“Clock Starts to Tick,” Amid Trump’s Venezuela Build-Up

The United States continues its heavy military build-up in the Caribbean, and continues to strike boats off the coast of Venezuela—despite CIA and Pentagon lawyers’ serious concerns about the strikes’ legality. As the Washington Post reported, the Trump administration responds to their concerns by changing lawyers.

So far at least 83 people are believed to have been killed. The administration has offered no evidence that they were trafficking drugs as it claims, and has not released information about their identities. A few have been publicly identified by their families, who say the men were merely fishermen.

The administration continues to argue, in legal memos and in public, that the strikes are justified because they target “narcoterrorists” whose products kill US consumers, thereby constituting an attack on the nation that warrants a military response.

Venezuela is not a significant producer of fentanyl or other opioids most commonly involved in US overdose deaths. And even if some of the strike victims were ferrying cocaine, which Venezuela does produce, they were low-level operatives.

On November 21, US “Secretary of War” Hegseth announced that the government had designated “Cartel de los Soles” as a terrorist organization.

“They are using vast military resources to blow up speedboats,” John Walsh, director for drug policy and the Andes at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), told Filter. “That’s vastly in excess of what it takes to detain them and confiscate the drug.” He pointed out that a speedboat would carry a miniscule quantity of drugs in the grand scheme of things. “Bulk shipments of cocaine go through compartmentalized shipping.”

On November 21, US “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth announced that the government had designated “Cartel de los Soles”—allegedly a network with ties to the government of President Nicolás Maduro—as a terrorist organization.

That would be in line with the Trump administration’s other designations of groups accused of drug trafficking. But experts have said that Cartel de los Soles is more a generalized term than any kind of organized, hierarchical group. AP reports that, “Venezuelans began using the term Cartel de los Soles in the 1990s to refer to high-ranking military officers who had grown rich from drug-running.”

Walsh said the Trump administration is trafficking in fantasy.

“It’s not your father’s drug trade,” he observed. “There’s no Pablo Escobar you can take out.” Instead, you have loosely centralized hubs for production and transportation, and any government connections are somewhat incidental, mostly involving bribes to military officials in return for being left alone. 

“It’s certainly not Maduro calling the shots,” Walsh said.

Hegseth all but admitted that the Cartel de los Soles move opened the door for military action aimed at overthrowing the Maduro regime—something that’s been widely suspected as the main motivation for the boat strikes and military build-up.

“[The terror designation] gives more tools to our [War] Department to give options to [President Donald Trump] to ultimately say our hemisphere will not be controlled by narco-terrorists, it will not be controlled by cartels, [and] it will not be controlled by what illegitimate regimes try to push toward the American people,” Hegseth said. “So, it’s just about options, and we plan better than any organization in the world here.”

“The ideal scenario for the administration is that the build-up prompts Maduro to look for safe passage or the defection of his military. The second scenario is fanciful, the first unlikely.”

Trump has issued a series of ambiguous threats, striving to connect the military escalation to his signature issues of ramping up the drug war and mass deportations.

“I doubt it. I don’t think so,” he told CBS News on November 2, when asked if the US was going to war with Venezuela. “But they’ve been treating us very badly, not only on drugs—they’ve dumped hundreds of thousands of people into our country that we didn’t want, people from prisons—they emptied their prisons into our compan.. country.”

As his administration pushed ahead with designating Cartel de los Soles a terror group, CBS News asked if he was considering sending in ground troops.“No, I don’t rule out that. I don’t rule out anything,” Trump said. “We just have to take care of Venezuela.”

Administration officials recently floated an idea to drop leaflets over Caracas on November 23, Maduro’s birthday, to urge him to flee and turn his circle against him.

“The ideal scenario for the administration is that the build-up of all that weaponry nearby would prompt Maduro to look for safe passage or the defection of his military and security forces,” Walsh said. “The second scenario is fanciful, the first unlikely.”

He noted that given Trump’s penchant for dictators, he’s certainly not driven by human rights considerations—rather he’s enticed by the country’s vast oil reserves, and appears to hold a grudge over Maduro’s defiance of the US, and its sanctions, during Trump’s first term.

Meanwhile Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Walsh believes, is obsessed with regime change in various parts of Latin America. 

“I think that is the reason for this formidable armada of the US Navy in the region,” Walsh said. “The drug aspect is untethered to reality. There’s no way they’re serious as a drug-trafficking deterrent.” 

Ultimately Trump, in his elusive quest for the Nobel Peace Prize, likely doesn’t have the desire to start a full-scale war, Walsh believes. “One way or another, it seems he has made up his mind. But nobody knows.” If he does, however, and it doesn’t go well, you “pin the blame on ‘Little Marco.’”

Still, Walsh warned, events don’t always follow the desires of even the most powerful man on earth. 

“Once you have that much military hardware, weaponry, sailors, things can take a life of their own,” he said. “Even if you don’t want things to escalate, they can. Once you’ve established such a force, the clock starts to tick.”

Photograph of USS Gerald R. Ford, which deployed to the region in October, via Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain