The world has been watching for weeks to see if the United States will escalate its militarized anti-drug mission in the Caribbean into a direct intervention aimed at toppling the regime of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, prompting intense debate about the wisdom and potential impacts of such an action.
The military buildup started in late August, with US warships sent to patrol international waters near Venezuela’s coast, ostensibly to disrupt drug trafficking. In September, the US military started carrying out airstrikes on small boats leaving Venezuela and Colombia – a tactic that is now being used in both the Caribbean and the Pacific.
President Donald Trump’s administration has not been clear about whether ousting Maduro is the ultimate goal, though credible media reports have indicated that top officials have seriously discussed the possibility.
When Trump was asked by the CBS 60 minutes program earlier this month whether he would go to war with Venezuela, he said: “I doubt it. I don’t think so.” But in response to whether he thought Maduro’s days as president were drawing to an end, he said: “I would say yeah. I think so, yeah.”
Some experts and analysts argue that removing Maduro by force is the only way to restore democracy in Venezuela and end the hybrid criminal state he has established, where illegal armed groups act as state proxies and organized crime networks operate within state institutions.
Others counter that intervention could make a bad situation worse, disrupting a relatively stable criminal landscape and potentially complicating the re-establishment of governance by legitimate institutions.
InSight Crime tracks the United States’ attacks on drug trafficking organizations.
The Case for Intervention
Proponents of intervention argue that Maduro’s government essentially amounts to a criminal organization that has taken over Venezuela, and nonviolent means have proven inadequate for addressing that problem.
“It basically has become a very large criminal enterprise that essentially has used the power of the state to kidnap an entire society,” said Pedro Burelli, a Venezuelan activist and consultant. “Either the kidnappers get what they want…or somebody with much more force than they have comes in and resolves it.”
The Trump administration has accused Maduro of heading the Cartel of the Suns, which it has now added to its terrorist designations list, describing is as a centrally coordinated criminal operation that supports Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel as well as Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang, both of which the US has also designated as terrorist groups.
However, the Cartel of the Suns is not a hierarchical criminal group, but rather a complex set of corruption networks through which members of the military and political actors profit from drug trafficking and other illegal activities. Rather than leading an organization, Maduro facilitates these arrangements in order to ensure the loyalty of those involved to the regime.
The Maduro government offers little support to the Sinaloa Cartel and Tren de Aragua. Mexican traffickers appear to be leaving parts of Venezuela as the government favors local criminal allies, and Venezuelan authorities have struck significant blows against Tren de Aragua over the last two years, including driving the gang out of its stronghold and base of operations, Tocorón prison.
Still, there is near-universal agreement that Maduro oversees and permits a broad spectrum of criminality in Venezuela, and that his remaining in power ensures that system will persist.
He has used alliances with criminal actors to suppress nonviolent protests and rigged elections to consolidate control. Venezuelan officials have also evaded international sanctions using cryptocurrencies and corruption.
“There are some autocracies that have an unreformable nature,” said Paola Bautista, a Venezuelan political activist and scholar. “All the other ways have been tried and have not had an effect.”
Blowback Potential
Other experts caution against escalation, saying it risks creating an open-ended, multi-front conflict involving an array of powerful non-state armed actors.
Ousting Maduro by force could create a power vacuum and open the door for his criminal allies, like the guerrillas of the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional – ELN) and violent pro-government organizations called colectivos, to deepen their existing control over important political and territorial spaces.
A complete transition to democracy would require not just defeating the Venezuelan military but also retaking control from these non-state actors. This would likely be a daunting task reminiscent of the US experience in Iraq during the 2000s and 2010s, albeit without the complexities of religious and ethnic divisions.
“My fear is that they don’t have any plan for the day after. This is all being made up as they go along,” said Phil Gunson, a Caracas-based analyst for the International Crisis Group.
Trump has suggested his administration might conduct airstrikes on land inside Venezuela against alleged drug trafficking infrastructure, similar to those being carried out in international waters. However, given Venezuela is primarily a transit country, where drugs are moved from stash points to dispatch points that shift constantly and are extremely difficult to identify without on-the-ground intelligence, it is unclear what these targets would be.
SEE ALSO: Special Series – The Deadly US Strikes on Suspected Drug Traffickers
In addition,any military operation inside Venezuela would require the US to engage directly with Venezuela’s military, even if non-state criminal groups were the ultimate target, said Geoff Ramsey, a Venezuela expert at the Atlantic Council think tank.
“The order of operations here would be to first take out Venezuela’s air defenses, which would necessitate directly engaging in conflict with Venezuela,” Ramsey said. “The escalation ladder doesn’t have as many rungs in it as we might think.”
What’s Likely to Happen
The desire to see Maduro out of power is widespread, but there is disagreement around the question of how to accomplish that goal.
Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in October, has signaled support for the Trump administration’s military deployment as a way to pressure the Maduro regime, though she has stopped short of advocating an invasion. The leader of a different opposition faction, Henrique Capriles, favors a peaceful, negotiated transition.
A recent poll showed most respondents in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico support a US military intervention in Venezuela.
But a full-scale invasion remains unlikely, given its unpopularity in the United States. A separate recent poll showed most American respondents oppose the idea, and CNN reported that the Trump administration told Congress it lacks a legal justification for military action inside Venezuela.
The US military deployment and strikes on alleged drug-carrying boats are unlikely to have any sustainable impact on drug trafficking and criminal dynamics in Venezuela. Drug traffickers are highly adaptable, and will simply change routes to avoid the strikes. Moreover, the pressure could backfire, encouraging Maduro and his criminal allies to build closer ties rather than pushing them apart as the US government makes it clear their fates are now bound together.