The Trump administration is negotiating an agreement with Venezuela that would lay the foundation for a potential long-term U.S. military presence in the country, U.S. officials said.
The talks could open the door to a remarkable and perhaps risky new stage in the U.S. relationship with Venezuela, as the two former adversaries attempt to move toward military cooperation.
Venezuela’s top officials have become subservient to President Trump since U.S. troops killed scores of people in a nighttime assault on Venezuela in January and took Nicolás Maduro, the country’s leader, to a prison in New York.
In a speech in Washington on Monday, Mr. Trump referred to “our conquest of Venezuela.”
The negotiations are the latest manifestation of the U.S. government’s increasingly militarized policies in Latin America. Mr. Trump and his top aides have ordered troops to carry out operations across the region, including joint actions with forces in Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela.
The U.S. military has also carried out scores of lethal strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific that many legal experts say are extrajudicial killings.
The Trump administration has forged closer security ties with many of the region’s right-wing governments and has troops and military assets at bases across Central and South America.
Venezuela’s new authoritarian leader, Delcy Rodríguez, is an ally of Mr. Maduro and has a history of criticizing the United States, including its military. But since Mr. Maduro’s ouster, she has worked closely with Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
The State Department under Mr. Rubio is leading the talks on the military pact, known as a status of forces agreement, or SOFA, said the U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy.
Any details of a long-term U.S. troop presence in Venezuela, including numbers and locations, would be worked out in future agreements.
The State Department said in a statement that it has negotiated status of forces agreements with more than 100 countries. The United States maintains tens of thousands of troops on bases in some of them but only a few advisers or units in others.
The pacts, it said, “promote defense cooperation by providing a clear, predictable legal framework for U.S. forces to work on mutually agreed activities with our security partners, such as ship visits, training, exercises and humanitarian assistance.”
The Embassy of Venezuela in Washington did not reply to a request for comment.
It is extraordinary for the American government to try to reach such an arrangement with Venezuela, which recently considered the United States an enemy and which had troops killed in the U.S. assault in January.
The populist anti-American ideology in Venezuela known as Chavismo still has support among 10 to 20 percent of citizens, including in the military and security agencies, experts say. They could become vocal opponents to the negotiations.
Even outside of those ideologues, many Venezuelans bristle at what they call a new form of Western colonialism, with Mr. Trump’s boasting of taking the country’s oil. The sight of American troops in the country could fuel their anger.
State Department officials gave some congressional aides a formal briefing on the imminent negotiations with Venezuela in late October.
On Monday, Mr. Rubio met with the new foreign minister of Venezuela, Oliver Blanco, in Washington. They discussed reconciliation talks among the country’s political factions, the possibility of future elections and the potential release of political prisoners, the State Department said. Its summary of the meeting did not mention negotiations over a military agreement.
After the deadly U.S. operation on Jan. 3 in which Mr. Maduro was seized, the Pentagon said it did not have a military presence in Venezuela. When a series of devastating earthquakes hit Venezuela in June, the U.S. Southern Command sent about 2,000 troops into and around Venezuela, said the commander in charge, Gen. Francis L. Donovan. Those who entered the country have since left.
Venezuela has a coast along the Caribbean and land borders with Colombia, Brazil and Guyana, making it well suited as a regional base of operations.
The U.S. military and other American agencies are conducting operations in Colombia to try to halt drug trafficking. Smugglers move drugs from Colombia to Venezuela and then mainly to Europe.
In June, Southern Command carried out an airstrike in Venezuela that killed Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, a founder of Tren de Aragua, a criminal organization in Venezuela that the Trump administration aims to crush, officials from both countries said. The C.I.A. provided intelligence, and Venezuelan forces were involved in the operation, they said.
One question is whether the United States intends to set up and maintain American military bases in Venezuela or put troops on Venezuelan bases.
A senior State Department official said in Caracas that the United States expected to expand its security cooperation with Venezuela but asserted that any serious discussion of setting up bases was “way, way down the road.” He said there were no current talks about bases with the Venezuelan government.
The U.S. Embassy in Caracas, which recently resumed operations after being shut down for seven years, has one full-time military attaché and a handful of Marines, the official said.
The Pentagon and Southern Command’s efforts to bolster military ties in South America have focused on Ecuador and Colombia so far.
A former U.S. official who worked on military cooperation in Latin America said there were challenges to establishing a U.S. troop presence in Venezuela even if officials successfully negotiated an agreement.
One issue is the country’s shoddy infrastructure, including at the U.S. Embassy, he said. Another is the fact that the U.S. military has not engaged with Venezuelan forces in nearly a decade, so it would take some time to forge a working relationship.
The talks with Venezuela on a military agreement come at a delicate political moment because of a debate in Washington and Caracas on a timeline for elections and discussions on who might be Venezuela’s next leader.
It is the administration of Ms. Rodríguez that negotiates diplomatic agreements with the State Department. Mr. Trump has given her his full-throated support and has said Venezuela is not ready for elections.
Mr. Rubio has been nudging along political discussions within Venezuela that are supposedly aimed at making structural changes needed for fair elections. But neither he nor any Venezuelan official has given concrete dates for local or national elections.
The two governments are coming under increasing pressure to set dates, though. The most prominent Venezuelan opposition leader, María Corina Machado, who has called for presidential elections by July, made a surprise return to her country in late October after being in exile for 10 months.
She made a risky, secret departure in December to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway but found it impossible to travel to Venezuela earlier this year because the Trump administration had made it clear to foreign officials that it did not endorse her return, U.S. officials said.
Ms. Machado, a conservative politician, is the most viable challenger to Ms. Rodríguez for the presidency. She has criticized an oil deal that Mr. Trump and Mr. Rubio reached last year with Venezuela — and denounced Alejandro Betancourt, the Venezuelan oilman at the center of that deal — but has not said anything about future U.S. military involvement in Venezuela.
She had supported the U.S. military’s actions in Mr. Trump’s earlier pressure campaign against Mr. Maduro.
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.
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