\n<\/p>\n
Last month,<\/span> 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 d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. A little while later, I understood why.<\/p>\n I\u2019d interviewed the leader of Venezuela\u2019s opposition movement, Mar\u00eda Corina Machado, a few months earlier. She\u2019d told me she would love to see a scenario remarkably similar to the one now developing. I confess that I didn\u2019t pay much attention to this idea, which at the time seemed fantastically improbable. But when the flotilla was lined up, I figured I\u2019d relisten to the recording I\u2019d made of the interview.<\/p>\n I\u2019d been speaking to Machado in the context of Venezuela\u2019s unfolding electoral drama. She had not been permitted to run against the strongman president, Nicol\u00e1s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cMaduro\u2019s days are numbered,\u201d she often said. The regime was in its \u201cterminal phase.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s Venezuela policy would be.<\/p>\n \u201cLaw enforcement,\u201d she replied. The conversation was in Spanish, but she said those words in English, as if they were an American talking point.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Machado told me that she wished the Trump administration would carry out a \u201cbig antinarcotics operation in the Caribbean,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cnarco-terror cartel\u201d: Maduro\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWe just, over the last few minutes, literally shot out a boat, a drug-carrying boat; lot of drugs in that boat,\u201d Trump told reporters. \u201cThere\u2019s more where that came from.\u201d<\/p>\n Some Venezuelan observers have speculated that the Trump administration launched this mission at least partly with Machado\u2019s 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\u2019s claims\u2014that Maduro leads Tren de Aragua, for example\u2014and embraced a Machado-like use of narco<\/em> as a prefix (\u201cnarco-boat,\u201d \u201cnarco-terrorists\u201d).<\/p>\n 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\u2019s election results and, by extension, the sovereignty of the Venezuelan people. Maduro\u2019s days are numbered, she has repeated again and again in the past few weeks.<\/p>\n The Venezuelan government\u2019s <\/span>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\u2019s drug operations reach a magnitude that would justify the deployment, as the White House recently put it, of \u201cevery element of American power\u201d?<\/p>\n Venezuela\u2019s production of cocaine is modest; of fentanyl, virtually nonexistent. President Joe Biden\u2019s State Department estimated the share of the world\u2019s cocaine traffic that passes through Venezuela at 13 percent at most. That percentage is higher for some other Latin American countries, such as Guatemala.<\/p>\n A number of high-level Venezuelan officials and military men have been investigated for drug trafficking\u2014not least Maduro\u2019s infamous \u201cnarco-nephews,\u201d 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 R\u00edsquez, the author of the book El Tren de Aragua<\/em>. 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\u2019t even a major player: \u201cYou 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\u2019s not,\u201d R\u00edsquez told me.<\/p>\n Still, within the Trump administration\u2019s 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 \u201cnatives and citizens\u201d from an enemy nation. Now the United States seems to be toying with the idea of going to war with that nation.<\/p>\n \u201cWell, you\u2019re going to find out,\u201d Trump said when a reporter asked if he\u2019s considering attacks inside of Venezuela. Puerto Rico\u2019s governor, Jenniffer Gonz\u00e1lez-Col\u00f3n, thanked the administration for recognizing the island\u2019s \u201cstrategic value\u201d in the \u201cfight against drug cartels in our hemisphere, perpetuated by narco-dictator Nicolas Maduro.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s not training,\u201d Secretary of State Pete Hegseth told Marines and sailors stationed in Puerto Rico for a counternarcotics operation.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s history is rife with examples of U.S. meddling that have ended unhappily.<\/p>\n Tom\u00e1s Straka, a history professor at Andr\u00e9s 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 Ch\u00e1vez, Maduro\u2019s predecessor, as a messiah, but they can be faulted for believing, with similar fervor, that American salvation is coming.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. A little while later, I understood why. I\u2019d interviewed the leader of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20789,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[12773,252,71,4791,261],"class_list":{"0":"post-20788","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-cheering","9":"tag-drug","10":"tag-trumps","11":"tag-venezuelans","12":"tag-war"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20788","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20788"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20788\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20788"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20788"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20788"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}