount of money it makes selling hundreds of thousands of barrels per day?” he asked us. “That’s just a tale.” Venezuela’s oil exports averaged 1.09 million barrels a day in September, the highest monthly level since February 2020. To make that kind of money selling drugs, you would probably need more than a few peñeros.
There are overlapping U.S. military missions under way in the Caribbean. Roughly 5,000 U.S. personnel, aboard approximately eight naval vessels operating in the region, are tasked with monitoring nearby boats. When the U.S. suspects one is smuggling narcotics, standard practice calls for the Coast Guard, under its law-enforcement authorities, to board it and potentially seize it and detain those on board. But sometimes their assessments are off. Last month, the Coast Guard said in a statement that its forces boarded a ship “based on reasonable suspicion of illicit drug trafficking activity” but found none on board. (Local news reports said the vessel was carrying tuna.) In fiscal year 2025, the Coast Guard told us, it seized nearly 175,000 pounds of cocaine in the Caribbean.
In addition to the Coast Guard interdictions, there are also now the deadly missions. The U.S. Navy is rotating ships in and out of the area, but Defense officials have declined to say whether the strikes are coming from ships or drone operators based inside the United States. Nor has the military said what kind of munitions it is using in the strikes. Even if the Pentagon is being quiet about details of the operation, it is being vocal about the threat it is laying down—as is the president. “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 in an address to the United Nations last month.
When the U.S. launched military campaigns against another nonstate actor, al-Qaeda, in the years after 9/11, there were questions about whether the U.S. was legally justified in conducting such strikes. The courts concluded that because the terror group had a mission to attack the U.S., the military could proceed. But Tren de Aragua’s aims appear to be driven by finances, not ideology. Earl Matthews, a Pentagon lawyer, told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee during closed session last week that the designation of Tren de Aragua as a terrorist organization, coupled with Article II of the Constitution, which delineates the president’s powers, was all the legal justification that the administration needs for the strikes. (Matthews did not respond to a request for comment.) But even Republicans balked at his description, one official familiar with the meeting told us. Declaring a group a foreign terrorist organization is typically used to allow the U.S. to target financing and other support for such groups, not to legally justify launching strikes. Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky publicly rebuked Vance on X last month after the vice president described the killing of drug traffickers as “the best use of our military.”
“What a despicable and thoughtless sentiment it is to glorify killing someone without a trial,” Paul replied. Democratic Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island told us in a statement that “every American should be alarmed that their President has decided he can wage secret wars against anyone he calls an enemy.”
Many Venezuelans, in the country and abroad, support the American military strikes, hoping that they will help push Maduro out of power. Regime opponents feel that they have exhausted all other options. Last year, opposition leader María Corina Machado was going to run against Maduro in national elections, but Maduro banned her candidacy after she garnered more than 95 percent of the primary vote. Still, her stand-in won the election with twice as many votes as Maduro, according to credible tallies from electoral observers. (The Venezuelan government refused to publish an official tally.) Maduro stayed in power and mounted a repression campaign against his critics. Machado has publicly welcomed the military strikes and frequently portrays Maduro as a drug kingpin. Maduro, she told Fox & Friends, is the “biggest threat to the national security of the United States.”
The leadership of the opposition movement rejects the notion that an American intervention would be just another example of unwelcome meddling on the part of the United States. “I know there are voices that say that this could be another Libya, another Iraq. Not at all,” David Smolansky, a close Machado aide, told us. Through the elections, Machado proved her legitimacy as opposition leader. “That makes it so different from other experiences across the world.” Smolansky wasn’t concerned that, given the history of American interventions in Latin America, an incursion might end unhappily. “The history of military incursion of the U.S. in Latin America? It has not happened for 36 years,” he told us. “The last one was in Panama, which, by the way, was successful.”
Just how it is that destroying small boats could ultimately lead to Maduro’s downfall is not entirely clear. Supporters argue that the strikes could have tens of millions of dollars of economic impact that would put a dent in Maduro’s economic clout and undermine the regime’s authority. “Lacking legitimacy, the only way Maduro stays in power is through repression and terror financed by illicit income from drug trafficking and other criminal activities,” Smolansky told us. Not everyone in the Venezuelan opposition shares the belief that U.S. meddling will be helpful. Tomas Straka, a Venezuelan historian, told us that intervention could go many different ways. Panama may have been successful for the U.S., he noted, but Haiti, in 1994, was far less so. An invasion, Straka said, “is a roulette that I’d rather not play with.”
But Straka’s perspective is not widely shared within the opposition. A contingent of Venezuelans in America, one that’s vocal on social media, is cheering on the attacks. Some are enthusiastic Trump supporters; others dislike the president and resent his treatment of Venezuelans. Some believe that Maduro is indeed a narco-dictator; others have their doubts. Whatever the case, they don’t care if “regime change” is Trump’s goal; they just hope it will be the result.
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