In the past couple of weeks, the U.S. has sent waves of military ships and planes to the international waters on the edge of Venezuela in a mission to stanch the flow of drugs into the U.S. by Venezuelan drug cartels. Those assets include three Aegis guided-missile destroyers, several P-8 spy planes and at least one nuclear-powered fast attack submarine.
On September 2, a missile fired by either an attack helicopter or an MQ-9 Reaper drone hit and destroyed a “go-fast” drug-running speed boat. The strike was carried out on President Donald Trump’s orders. Later that morning, Trump announced that the boat was being operated in international waters by the Venezuelan drug cartel Tren de Aragua (TDA). He said that “The strike resulted in 11 terrorists killed in action.”
The justification for the fatal attack was a directive Trump signed at the beginning of August ordering the use of military force, instead of law enforcement, to fight drug cartels in Latin America. That directive opened the door for military operations against Venezuela. According to one U.S. official, the American naval assets can be used “as a launching pad for targeted strikes if a decision is made.”
That directive transformed U.S. foreign policy on Venezuela into a provocative and dangerous posture. Trump had previously taken the unprecedented step of designating several drug cartels, including Venezuela’s Cartel de los Soles and TDA, as foreign terrorist organizations. Because the State Department posits that those organizations constitute “a national-security threat beyond that posed by traditional organized crime,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio argues that this allows the U.S. “to use other elements of American power, intelligence agencies, the Department of Defense, whatever, to target these groups.”
What’s worse is that the Trump administration asserts that Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro is the head of the Cartel de los Soles. On July 27, Rubio said that “Maduro is not the President of Venezuela and his regime is not the legitimate government… Maduro is the leader of the designated narco-terrorist organization Cartel de Los Soles.” Trump’s Truth Social post on the morning of the attack on the speed boat said that the boat was being operated by a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, operating under the control of Nicolas Maduro. Those two claims put Venezuela and its president in the crosshairs of the U.S. military, allowing the dangerous possibilities of military confrontation and regime change.
The only problem with the U.S. case is that it is a fabrication. The argument rests on three charges. It asserts that Venezuela is a narco-state that produces drugs and facilitates their flow into the United States. It is not. It asserts that Maduro is the “kingpin of [that] narcostate.” He is not. And it asserts that the terrorist designation makes military action legal. It does not.
Miguel Tinker Salas, professor of Latin American history at Pomona College and one of the world’s leading experts on Venezuelan history and politics, told The American Conservative that “there is no evidence that Venezuela is a narco-state.” Pino Arlacchi, former Executive Director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), says that in all the times he had to travel to South America, he never had to travel to Venezuela, because there was no need. He says that “Trump’s narrative of a ‘narco-state’ in Venezuela” is rendered a “geopolitically motivated slander” by the reality that the “Venezuelan government’s collaboration in the fight against drug trafficking was among the best in South America.”
As evidence, Arlacchi enters the 2025 UNODC World Drug Report that “only briefly mentions Venezuela, stating that a small amount of Colombian drug production passes through the country en route to the United States and Europe.” According to the UN, Venezuela “has consolidated its status as a territory free from the cultivation of coca leaves, cannabis and similar crops.” The report says that “[o]nly 5% of Colombian drugs transit through Venezuela.”
Arlacchi says that the UN report “confirms the findings of the previous 30 annual reports, which did not address Venezuelan drug trafficking because it does not exist.” The UNODC report, Arlacchi says, “is crystal clear and should embarrass those who have demonized Venezuela through rhetoric.” Its findings are “the opposite of the narrative peddled by the Trump administration.” He adds that the EU’s European Drug Report 2025 corroborates the UN report: it “does not mention Venezuela even once as a corridor for the international drug trade.”
The case against Maduro as the leader of the Venezuelan drug cartels is no stronger. A “sense of the community” memorandum dated April 7, 2025 that puts together the findings of the 18 agencies in the U.S. intelligence community has been released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It directly contradicts the Trump administration’s claim that Maduro is the leader of TDA.
The memorandum clearly states that “the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.” It states that the intelligence community “has not observed the regime directing TDA.”
Making the American case against the Maduro government even less credible, the memorandum finds that “Venezuelan intelligence, military, and police services view TDA as a security threat and operate against it in ways that make it highly unlikely the two sides would cooperate in a strategic or consistent way.” The Venezuelan National Guard has arrested TDA members and “Venezuelan security forces have periodically engaged in armed confrontations with TDA.”
But even if Venezuela was a narco-state headed by an illegitimate leader who was the kingpin of a drug cartel, that would not lay the legal ground for military action, coups, or firing missiles at speed boats in international waters.
The U.S. did not employ law enforcement, as is traditional for the U.S. and other countries, by having the National Guard interdict the boat and arrest the suspected drug smugglers. They blew it out of the water and killed all 11 people on board. The 11 people, if they were affiliated with the drug cartels, were likely low-level drug runners. The missile strike seems to have been an extrajudicial killing of suspects who were neither charged nor tried. “What will stop them,” Rubio said at a press conference, “is when we blow up and get rid of them.”
U.S. defense officials have not yet said what legal authority they had to destroy the boat and kill its crew. Designating “Tren de Aragua as a ‘foreign terrorist organization’ does not itself provide the authority for using military force,” according to Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and specialist in the law of war. It “is not a military organization in the same way that ISIS or Al Qaeda or Al Shabab is.”
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“The fact that US officials describe the individuals killed by the US strike as narco-terrorists does not transform them into lawful military targets,” Professor Michael Becker of Trinity College Dublin told BBC Verify. “The US is not engaged in an armed conflict with Venezuela or the Tren de Aragua criminal organization.” The attack on the boat, Becker says, “stretches the meaning of the term beyond its breaking point”.
American military action in Venezuela has created a dangerous situation. Miguel Tinker Salas told TAC that the Venezuelan government “interprets U.S. action as part of an effort at regime change.” A Trump administration official familiar with policy discussions on the approach to Venezuela told Axios that, though the military build up is “about narco-terrorism… if Maduro winds up no longer in power, no one will be crying.” Another, by comparing it to the American operation against Panama’s Manuel Noriega in 1989, implied that a coup was higher on the agenda.
The Trump administration has created what Maduro has called “the greatest threat that has been seen on our continent in the last 100 years.” The case for that risk rests on very leaky intelligence and legal ground.
