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venezuela
Trump Admin Reportedly OKs CIA Action in Venezuela Amid Growing Alarm Over Bombed Boats
The reporting came as rights groups sought the legal memo on the president's deadly strikes on alleged drug-running boats in the Caribbean.
Oct 15, 2025
As outrage over US President Donald Trump's deadly boat bombings mounts, The New York Times reported Wednesday that his administration secretly authorized the Central Intelligence Agency "to carry out lethal operations in Venezuela and conduct a range of operations in the Caribbean," with the ultimate aim of ousting the country's leader, Nicolás Maduro.
"The agency would be able to take covert action against Mr. Maduro or his government either unilaterally or in conjunction with a larger military operation," according to the Times, which cited unnamed US officials. "It is not known whether the CIA is planning any operations in Venezuela or if the authorities are meant as a contingency."
"But the development comes as the US military is planning its own possible escalation, drawing up options for President Trump to consider, including strikes inside Venezuela," the newspaper noted. The administration's Venezuela strategy was "developed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, with help from John Ratcliffe, the CIA director."
The White House and CIA declined to comment on record, though some observers speculated it was "an authorized leak." The reporting comes as Democrats in Congress, human rights groups, and legal scholars sound the alarm of Trump's five known strikes on boats he claims were smuggling drugs, which have killed at least 27 people.
Critics highlighted the United States' long history of covert action in Latin America, as well as how the reported CIA authorization contrasts with Trump's so-called "America First" claims.
"This is absolutely insane," said Tommy Vietor, a former Obama administration official who went on to co-found Crooked Media. "America First was not sold as CIA regime change operations in Venezuela."
Critics also noted Trump's mission to secure the Nobel Peace Prize; this year, it went to María Corina Machado, a right-wing Venezuelan who dedicated the award to not only the people in her country, but also the US president.
"Now that Trump has delegated his preposterous politicking for a Nobel Peace Prize to sycophants, he can finally get around to declaring unilateral war on Venezuela, a war crime, as he murders Colombian civilians at sea, another war crime, and endorses collective punishment in Gaza, another war crime," journalist Seth Abramson said Wednesday.
As Senate Democrats last week unsuccessfully fought to stop Trump's boat strikes of the Venezuelan coast, Colombian President Gustavo Petro said on social media that one of the bombed vessels appeared to be carrying citizens of his country.
"A new war zone has opened: the Caribbean," he said at the time. "Evidence shows that the last boat bombed was Colombian, with Colombian citizens inside. I hope their families come forward and file complaints. There isn't a war against smuggling; it's a war for oil, and the world must stop it. The aggression is against all of Latin America and the Caribbean."
The Trump administration recently claimed in a confidential notice to Congress intended to justify the deadly bombings that the president decided drug cartels "are nonstate armed groups, designated them as terrorist organizations, and determined that their actions constitute an armed attack against the United States."
While that notice leaked to the press, the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) on Wednesday filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking the Office of Legal Counsel's guidance and other related documents regarding the strikes.
"All available evidence suggests that President Trump's lethal strikes in the Caribbean constitute murder, pure and simple," said Jeffrey Stein, staff attorney with the ACLU's National Security Project. "The public deserves to know how our government is justifying these attacks as lawful, and, given the stakes, immediate public scrutiny of its apparently radical theories is imperative."
CCR legal director Baher Azmy stressed that "in a constitutional system, no president can arbitrarily choose to assassinate individuals from the sky based on his whim or say-so."
"The Trump administration is taking its indiscriminate pattern of lawlessness to a lethal level," Azmy added. "The public understanding of any rationale supporting such unprecedented and shocking conduct is essential for transparency and accountability."
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'These Are Murders': Trump Condemned After Bombing Yet Another Boat Off Venezuelan Coast
"That's 27 lives taken without even a semblance of a legal justification under domestic or international law," said one critic of the boat strikes.
Oct 14, 2025
President Donald Trump, who in recent days has been lobbying to receive a Nobel Peace Prize, announced on Tuesday afternoon that he had ordered a lethal US military strike against yet another boat off the coast of Venezuela.
