• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Venezuela - Background

Secretary Marco Rubio stated "Maduro is NOT the President of Venezuela and his regime is NOT the legitimate government. Maduro is the head of the Cartel de Los Soles, a narco-terror organization which has taken possession of a country. And he is under indictment for pushing drugs into the United States." A period of significant tension between the United States and Venezuela stemmed from the disputed presidential election on July 28, 2024. Credible election monitors documented a clear victory for opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez, who allegedly received more than two-thirds of the vote. However, the Nicolas Maduro regime refused to respect this outcome and subsequently arrested and abused citizens for peaceful political participation.

The U.S. classification of members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as "enemy aliens." This designation was reportedly determined by a point system where individuals need only eight points to be classified as a gang member. The criteria are described as subjective; for example, tattoos are worth four points and social media posts with gang symbols are worth two. The text notes that some alleged symbols, like sportswear from U.S. teams, are commonly used by the general public. This focus on the gang was contrasted with an August 2025 investigative series by InSight Crime, which concluded that the Tren de Aragua has been declining in power and has not been linked to "cases of large cocaine shipments... especially not in connection with the U.S. market." On 07 October 2025, President Trump ordered his special envoy Richard Grenell to halt all diplomatic outreach to Venezuela, effectively ending negotiations with President Nicolás Maduro U.S. News & World ReportAnadolu Ajansi. Trump reportedly grew frustrated with Maduro's refusal to step down voluntarily and the Venezuelan government's continued denial of involvement in drug trafficking. The negotiations, which occurred over several months, involved several key US demands and Venezuelan counter-proposals. Trump told US service members that US strikes on vessels off the coast of Venezuela had halted the flow of drugs by sea and the U.S. would now "have to start looking about the land."

A "best and final offer" (BAFO) is a negotiation term representing the last and most favorable proposal a party is willing to submit before a decision is made. It signals that further negotiation will not be undertaken – the offer may only be accepted or rejected KARRASSContractSafe. It's commonly used when one party is dealing with multiple bids or in final rounds of negotiations Best and Final Offer. In the Venezuela context, neither side appears to have formally issued a "best and final offer," but the breakdown suggests both sides had reached their limits – the US insisted on regime change while Maduro refused to negotiate his departure, even when offering substantial economic incentives.

1. The primary American demand was for Maduro to give up power voluntarily
2. Acceptance of deported Venezuelan criminals and gang members back to Venezuela
3. Release of Americans detained in Venezuela
4. Acknowledgment of Venezuela's role in drug trafficking

According to The Atlantic, Special Envoy Richard Grenell latr re-established direct contacts with the Maduro government, facilitating the release of detained Americans and cooperation on migration issues. The publication's sources claimed that Maduro sent personal messages to Trump, expressing his willingness to compromise on the condition that Washington stops calling him a "drug dealer and dictator."

Behind closed doors, Maduro made sweeping economic concessions, offering to open all existing and future oil and gold projects to American companies, grant preferential contracts to US businesses, redirect Venezuela's oil exports from China to the US, and scale back energy and mining deals with Chinese, Iranian, and Russian companies. The political impasse stemmed from the Venezuelan government's refusal to negotiate Maduro's potential exit from power, with Foreign Minister Yván Gil declaring "the president will not negotiate his departure". While Maduro was willing to offer major economic concessions to avoid military intervention, surrendering power was a non-negotiable red line. The US was offering a $50 million reward for Maduro's arrest, accusing him of links to drug trafficking and criminal groups.

Donald Trump's relationship with Venezuela had been characterized by escalating hostility since his first presidency, where he implemented a "maximum pressure" strategy against Nicolás Maduro's regime through severe economic sanctions that devastated the country's oil industry and exacerbated a humanitarian crisis, leading to the displacement of millions. Upon returning to the White House in January 2025, Trump intensified this approach, designating Venezuelan gangs like Tren de Aragua and the so-called Cartel of the Suns as foreign terrorist organizations, doubling the bounty on Maduro to $50 million for alleged narcoterrorism, and deploying U.S. naval forces to the Caribbean in late August to intercept drug shipments. This military buildup, involving guided-missile destroyers, submarines, Marines, and F-35 jets in Puerto Rico, was framed as a counter-narcotics operation to combat fentanyl and cocaine flows into the United States, but critics argue it's a pretext for regime change aimed at Venezuela's vast oil reserves.

