By W.T. Whitney Jr.

September 18, 2025

 

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 had destroyed illegal drugs on board and killed 11 passengers. Trump showed a video on social media displaying the boat’s fiery destruction.

He alleged the victims were members of the Tren de Aragua drug-dealing and terrorist gang. Analyst Vijay Prashad characterizes the group as criminals rather than narco-traffickers.

For weeks, 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 summary executions and war without a declaration as both illegal. No prisoners were taken.

La Jornada journalist Carlos Fazio suggests the attack may not have happened. There was no information on the boat’s location, home port, or destination. Venezuelan officials attributed the video to artificial intelligence.

On September 12, troops from a U.S. destroyer boarded a Venezuelan tuna fishing vessel; they harassed nine crew members for eight hours, the action occurring in one of the country’s “exclusive economic zone[s].” Venezuela’ s defense minister on September 14 denounced U.S. reconnaissance and intelligence flights along the coast. The next day, Trump announced that three “confirmed narco-terrorists from Venezuela” were killed, as the U.S. attacked another small boat.

Truths from history

The military build-up and attacks trace back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. That instrument told European powers to back off from South and Central America. It would become license for U.S. interventions throughout the region.

What’s real is that the U.S. government has interests needing to be satisfied, specifically: access to Venezuela’s oil deposits that are the greatest in the world, the blocking of competition from China for resources and trade, and assuring that Venezuela’s socialist government disappears.

A major historical truth is evident. What the U.S. government does is determined by arrangements coming out of historical experience. The United States acts according to a script.

In particular, U.S. political leaders know their kind of economy always has to expand. Historically, they and leaders in other developed countries have continually sought to overcome shortages of the raw materials, fuel sources, and cheap labor they need in order to expand production and make profits. They’ve done this by plundering poor countries of the world.

It’s not easy. Working and marginalized people, at home and abroad, deprived and oppressed, rise up in opposition and, worse, do it together. This kind of tension has continued since the onset of the industrial revolution. Tensions reappeared after Venezuela’s change-oriented Bolivarian government came to power in 1999.

The stage was set. The capitalist, debt-ridden U.S. government faces internal crises, has to deal with newly-powerful rival states, and tries to adjust to a failing neoliberal system.  It lashes out.  Venezuela, with oil and with a government representing “socialism of the 21st century” – as propounded by former president Hugo Chávez – is a ready target for a U.S. imperialism bent on recovery.

It’s as if the U.S. government is once more taking the Monroe Doctrine to heart.  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.”

Fakery

Myth-making is no stranger in an era of great change. The United States seemingly does best with a ready-at-hand label to apply to enemies. The progression has been from fascists during World War II to world communism, to terrorism, and now to something called narcoterrorism.

Current Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, object of a $50 million bounty for his capture, becomes narco-terrorist-in-chief. U.S. officials say Venezuela’s government operates a drug cartel called the “Cartel de los Soles.” Pino Arlacchire, former director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) regards that entity as “a creature of Trumpian imagination.” UNODC’s 2025 report declared Venezuela to be “a marginal player in the great theater of international drug trafficking.”

Most of the cocaine (and methamphetamine) consumed in the United States and Europe flows up the Pacific coast and across Central America. A lot of cocaine goes to Europe in Ecuadorian banana boats owned by the family of Ecuador’s president.  Only five percent of cocaine arriving in the United States passes through Venezuela. The most prominent producing and trafficking countries are Colombia, Peru, and Ecuador, all close U.S. allies at one or another time.

And contradictions

The United States itself is a great facilitator of the worldwide 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 U.S. narco-networks, consumption of illegal drugs, and addiction, but of course did not.

The “war on drugs” announced by President Nixon in 1971 concentrated on inner city users during the 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. governmentapplied Plan Colombia to fighting FARC leftist insurgents.

According to the Harvard International Review in 2024, “[Coca] “plantations are again quickly spreading” in Colombia. The report is damning: despite the long U.S. drug war, “[F]or decades, Latin America has remained a hub for the illicit drug market … and drug production continues to increase.”

Uncomfortable truths

A big portion of the profits from narco-trafficking in the Western Hemisphere stay in the United States, in effect as incentive to import more. The vastness of the U.S. trade is clear from penalties imposed on U.S. banks caught laundering drug money. These include the $3 billion judgment against TD bank in 2024, $1.9 billion imposed on HSBC Bank in 2012, and, earlier, $160 million paid by Wachovia-Wells Fargo.

A convicted trafficker told an interviewer about delivering “billions of dollars worth (sic) of cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines to their US and Canadian wholesale clients.” He reported that, “Heading south, … 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.”

Weapons exported from the United States under the eyes of U.S. authorities benefits drug cartels. 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, has long dealt in drugs:

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

Anti-imperialist resistance to U.S. war on Venezuela is building, with confusion. Some left-leaning activists opposing U.S. war against Venezuela criticize perceived lapses of the Maduro government, among them compromise with business owners, backtracking on worker protections, and the attempted destruction of Venezuela’s Communist Party, despite its long support for the Bolivarian Revolution.

A joint statement from many of the world’s Communist and workers’ parties issued on September 5, and accessible here, is helpful. It condemns as an urgent matter this “new warmongering escalation of U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean area.” Establishing priority, the statement also seems to recognize that complaints against Venezuela’s government will be dealt with over time.”

 

-W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician and lives in rural Maine.