In a post on his Truth Social network, Trump said that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Tuesday morning "ordered a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel affiliated with a Designated Terrorist Organization (DTO) conducting narcotrafficking."
Trump then claimed that "intelligence" had "confirmed" that the boat was engaged in illegal drug trafficking, although he provided no evidence to back up this claim.
Six passengers aboard the boat were killed in the attack, the president claimed.
Trump has now repeatedly ordered the American military to use deadly force against boats in international waters that are allegedly engaged in drug smuggling. Many legal scholars, including some right-wing experts who in the past have embraced expansive views of presidential powers, consider such strikes illegal.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) condemned Trump's attack, which she noted was the fifth time the president had ordered a strike on a purported drug-trafficking vessel.
"Using the military to execute alleged criminals with no due process or input from Congress is brazenly unconstitutional and damaging to our democracy," she wrote in a social media post.
Attorney George Conway, a former Republican who broke with the party over its support of Trump, said there was absolutely zero doubt that Trump's strikes on the boats were acts of murder.
"That's 27 flat-out murders," he wrote in a post on X, referring to the total body count resulting from the president's boat strikes. "That's 27 lives taken without even a semblance of a legal justification under domestic or international law."
Kenneth Roth, former director of Human Rights Watch, said that Trump could face criminal prosecution for attacking the boats.
"Trump keeps ordering the summary killing of people in boats off the coast of Venezuela," Roth wrote. "Whether drug traffickers or not (we have no idea), these are murders. If on Venezuelan territory, the International Criminal Court could prosecute."
Richard Painter, who was an ethics lawyer in former President George W. Bush's White House, similarly described the strikes as "murder" and "a violation of US as well as international law."
According to The Associated Press, the strikes against boats have unnerved the Venezuelan government, which believes the US is preparing to launch a regime-change war against it. Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino last week even went so far as to tell his citizens to be prepared for a potential invasion during a televised appearance.
"I want to warn the population: We have to prepare ourselves because the irrationality with which the US empire operates is not normal,” he said, according to the AP. “It’s anti-political, anti-human, warmongering, rude, and vulgar."
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Venezuela’s Opposition Used UN Meeting to Lobby for US Coup
The opposition’s proposed total economic surrender to US corporate interests would doom Venezuela to the same conditions that led to Chavez’s rise to power.
Oct 11, 2025
The United Nations General Assembly, held in late September, offered a stark panorama of competing global visions. US President Donald Trump’s address was a characteristically bombastic, comically terrifying display of imperial nostalgia and hate-filled paranoia, including claims that climate change is a con and that London is no longer London because of Muslim immigration and “sharia law.”
In contrast, Colombia’s Gustavo Petro, Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and Chile’s Gabriel Boric each used their time on the international stage to defend democracy and humanism, take action against climate change, and oppose rising global authoritarianism.
Meanwhile, the Venezuelan opposition, led by former presidential candidate María Corina Machado, the far-right extremist who just won the Nobel Peace Prize, used the UN General Assembly (UNGA) as a lobbying platform, courting the Trump administration and sympathetic foreign governments to support a coup to depose President Nicolás Maduro. She has been part of multiple calls for US interventions in Venezuela, including to, in her words, secure the "total asphyxiation of the Venezuelan economy."
The opposition organized demonstrations in front of the Secretariat Building to denounce Maduro and call for the world to intervene. Pedro de Mendonça, Press Director for Machado’s campaign, hosted a protest saying, “Maduro is not the legitimate president of Venezuela, but the head of the Cartel of the Suns and the Tren de Aragua.” Mendonça called for “a free Venezuela and a secure West” through an “international coalition.” This is as direct a call for intervention as you could get. Machado retweeted it.
Machado has been a central figure to the Venezuelan opposition for more than two decades, helping push the opposition much farther to the right.
She says she models herself on Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and has championed “Popular Capitalism,” a philosophy pioneered by dictator Augusto Pinochet in Chile, seeking to privatize all sectors of the state, and would give priority to American oil, gas, and mining companies in “free Venezuela.”
She has herself met with American oil executives during her campaign. Her proximity to the US is crystal clear; she has previously worked with the US Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the International Republican Institute in Venezuela, and served as a Yale World Fellow. She was quite close to the George W. Bush administration during this period.
