3 hours ago
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In the early hours of 3 January, Caracas and other cities in Venezuela were bombed and the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, was kidnapped along with his wife by US military personnel. In addition to the 100 deaths recorded so far as a result of the attack, approximately 100 more were caused by US attacks on small boats in the previous months, under the pretext of combatting drug trafficking. Although it seems clear that the real intention of Donald Trump’s administration was to seize Venezuela’s wealth, the initial argument to justify the military deployment in the Caribbean was that it was to fight the illegal drugs trade and stop the flow of migrants that the Venezuelan government was allegedly causing by emptying prisons of criminals and sending them to the US.
As a criminology professor who has studied Venezuelan drug trafficking for 20 years, I find this far-fetched. To understand this, we have to consider Venezuela’s historical role in drug trafficking. As a typical Andean country neighbouring the world’s main coca producers, Venezuela has always played a significant role as a cocaine corridor. Since the turn of the century, its involvement in international drug trafficking has increased significantly as a result of growing European demand for cocaine, the effects of 2000’s Plan Colombia, which displaced illegal operations to border regions and neighbouring countries, and the breakdown of technical cooperation with Washington.
However, Venezuela’s role in drug trafficking has declined significantly in recent years. According to the UN World Drug Report 2025, only 5% of Colombian cocaine passes through Venezuela. There may be many reasons for this decline. The increase in seizures in the Caribbean, for example, may have favoured new routes, such as the Pacific. There has been a fragmentation of criminal groups linked to drug trafficking in Colombia and a strengthening of criminal structures in other countries, such as Ecuador.
In my opinion, the fundamental reason for this decline in Venezuela has to do with the degree of fragmentation and competition among actors (illegal and legal, criminal and state) involved in drug trafficking, and the prolonged crisis in Venezuela aggravating the traditional fragmentation of the state. This means that the use of routes through Venezuela generates a high degree of uncertainty for drug traffickers, because securing the collaboration of one state actor does not guarantee that they will escape being intercepted by another. Even drug trafficking needs clear and predictable rules, which do not exist in Venezuela.
The latter argument also allows us to discuss another of the reasons put forward by the Trump administration to justify its attack on Venezuela: that the Venezuelan government (or at least part of it) is a criminal organisation involved in drug trafficking, known as the Cartel de Los Soles (“Cartel of the Suns”, in reference to the suns that identify the highest ranking officers in the armed forces on their uniform epaulettes). This was one declared reason for sending in special forces and kidnapping Maduro and his wife.
The term Cartel de Los Soles has been used by the Venezuelan press since at least the early 1990s to denounce the links between high-ranking military officers and drug trafficking. In other words, if we believe the press, it has been in existence for almost 40 years. When Hugo Chávez was in power, the US government appropriated the term to attack the Venezuelan government, accusing it of collusion with international drug trafficking without any evidence to date to support the claim.
The idea of a cartel implies horizontal and vertical coordination between different actors to control a drug production and trafficking chain, or at least some of its operations. The prosecution responsible for charging Maduro and his wife in New York last week refrained from pointing to their participation in such a structure when presenting its case, most likely due to the difficulties of proving its existence.
Regarding Venezuelans’ migration, Trump’s interest in this issue is not new. In November 2024, in the midst of his presidential campaign, he took advantage of an incident involving armed Venezuelan migrants to promote the idea that Venezuelan migration was a threat to the American way of life. To do so, he drew on one of the popular bogeymen of the moment: the Tren de Aragua, a gang born in a Venezuelan prison. As soon as he took office, Trump declared this group a “foreign terrorist organisation” and accused it of leading a “predatory incursion” in concert with the Venezuelan government; he sent several hundred Venezuelans to prison in El Salvador and deported several thousand others for reasons as random as having tattoos or simply being Venezuelan. Regarding the military deployment in the Caribbean, Trump has repeatedly resorted to the argument that the Venezuelan government sent ex-convicts and mental patients to the US to undermine American democracy.
Venezuelan migration in recent years amounts to several million people. However, neither in the Latin American countries that host most of this population, nor in the US, are there any signs of a disproportionate involvement of Venezuelans in crime. As for the notorious Tren de Aragua, serious studies indicate that it does not exist as a centralised organisation with a single command structure outside its place of origin. Furthermore, even US intelligence sources agree that there is no evidence of a link between the Tren de Aragua and the Venezuelan government.
Trump resorts to the usual suspects (drugs, narco-terrorism, organised crime, illegal migration) to justify his persecution of Venezuelan migrants and the invasion of Venezuela. There is nothing older or more worn out than using folk devils to generate fear and legitimise persecution and wars, while hiding the real motives: the plundering of Venezuela’s wealth and the intimidation of countries in the region to submit to Washington’s tutelage.
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Andrés Antillano is a social psychologist and professor at the Central University of Venezuela
