Operation Venezuela: Why the US Drug War Explanation Doesn’t Add Up When military buildups wear the mask of drug enforcement
by Michael Lamonaca, 1 December 2025
When the US deploys 15,000 troops and its largest aircraft carrier to threaten a sovereign nation’s airspace, the stated reason matters. President Trump says Venezuelan airspace should be considered “closed” because of drug trafficking. His administration designated President Maduro’s government as leadership of the “Cartel of the Suns,” a narco-terrorist organization, giving US agencies broader powers to target and dismantle it. US forces have already killed more than 80 people in strikes on boats allegedly carrying drugs. But here’s what doesn’t fit: the US has provided no evidence that those boats carried narcotics. Most American fentanyl enters through Mexico, not Venezuela. And the military deployment—the largest in the Caribbean since the Panama invasion—vastly exceeds what drug interdiction requires. Venezuela’s foreign ministry calls it an attempted coup and appeals to the UN. The US calls it counternarcotics enforcement. The truth likely sits in the gap between those narratives, where military buildups wear the mask of drug enforcement while pursuing objectives that have nothing to do with cocaine or fentanyl.
The architecture of this confrontation reveals objectives far beyond interdiction. The USS Gerald Ford, the world’s most advanced aircraft carrier, now operates within striking distance of Venezuela’s coast. Fifteen thousand American troops have been positioned throughout the Caribbean theater. The US Federal Aviation Administration issued warnings about heightened military activity around Venezuelan airspace, prompting six major international airlines to suspend service after Venezuela banned them for refusing to resume flights. Trump’s Truth Social declaration addressing “Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers” collapsed the distinction between civilian commerce and criminal activity, transforming every flight path into a potential tactical consideration. This isn’t the infrastructure of drug interdiction—coast guard cutters and DEA operations handle that mission profile. This is the infrastructure of regime pressure, designed to isolate, intimidate, and ultimately destabilize a government Washington has spent years trying to remove.
The scale mismatch between means and stated ends becomes more apparent when examined against actual drug trafficking patterns. The overwhelming majority of fentanyl entering the United States comes through Mexican border crossings, hidden in commercial vehicles and smuggled by land-based networks. Venezuela’s geographic position makes it a poor candidate for major drug transit to North America—the currents, distances, and interdiction risks favor Central American and Mexican routes. Yet the Trump administration has assembled the largest military force in the Caribbean since the 1989 Panama invasion, justified entirely by the Venezuelan drug threat. US forces have conducted at least 21 strikes on boats in Venezuelan waters, killing more than 80 people. The Pentagon has not released evidence that any of these vessels carried narcotics. No drug seizures have been publicized. No arrests have been announced. The boats were destroyed, the occupants killed, and the official narrative simply asserts they were drug traffickers. The absence of proof doesn’t mean the boats were innocent—but it does mean the American public is being asked to accept extrajudicial killings in foreign waters based solely on executive branch assertions.
The human dimension of this operation exists in fragments and official silences. Families in Venezuelan coastal communities have lost fathers, brothers, and sons in these strikes, with no legal recourse and no independent verification of what their relatives were doing when American missiles found them. Airline executives face impossible choices between violating Venezuelan sovereignty by ignoring flight bans or losing access to South American markets by complying with US pressure. President Nicolás Maduro oscillates between defiant rhetoric—calling Trump’s airspace declaration a “colonialist threat” and appealing to the United Nations—and the practical reality that his government cannot defend its airspace against American military power. Diosdado Cabello, Venezuela’s interior minister and alleged leader of the Cartel of the Suns, has called the drug cartel designation an “invention,” while the US State Department insists the organization has “corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary.” Ordinary Venezuelans, already suffering under economic collapse and hyperinflation, now face additional isolation as international airlines withdraw and the specter of armed conflict grows. The tragedy of this human layer is that regardless of which government is telling the truth about drug trafficking, civilians bear the costs of escalation.
