Donald Trump boasted striking small boats off Venezuela’s Caribbean coast to “blow the cartel terrorists the hell out of the water.” Claiming destruction of enough drugs to kill 25,000, he called the extrajudicial murders “an act of kindness.” Then he ominously hinted at a US land invasion of Venezuela now that the marine route for drugs had been obliterated.
Mythical “Cartel de los Soles”
The Miami Herald described the “precision strike” as targeting the Tren de Aragua (TdA) criminal organization. Then, in the very next sentence, the newspaper lauded the strike at the “heart of Venezuela’s Cartel de los Soles,” as if the two entities were one in the same. The rest of the article addressed the Cartel de los Soles, forgetting that it was TdA that had supposedly been blown out of the water.
The criminal network, we are told, had been “embedded within [Venezuelan President] Nicolás Maduro’s regime and accused of moving massive quantities of cocaine overseas.”
Trump sees no need to back his claims. His fourth estate stenographer based its investigative reporting on unidentified “sources with knowledge of the situation.” The Herald revealed that their three anonymous informants knew all about the “‘Caribbean Route’ — long one of the busiest corridors for speedboats ferrying cocaine to Europe and the United States.”
The Miami-based newspaper claimed, without presenting evidence, that “inside Venezuela, authorities have turned to…extortion of businesses.” But who needs evidence when the US Justice Department had indicted the Venezuelan political leadership as a “narco-terrorist enterprise” in 2020? Further, Washington placed a $50 million bounty on Maduro this August. If that is not proof of culpability, nothing is.
Regarding the Cartel de los Soles, the Herald allowed that “Maduro has denied the accusations.” And so has President Gustavo Petro in neighboring Colombia. He observed that it “does not exist; it is a fictitious excuse used by the extreme right to overthrow governments that do not obey them.”
Recently retired head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Pino Arlacchi, pronounced the cartel “a product of Trump’s imagination… useful for justifying sanctions, blockades and threats of military intervention against a country which, incidentally, sits on one of the planet’s largest oil reserves.” Venezuelan analyst Clodovaldo Hernández described the cartel and its alleged connection to Maduro as “nothing more than a reheated dish that was never edible.”
False narrative on drugs in the Caribbean
Casting doubt on Trump’s avowal that the boats were carrying “fentanyl mostly,” a congressional CRS report reported that Mexico is the main source of illicit fentanyl entering the US. PolitiFact also found that most fentanyl comes from Mexico. And the State Department had hitherto mainly described land/over-the-border routes for fentanyl.
According to reports from the United Nations, the European Union, and the US Drug Enforcement Agency, Venezuela is essentially free of drug production and processing – no coca, no marijuana, and certainly no fentanyl. The authoritative UN 2025 World Drug Report identifies Colombia and secondarily Peru and Ecuador as the major coca growers and/or cocaine producers.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of the cocaine traffic is from the Pacific, not from Venezuela’s Caribbean coast, according to the US National Drug Threat Assessment. The world’s leading cocaine exporter is Ecuador, using banana boats owned by the family of Trump’s ally and right-wing president of the country, Daniel Naboa.
The war on “terrorism”
The Herald marveled how Trump dispatched an armada of warships – destroyers and a nuclear submarine – plus F-35 stealth jets and 4,500 troops for drug interdiction. In contrast, the knowledgeable military press, such as the US Army-funded Stars and Stripes, skeptically described the deployment as “bringing a howitzer to a knife fight.”
In fact, drug interdiction is a ruse for Washington’s goal of regime-change in Venezuela, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
US administrations have steadily merged the war on drugs with the war on terror, framing Latin American drug trafficking as a national security threat to justify military operations. George W. Bush rebranded Plan Colombia as counter-terrorism, and Barack Obama increased the military buildup.
This laid the present groundwork for Trump, who tied migration to terrorism and cast Venezuelan refugees as a criminal invasion. The president labeled Venezuelan migrants as terrorists to expand executive authority to carry out naval deployments, extrajudicial strikes, and mass deportations. And he weaponized the human rights discourse to criminalize migrants.
Further, Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, designated drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and directed the Pentagon to prepare options for military force against cartels. However, conflating “organized crime/drug cartel” with “terrorism/wartime enemy” is legally and conceptually problematic.
Such measures not only violate international norms but also amplify a narco-terror narrative. They falsely link the Venezuelan government to major drug trafficking while promoting domestic support for intervention in Venezuela.
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