From the U.S. perspective, the Trump administration portrayed Venezuela as a narco-state under Maduro's direct control, with officials like Rubio emphasizing that these actions are self-defense against gangs poisoning Americans with drugs, and the deployments are necessary to protect national security amid a domestic overdose epidemic. Supporters view the strikes as bold enforcement of the law, crediting Trump's first-term sanctions with isolating Maduro from allies like Russia and China, though those measures failed to topple the regime and instead worsened poverty and migration. Venezuelan opposition figures, such as María Corina Machado, have expressed cautious support for pressuring Maduro but warn against full-scale war, recalling the unsuccessful 2019 recognition of Juan Guaidó as interim president.

Secretary Rubio stated that the president “has been clear that the days of acting with impunity and having an engine shot down or a couple drugs grabbed off a boat, the – those days are over. Now it is we are going to wage combat against drug cartels that are flooding American streets and killing Americans.”

"Ascertaining the legitimacy and legality of the use of force in this case will depend on the factual answers to numerous questions. It is not clear whether the U.S. military forces deployed to the southern Caribbean tried to contact the people aboard the boat, tried to board the boat, fired warning shots, or tried to disable the engine by firing on a part of the boat where humans were not present. U.S. authorities should also address the question of whether there is any evidence that those aboard were threatening U.S. personnel in a way that would justify using lethal force in self-defense.

"If the evidence shows that the U.S. military, apparently on the orders of President Trump, engaged in the unlawful use of force that caused the deaths of 11 people in international waters, those responsible, especially at the political and military command levels, must be held accountable in the U.S. criminal justice system and under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The U.S. Congress should also require the Administration to disclose all the relevant facts.

"What we have seen so far suggests that the U.S. armed forces did something that it has never done, to our knowledge, in more than 35 years of military involvement in drug interdiction in the Caribbean Sea: an instant escalation to disproportionate lethal force against a civilian vessel without any apparent self-defense justification.

"Using lethal force on suspicion of illegal activity violates the letter and spirit of more than a century of international standards and the United States’ own regulations for maritime operations against civilian vessels in international waters. These measures include the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), Article 51 of the UN Charter, the UN Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs, the San Remo Manual on International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea, the Defense Department’s Law of War Manual, and the Joint Chiefs’ Standing Rules of Engagement and Standing Rules for the Use of Force (though key language in the counter-drug section is classified)."

The US military was authorized to shoot down Venezuelan aircraft if commanders judge them a threat, President Donald Trump has said. His warning followed reports that Venezuelan aircraft had buzzed American warships taking part in what Washington describes as an anti-drug mission near the South American country. Asked by reporters what the US would do if Venezuelan jets fly near US naval vessels again, Trump warned that “they’re going to be in trouble.” “If they do put us in a dangerous position, we’ll shoot them down,” he stressed.

Trump rejected claims by Caracas that Washington was seeking to topple the government of President Nicolas Maduro. “Well, we’re not talking about that, but we are talking about the fact that you had an election which was a very strange election,” he said. He instead framed the US military presence near Venezuela as part of a crackdown on drug trafficking. “Billions of dollars of drugs are pouring into our country from Venezuela. The prisons of Venezuela have been opened up to our country,” Trump said, adding that US forces would target boats suspected of carrying narcotics.

President Donald Trump on 14 September 2025 said "What's illegal are the drugs that were on the boat and the drugs that are being sent into our country, and the fact that 300 million people died last year from drugs. That's what's illegal."

But the estimated total number of illegal drug users worldwide was around 300 million. Reputable sources emphasize that claims of millions of drug deaths worldwide are unfounded. Drug overdoes claimed over 80,000 US lives in 2024 – more than twice as many as motor vehicle accidents and nearly three times as many as Covid-19. This wesa down frm 110,700 drug overdose deaths in 2021. In a June 2024 report citing 2019 data, the World Health Organization (WHO) attributed 600,000 deaths worldwide to psychoactive drug use. The report from the World Health Organization (WHO) highlighted that 2.6 million deaths per year were attributable to alcohol consumption.