Machado was also part of the 2002 coup attempt against Hugo Chávez, signing the Carmona Decree to suspend the constitution, dissolve the National Assembly, and appoint oligarch Pedro Carmona as president. The coup collapsed within 48 hours due to immense popular backlash (some anti-coup protesters were also killed in the process).
This kind of rhetoric by the Trump administration, echoed by the Machado camp, has helped legally justify actual military operations on both American and foreign soil.
Parallel to the UNGA sessions, representatives of the opposition allegedly met with members of the Trump administration, while Machado herself and prominent opposition figures saturated social media with calls for a global movement to remove Maduro.
During the UNGA, Juan Guaidó, the former opposition leader whom the US was pretending was the legitimate president of Venezuela, also met with Trump administration officials to lobby for more “counter-narcotics” operations in Venezuela and to depose Maduro. Machado and Guaidó have recently labeled the Venezuelan government “criminal” and “illegitimate,” and Maduro a “drug trafficker and terrorist.” Dozens of tweets, press statements, and interviews echoed the same talking points during the event; and urged the world to end his “regime.” To an American audience, this all sounds eerily familiar. It’s no coincidence that the Trump administration has merged the War on Drugs with the War on Terror. This is why calling Maduro a “narco-terrorist” is so dangerous (and wrong), and can open the door to more military action by the US.
Despite what the opposition wants to portray, these protests are not organic, and neither has been the US response. In fact, many of them are rooted in American energy and defense profits, and backed by hawkish think tanks. They circulate these postures within their circles to give an allure of a global movement, but most Americans and Venezuelans oppose US military involvement in Venezuela.
The allegations that Maduro heads the “Cartel of the Suns” (debunked by the very InSight Crime that receives State Department funding, as well as several Latin American governments) serve as a cudgel against any measured approach to dealing with Venezuela, reminiscent of how any opposition to intervention in the Middle East post-9/11 was met with accusations of support for terrorism.
Never mind the fact that Venezuela is nowhere near the most important drug trafficking port in Latin America, that the War on Drugs doesn’t work, that the US is allied with bigger drug-supplying countries, or that this all comes from the fact that the US can’t decrease its own demand for drugs.
Earlier this year, in February, the Trump administration officially designated Tren de Aragua (TDA) as an international terrorist organization, claiming it operates with support from the Maduro government. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, one of Washington’s most vocal Venezuela hawks, has himself called Maduro a narco-terrorist and an illegitimate dictator, and has long lobbied for regime change. Attorney General Pam Bondi has also echoed these claims, as have many other key members of the Trump administration.
This kind of rhetoric by the Trump administration, echoed by the Machado camp, has helped legally justify actual military operations on both American and foreign soil, including a series of drone strikes against fishing boats, which, yes, are war crimes.
The Trump administration has cited alleged TDA ties (without much evidence) to carry out deportations of Venezuelan migrants, with the deportation advertised by Homeland Security through cruel and disgusting meme videos they share on social media. Machado and her ilk have helped make all of this a reality.
We also have to remember that all of this is not in the name of democracy or protecting against drug trafficking. The Trump administration is invested in dismantling American democracy at home and supporting tyrants abroad. Until two seconds ago, the Trump administration was signing numerous deals for cheap oil and for deportation flights with Maduro, the very dictator it now wants to depose.
The US has a long history of supporting drug traffickers when it serves their interests. This includes the Contras and the far-right Paramilitaries in Colombia, now the largest drug traffickers in South America. The American security state has shown no interest whatsoever in pursuing actual solutions to the drug crisis, including decreasing demand, making supply less appealing by providing better ways of life, improving safe supply, or drug legalization.
The opposition’s proposed total economic surrender to US corporate interests would doom Venezuela to the same conditions that led to Chavez’s rise to power.
This is about protecting power and profits, including the profits of big oil, gas, and mining companies (Venezuela has some of the world’s largest reserves in all), and those of the military-industrial complex. A full coup would be a disaster and another bloody coup added to the United States’ long history of calamitous military interventions in Latin America.
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