On August 19, United States warships set course for Venezuela. They’ve been deployed there for the specific purpose of targeting transnational drug-trafficking organizations (DTO) that President Donald Trump claims pose a threat to national security, as his administration begins to openly use military forces in service of the drug war.
In July, the Department of the Treasury announced it was sanctioning Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization, characterizing it as a Venezuela-based DTO that, led by President Nicolás Maduro Moros and other high-ranking members of his administration, endeavors to move fentanyl into the US. The department also linked Cartel de los Soles to Tren de Aragua, which it had already designated a “significant” terrorist organization in 2024.
The US intelligence community considers Tren de Aragua to no longer be a major player. Cartel de los Soles, meanwhile, is not really a DTO at all.
Since Maduro’s election in 2013, Venezuela’s DTO activity has become decentralized. Cartel de los Soles isn’t the name of any single group, but is what think tank InSight Crime explained as a catch-all term for “a fluid and loose knit network of trafficking cells embedded within the Venezuelan security forces … less an organization run by [Maduro’s] Chavista regime and more a system that it regulates.”
The US doesn’t allow military resources to be used for law enforcement—only for matters of national security.
In the 54 years since President Richard Nixon declared the War on Drugs, the US has intermittently deployed troops to Latin America in service of that agenda. But these efforts have always been hampered by the fact that US law doesn’t allow the president to send in military resources to do jobs meant for law enforcement, such as enforcing the criminalization of fentanyl. In order to tap into the full power of the US military, which has a budget that’s pushing $1 trillion, the drug war would have to be considered a matter of national security against a foreign threat.
For several years now, the public discourse around fentanyl has been steered toward language that you used to only hear when someone was describing chemical weapons like sarin gas, or the vague threat of nuclear war.
Since returning to office in January, Trump has set about militarizing the US response to the overdose crisis in a way that he didn’t during his first term. Sending troops to the southern border to provide immigration enforcement; designating DTO as foreign terrorist organizations; ramping up a program begun under Joe Biden’s administration by flying drones not just over the southern border, but actually into Mexico, to find the locations of unregulated fentanyl labs. Earlier in August, the New York Times reported that Trump had quietly begun ordering military resources deployed against the DTO that had been recently designated terrorist groups.
Trump’s solution to “clandestine labs” is that we should just bomb them.
Despite how tightly organized hierarchical the media often portrays them, DTO aren’t militia. Their motives aren’t political or ideological; they’re commercial. The Drug Enforcement Administration has spent a lot of time building up the idea that synthetic drugs are an unprecedented threat partly because manufacturers can just set up shop anywhere, anytime, but since at least 2020 Trump has been floating the idea that the obvious solution to “clandestine labs” is that we should just bomb them.
Though the term “superlab” has become popular in the last two or three years, usually it refers to methamphetamine production, or to fentanyl production in Canada rather than in Mexico. Elected officials constantly describe fentanyl as a synthetic drug that’s “chemically produced in a lab,” without mentioning that the labs are often inside people’s homes.
Fentanyl’s potency means a large-scale DTO operation can be done in someone’s kitchen, in their house on a central street in a densely populated residential neighborhood. Which evokes somewhat different imagery than a lab, when you think about sending in unmanned drone strikes.
The inevitable deployment of the US military obviously won’t be the thing that finally makes prohibition work. Bombing fentanyl labs across Mexico wouldn’t be the end of the supply; the US and Mexico seize fentanyl labs all the time. But now that drone strikes are looking like a real possibility, cooks aren’t going to stay in the same place for long, given that the US is actively mapping their locations. And if they’re constantly on the move, setting up short-term labs with makeshift equipment in place of whatever had to be left behind in a rush, it’s not hard to guess whether that will be the end of the fentanyl supply chain or make it more chaotic than it already is.
Image of MQ-9 Reaper drone via United States Department of Transportation