The president justified the strikes by asserting that the United States was engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels. He was relying on the same legal authority used by the administration of former President George W Bush when it declared a war on terrorism after the September 11 attacks on the US. This includes the ability to capture and detain combatants and use lethal force to take out their leadership. Trump was also treating the suspected traffickers as if they were enemy soldiers in a traditional war. President Donald Trump on 15 October 2025 was asked " why not have the Coast Guard stopped them, which it was empowered by law to do?" to which he repied "Because we've been doing that for 30 years and it has been totally ineffective. They have faster boats. Some of these boats are seriously… I mean, they're world- class speedboats, but they're not faster than missiles. But we've been trying to do that for years. And so, much of the drugs, 25%, 30% would come in through the seas. Right now, we have, I would say none coming in through the seas. In fact, I don't know about the fishing industry. If you want to go fishing, a lot of people aren't deciding to even go fishing. We've almost totally stopped it by sea. Now, we'll stop it by land."

And asked whether he was considering strikes on land, Trump responded "I don't want to tell you exactly, but we are certainly looking at land now because we've got the sea very well under control. We've had a couple of days where there isn't a boat to be found, and I view that as a good thing, not a bad thing. But we had tremendous amounts coming in by boats, by very expensive boats. They have a lot of money. Very fast, very expensive boats that were pretty big. And the way you look at it was every boat that we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives. So, every time you see a boat and you feel badly, you say, "Wow, that's rough." It is rough, but if you lose three people and save 25,000 people… These are people that are killing our population. Every boat is saving 25,000 lives and you can see it. The boats get hit and you see that fentanyl all over the ocean. It's like floating in bags, it's all over the place and we're saving tremendous saving amounts of lives....

"When they're loaded up with drugs, they're fair game. And every one of those ships were. And they're not ships, they're boats, they're speedboats. They're extremely fast record-setting type speedboats that cost a lot of money, and they have a lot of money because they're drug sellers, but they know one thing, and they all have the same thing in common, there's drug dust. They call it drug dust. They call it fentanyl dust, all over the boat after those bombs go off and you can take along-"

Internationally, Maduro's government and allies like China and Russia decry the actions as imperialistic violations of sovereignty, with the UN and humanitarian organizations highlighting how renewed sanctions could further displace over eight million Venezuelans and disrupt global oil markets. Critics in the U.S., including Representative Ilhan Omar, who introduced a War Powers Resolution labeling the strikes unauthorized, argue they distract from domestic issues like the Epstein files or immigration raids, and risk illegal escalation without proof of the vessels' threats—some reports note the first boat was turning around when hit. Regional neighbors, including Trinidad and Tobago, express alarm over potential spillover violence in the Caribbean, while Latin American countries grapple with the migrant influx.

The volatile standoff showed no signs of abating, with Maduro's forces on high alert and Trump keeping military options open, potentially including strikes within Venezuela, though analysts doubt a full invasion due to geopolitical costs and Maduro's backing. Backchannel talks on prisoner swaps and oil deals hint at possible negotiation, but the rhetoric of "narcoterrorism" and "regime change" dominates, raising the specter of unintended conflict that could stain legacies and destabilize the hemisphere.

Donald Trump held a Bilateral Meeting With Mark Rutte of NATO - October 22, 2025: "They killed 300,000 people last year, drugs, these drugs coming in. They killed 300,000 Americans last year and that gives you legal authority.... We have a national security problem -- really, I will say this, when you look at the people we're dealing with and we know them, we know the people coming in. We know the boats. We know everything else. We're allowed to do it. It's in international waters. If we don't do it, we're going to lose hundreds of thousands of people.... We know the boat almost immediately. You know, it's pretty unusual when you see somebody with a fishing rod and five engines on the back of the boat."

Marco Rubio said : "Now you're talking about a law enforcement matter. In this particular case, there are people traveling on international waters headed towards the United States with hostilities in mind, which includes flooding our country with dangerous deadly drugs and they're going to be stopped and that's what's happening. And in the case last week, you saw there was a submarine, it was a submarine, it was a submersible. That's a drug boat all the way through. We know what these boats are. The president just said it. We track them from the very beginning. We know who's on them, who they are, where they're coming from, what they have on them."