On September 2, President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio separately reported that a U.S. attack on a small boat off Venezuela’s coast destroyed illegal drugs and killed 11 passengers identified as members of the Tren de Aragua terrorist gang. Trump showed a video on social media displaying the boat’s fiery destruction.

For a week or so previous, eight U.S. naval vessels with 4,500 marines aboard, a nuclear-powered submarine, and F-35 stealth aircraft had been patrolling in nearby Caribbean waters.

Commentators denounced the illegality of an attack without a declaration of war. They condemned the executions of alleged drug traffickers who are not identified or subjected to criminal proceedings.

Maybe the attack never happened. La Jornada journalist Carlos Fazio argues the video offers no information as to the boat’s location, where it came from, or where it was heading. Trump and Rubio mentioned different destinations.  “[W]hy deliberately degrade the sharpness and clarity of the video to the point of rendering it useless for analysis,” Fazio asks.

Information Minister Freddy Ñáñez in Caracas claimed the video was generated by artificial intelligence and that sections of the video show differing numbers of the boat’s outboard motors and variations as to daytime and nighttime.

Analyst Vijay Prashad shows that the Tren de Aragua gang, having originated in 2012 as a prison gang in Venezuela, has committed many crimes but never narco-trafficking.  Nothing has appeared suggesting the supposed victims were part of that gang.

Pino Arlacchire, a former Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), rejects the U.S. portrayal of Venezuela as narco-trafficking giant. The Cartel de los Soles, alleged to be a drug-trafficking operation managed by Venezuela’s government, is really “a creature of Trumpian imagination.” The UNODC 2025 report, he recalls, declared Venezuela to be “a marginal player in the great theater of international drug trafficking.”

US in Charge

The context traces back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. The U.S. government instructed Europeans powers to no longer intervene in South and Central America. The United States would eventually regard the Monroe Doctrine as backing for its own interventionist and commanding role in the region.

Venezuela, with oil deposits that are the greatest in the world, has its appeal. Appealing to international law, the nation claims possession of the Essequibo district of neighboring Guyana. There, Exxon Corporation is exploiting the world’s most bountiful off-shore oil reserves. U.S. troops operate intermittently in Guyana.

The capitalist U.S. government, monitoring the political orientation of the region’s governments, looks for deviations. Venezuela’s government in the hands of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela is one of them. President Hugo Chávez, the founding leader of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, claimed to be building “socialism of the 21^st century.”

The U.S. government has provoked coups, instigated internal subversion, imposed sanctions, and actively supported Venezuela’s rightwing opposition. Reacting to widespread distress, the government of President Nicolás Maduro has compromised with business owners, negotiated with the United States, and backed away from some worker protections.

Even so, the threat of war remains. According to Politico,, U.S. officials “are proposing to shift the US military posture away from a focus on China, instead prioritizing alleged threats in Latin America and the Caribbean.”

A population’s enthusiasm for military intervention rests on dedication to a cause, for which myth-making plays a role. The banners under which the United States went to war after World War II were anti-communism first and then war on terrorism. Wars that were fought, in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and in Cuba – a different kind of war – did not turn out well.

Now comes an adjustment. The U.S. war machine would fight narco-terrorism in Venezuela and elsewhere. President Maduro, object of a $50 million bounty for his capture, is designated as narco-terrorist-in-chief.

Contradictions

Venezuela is supposedly a top drug-trafficking nation. But most of the cocaine and methamphetamine consumed in the United States and Europe flows up the Pacific coast and across Central America. Only five percent of exported cocaine passes through Venezuela, mostly from Colombia. The most prominent producing and trafficking countries are Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador, each a close U.S. ally at one time or another.

The United States, not Venezuela, dominates the current narco-trafficking system. U.S. Americans are by far the world’s champion users of illegal drugs. The United States might have mounted a well-resourced, comprehensive, and effective offensive against drug use and addiction, but did not.

The “war on drugs” announced by President Nixon in 1971 concentrated on inner city users during Reagan era – the better to oppress ethnic minorities – and, later, on drug-traffickers abroad. Beginning in 2000, U.S. Plan Colombia, the drug war’s crown jewel, represented a militarized U.S. effort costing $10 billion ostensibly to reduce that country’s cocaine production. The U.S. government used Plan Colombia to undermine FARC leftist insurgents.

According to the Harvard International Review in 2024, “[Coca] “plantations are again quickly spreading” in Colombia. The report adds that, “For decades, Latin America has remained a hub for the illicit drug market, … [which] has strengthened …  and drug production continues to increase.

Uncomfortable Truths 

Most of the profits from narco-trafficking in the Western Hemisphere remain in the United States, which encourages the importing of narcotics. A report dated March 6, 2025 estimates that the worldwide trade is “worth at least half a trillion US dollars each year” with a lot of it undoubtedly based in the United States. The authors cite a $3 billion judgment against TD bank in the United States for enabling the “laundering of millions of dollars of drug cartel money.”

One of two brothers convicted of delivering “billions of dollars worth of cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines to their US and Canadian wholesale clients” told the authors they “lost a handful of loads of drugs heading north [from Mexico]. Heading south was different: we just had the money put on tractor trailers and had it driven it across the border. We never lost a dollar.” The total “sent back to Mexico … [over a decade] was probably more than US$3.5 billion.” Imagine the amount remaining in U.S. hands.

The firepower of Mexican and Central American drug cartels rests on weapons imported from the United States under the eyes of U.S. authorities. Of guns confiscated in Mexico and across the Caribbean, 70% and 80% of them, respectively, came from the United States. Activist John Lindsay-Poland asks, “Why would we be arming the very people that we say we are fighting?”

The U.S. government itself, the CIA in particular, achieved a notable record of drug dealing:

+ Under CIA auspices, heroin was produced in and exported from the “Golden Triangle” area of Burma, Thailand, and Laos during the Vietnam War.

+ CIA-facilitated exports of crack cocaine to Los Angeles in the 1980s helped pay for the U.S. Contra war against Sandinista Nicaragua.

+ Prior to the Taliban taking power in 2000, the CIA enabled Afghanistan to be the world’s top supplier of heroin. Heroin and poppy production again flourished between 2003 and 2021, while the U.S. was in charge, and disappeared with the Taliban’s return.

Final thoughts are:

+ As with the former war on drugs, the current label of narco-terrorism represents a façade for hiding the reality of U.S. imperialism at work and, this time, the fact of growing Chinese participation in the region’s economy.

+ Together, falsification of U.S. purposes, the obscuring of who benefits from illegal drug trading, and myth-making about narcotics eradication highlight uncertainties in taking on Venezuela.

+ U.S. imperialism relies on appearances, images, posturing, and pretense in order to weaponize greed.

+ The show of war preparations against Venezuela may help decision-makers in two odd ways. It may distract unhappy citizens otherwise thinking of resistance. It reassures industrialists and militarists that war-making won’t stop soon.

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