President Trump’s plans for Venezuela have been a slow-building mystery, but the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, is feeling the heat.
The U.S. military has deployed warships, surveillance planes and an attack submarine to the Caribbean. It has attacked boats from Venezuela that it has claimed, without evidence, were smuggling drugs, killing 17 people. The administration calls Maduro a cartel leader and a “fugitive of American justice.” Some current and former U.S. officials contend that the unstated goal is to force him from power.
In other words, regime change.
It sounds like the kind of foreign conflict Trump once campaigned against. But my colleague Julie Turkewitz, who just spent a week in Venezuela and has years of experience reporting on the region, told me that Trump might not be thinking about the country in those terms. (You can watch our conversation in full here.)
The question that could determine Maduro’s fate is whether the Trump administration sees a regime change effort in Venezuela as the kind of “foreign war” the president has pledged to avoid, or as an operation to protect America’s interests in its own backyard.
‘You turn Venezuela into Haiti’
There are plenty of Venezuelans who would be happy to see Maduro go. He has been accused of major human rights violations, including torture and forced disappearances. He lost the 2024 election, according to independent vote monitors, and held onto power anyway. In recent weeks, one of Venezuela’s opposition leaders, María Corina Machado, has said she would welcome the U.S. military’s help to remove him from office.
But during Julie’s time in Venezuela, she spoke to many people who didn’t feel the same way. In a part of the world where the U.S. has a long history of military intervention and support for dictatorships, there is a visceral rejection of the idea of American-imposed change.
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The post Venezuela, America and the Specter of Regime Change appeared first on New York Times.
