US Threats to Venezuela Are About Power, Not Drugs

Three decades after the US invaded Panama, Washington is again amassing its largest military presence in the Caribbean. Aircraft carriers, stealth jets, and thousands of troops are being deployed in waters ringing Venezuela. The official pretext is the “war on drugs.” Yet the facts do not align with the rhetoric.

Washington claims its maritime attacks have stopped “85%” of drugs headed to the US. But the Drug Enforcement Administration’s own data tells another story: Most US-bound cocaine transits not through Venezuela, but through the Pacific and across the Mexican land border, usually smuggled by US citizens. Fentanyl—the drug repeatedly invoked by President Donald Trump—is not produced in Venezuela at all. South America neither manufactures nor consumes it at scale.

Despite this, more than 20 US strikes on small vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific since September have killed at least 83 people—mostly fishermen, according to regional governments. No evidence has been publicly presented that these boats carried narcotics. Independent human rights experts have condemned the campaign as a series of extrajudicial killings

Why, then, is Venezuela suddenly the target of this intensified pressure?

The region does not need another invasion disguised as war on drugs. It needs diplomacy and respect for sovereign political processes.

What is unfolding around Venezuela today is simply the latest iteration of a much older story. The United States is at it again. It is a familiar page out of its old playbook. And once again, the victims are not unfamiliar. Latin America has long served as the Empire’s preferred playground, where Washington has repeatedly engineered, enabled the toppling of democratically elected governments under the guise of protecting freedom, fighting communism, or now, defending democracy.

From the ouster of Guatemala’s Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 to the CIA-backed overthrow of Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973, the region bears a long scar map of US interference. Washington supported or installed right-wing military dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala—regimes that oversaw repression, disappearances, and mass killings. It funded and trained violent non-state actors such as the Contras in Nicaragua, whose campaign against the Sandinista government unleashed terror on rural communities.

Trump’s latest push for military action and regime change in Venezuela is a reaffirmation of the Monroe Doctrine—the 19th-century declaration that European powers must stay out of the Western Hemisphere because it belongs in the United States’ “sphere of interest.” Beneath its diplomatic phrasing lies a consistent message: Latin America is not sovereign land but a strategic backyard of the United States.

Venezuela offers a stage to counter the expanding presence of China, Russia, and Iran in the Western Hemisphere. A recent CSIS report shows nearly 100 Chinese military exchanges across Latin America and the Caribbean between 2022 and 2025, while Russia maintains security cooperation with governments such as Nicaragua and Venezuela. For Washington, projecting force in the region becomes a symbolic reaffirmation of the Monroe Doctrine: This hemisphere remains “ours.”

For five decades, the “war on drugs” has consumed over a $1 trillion, cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and utterly failed on its own terms. Cocaine production in Colombia is at historic highs. Mexico has lost more than 180,000 people to drug-related violence since 2018. And drug use in the United States has only increased. If anything, cartels have become more powerful, more militarized, and more deeply embedded in local economies. If the strategy hasn’t worked after 50 years, it won’t suddenly begin to work through missile strikes on fishing boats.

Even if one objects to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s authoritarianism, US military intervention has never delivered democracy or stability in Latin America. But even so, the United States has no right—moral, legal, or historical—to tinker yet again with regime change in the region already weighed down by economic contraction, inflation, and widening inequality. Venezuela in particular has suffered one of the deepest humanitarian crises outside war zones—shortages of food, medicine, water, and basic public services. Millions have fled. Any military escalation risks deepening the suffering of ordinary people while offering nothing meaningful in return.

Trump’s escalating posture toward Venezuela is not about drugs or democracy. And it is certainly not about humanitarian concern. It is about power. But if history is any guide, military intervention and regime change operations in Latin America have only ever worsened instability, strengthened authoritarianism, and led to more violence and displacement.

The region does not need another invasion disguised as war on drugs. It needs diplomacy and respect for sovereign political processes. Anything else is simply the empire repeating itself.