History offers uncomfortable precedents for military operations justified by drug enforcement that masked broader regime change objectives. The 1989 US invasion of Panama was officially launched to arrest Manuel Noriega on drug trafficking charges, but the operation’s scale—27,000 troops, 300 civilian casualties—suggested objectives beyond law enforcement. Noriega had been a CIA asset throughout the 1980s; his usefulness expired as Cold War priorities shifted, and drug charges became the legal framework for his removal. Similarly, the US war on drugs in Colombia during the 1990s and 2000s blurred the lines between counternarcotics operations and counterinsurgency against leftist guerrillas, with billions in military aid flowing under the banner of Plan Colombia while the actual strategic goal was weakening the FARC. The pattern repeats: drug enforcement provides domestic political justification and international legal cover for military operations whose actual purpose is geopolitical realignment. Venezuela fits this template precisely—a hostile government sitting on the world’s largest proven oil reserves, aligned with Russia and China, in a region Washington considers its strategic backyard.
The competing narratives about Operation Southern Spear reveal how different actors interpret the same military facts through entirely different frameworks. The Trump administration presents this as urgent counternarcotics enforcement, arguing that the Cartel of the Suns operates as a state-sponsored drug trafficking enterprise that threatens American communities with fentanyl and cocaine. The designation of this alleged cartel as a foreign terrorist organization legally authorizes expanded military action, asset seizures, and sanctions against individuals accused of membership. From this perspective, the carrier group and troop deployment represent appropriate force for dismantling a narco-state. Venezuela’s government, conversely, frames the entire operation as naked imperialism—an attempt to overthrow Maduro under the pretext of drug enforcement, seize control of Venezuelan oil resources, and install a compliant government in Caracas. The foreign ministry’s appeal to the United Nations and condemnation of “extravagant, illegal and unjustified aggression” positions Venezuela as a victim of American power projection. International observers occupy positions between these poles: some Latin American governments quietly support regime change but publicly criticize military methods; European allies express concern about unilateral action; Russia and China predictably back Venezuela while pursuing their own regional interests. The absence of neutral verification means every observer defaults to their prior geopolitical alignment.
The verification challenge at the heart of this crisis exposes the fundamental problem of modern information warfare. The US has not publicly released evidence that the boats destroyed in Caribbean strikes were carrying drugs, nor has it allowed independent investigation of the claimed cartel infrastructure within the Venezuelan government. The designation of the Cartel of the Suns as a terrorist organization relies on classified intelligence that cannot be scrutinized by journalists, human rights organizations, or international legal bodies. Venezuela, for its part, has every incentive to lie about drug trafficking involvement and has a documented history of corruption and authoritarian governance that makes its denials less credible. This creates an epistemological dead end: Americans cannot independently verify their government’s claims, Venezuelans cannot independently refute them, and international observers lack access to the evidence that would adjudicate the dispute. In the absence of verifiable facts, the conflict becomes entirely narrative-driven—each side tells a story that reinforces existing beliefs, and no amount of evidence could bridge the gap because the evidence remains classified or non-existent. This is the perfect environment for military escalation justified by claims that cannot be proven false.
The consequences of this operation extend far beyond the immediate Venezuela crisis. If the US can unilaterally declare another nation’s airspace closed, backed by military force but without legal authority or international consensus, then airspace sovereignty becomes conditional on American approval. Airlines face an impossible precedent: ignore sovereign nations’ flight permissions and defer to US military declarations, or risk being labeled accessories to terrorism. Regional powers watch closely—if military pressure disguised as drug enforcement succeeds in Venezuela, the model becomes replicable anywhere Washington identifies a hostile government and a legal justification. The economic isolation intensifies Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis, creating additional refugee flows into Colombia and Brazil that destabilize neighboring countries already struggling with migration. The alignment of Venezuela with Russia and China deepens, potentially leading to permanent foreign military bases in the Caribbean—exactly the outcome American strategists claim to be preventing. And the domestic precedent in the United States normalizes extrajudicial killings abroad based on executive assertions, with no evidence requirement and no congressional oversight. These second-order effects compound over time, gradually eroding the international legal framework that prevents powerful nations from simply declaring their military preferences as operational reality.
When military deployments vastly exceed the stated mission requirements, and when evidence for that mission remains perpetually classified, power reveals itself in its rawest form—not law, not international consensus, but the simple fact of carrier groups and 15,000 troops making sovereignty negotiable.
Tags: Geopolitics, Venezuela, US Foreign Policy, Drug War, Military Intervention, Regime Change, International Law, Caribbean Security, Trump Administration