Why The Trump Administration Is Blowing Up Venezuelan Boats

0:08Hey, it's Jen. Just a quick heads up before we start the show. The news is rapidly developing, and things may have changed by the time you hear this episode. For the very latest news, tune into your public radio station and follow updates at npr.org. There's a shift in U.S. foreign policy that's drawing attention and some alarm across Latin America. The Trump administration's so-called war on cartels is increasingly centered on Venezuela, not places where most illegal drugs actually originate, like Mexico or Colombia. So what's really driving this? Could this be a push for regime change in the South American country?

0:46And what does it mean for the people living under Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro's government? I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. We'll be back with more in just a moment.

1:00Let's meet our guests. We're joined by Julie Turkowicz, Andes Bureau Chief for The New York Times. She's based in Bogota, Colombia, and recently returned from a reporting trip to Venezuela. Julie, welcome to the program. Thanks so much. And joining us in studio is Eric Bazel-Emile. He's a national security reporter at Politico. Eric, it's great to have you. Thanks for having me. Now, on Tuesday, President Trump announced in a social media post that the U.S. military had destroyed a fifth boat off the coast of Venezuela, killing six people. Eric, what do we know about this strike? So what we know about this strike is that there were six people.

1:36The president made, he announced this in a true social post. The United States government, as has been the case with all the other boat strikes, has argued that intelligence says that they were transporting drugs. With this, you know, they released like a very limited amount of visual information about what the strike actually looked like. Like they didn't reveal more information about what kinds of sources went into this. So we're kind of left in the same position we've been in with all these other strikes, trying to make sense of where this is continuing to go because it's very sporadic. We see this flare up every so often, and we haven't seen direct evidence that they're actually involved in this drug trafficking.

2:11We haven't seen concrete evidence to that. Has there been any shift in the administration's messaging since the strike, the first strike we saw at the beginning of September? When we look at what administration officials are saying, there's certainly a lot more cohesion. We've been looking back through Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State and National Security Advisor's tweets, and there is significantly less mention of Maduro as an illegitimate political leader. We've seen that used to have a lot more presence in his public comments and his posts on X on other social media platforms. So there's certainly more of a cohesion right now.

2:44They're unifying around this message that these are, quote-unquote, narco-terrorists that need to be taken out and that they pose a direct national security threat to the United States and that this force is necessary. Senator Rand Paul is one of the lawmakers questioning whether these attacks are legal. He told Bloomberg last week that 25 percent of the boats the Coast Guard stops under suspicion of drug trafficking do not end up having drugs aboard. The idea that you can kill someone who you don't know their name and has had no process at all. People say, oh, you're going to give due process to fentanyl killers and all of this.

3:16Even in our country, 20 ,000 people commit murders. And as angry as we are, if it were my family, I would want to shoot them. But we still have trials because occasionally the accused is found innocent and not guilty. Occasionally we make mistakes. But we can't have a policy where we just blow up ships where we don't even know the people's names. President Trump sought to justify these strikes in a letter to Congress where he stated the U.S. is now in a formal armed conflict with various Latin American cartels. His administration has labeled terrorists. Julie, Trump has increasingly sought to link Venezuela to these groups, and specifically Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

3:55How has he tried to draw that connection? You know, as far back as 2020, under the Trump administration, the Department of Justice indicted Nicolás Maduro, who is a leader who has really held on to power through repression, through disappearances, through detentions, decided to indict him on charges of narcotrafficking and accuse him of being the head of this group that the US government calls the Cartel de los Soles. There is a debate about exactly what is the Cartel de los Soles, but the sort of broad assessment from analysts who watch Venezuela is that the Cartel de los Soles is the sort of name of the criminal type of governance that Nicolás Maduro engages in, which has to do with essentially allowing illicit economies to flourish inside the country and perhaps those funds going to individuals who support the government or to the government itself.

5:11The Trump administration asserts in this indictment and then has continued to assert during the second term that the Cartel de los Soles is in fact an organized cartel headed by the government of Nicolás Maduro, by Nicolás Maduro himself. And basically, we continue to look for more information about how true that is. Eric, the U.S. regularly engages in law enforcement activities at sea to disrupt drug smuggling. First, when you look at the big picture of drugs entering the U.S., how large of a role does Venezuela play? It's not quite the same kind of role as our, certainly not compared to our land-based ports of entry on the U.S.-Mexico border, the U.S.-Canada border.

5:56With regards even to just smuggling by sea, right, like places like Haiti, the Caribbean islands are certainly much more of a factor there. When we're even looking then at the enforcement landscape, what's very different about this is that it's the Navy that's conducting these strikes and it's U.S. military, which is very, very different. Typically, it's the Coast Guard, which does a lot of the interdiction work. And in fact, as part of the administration's ramp up, the Coast Guard's off the coast of Ecuador right now and off the coast of Mexico in the Eastern Pacific trying to pick up cocaine and fentanyl that's trying to get into the United States in collaboration with governments that we do cross-border collaborations with.

6:30So this is a very, very different kind of operation. It's both in terms of the actual hardware that's being used and the actual locus being within the U.S. military, and as well, Well, you know, Venezuela, even though certainly it does play a role in the global drug trade, Colombia is still a much larger producer. We're still seeing from the Andes much more in terms of the illicit narcotics that U.S. law enforcement is trying to tackle. So that's certainly contributed to the debate about what are the real intentions behind this. And when we talk about the work the U.S. military does to try to curb drug smuggling, what does that look like in practice?

7:05Like, I mean, the Coast Guard, you know, will go, even if they're working in concert with the Navy, they'll take over the boat. Like they'll literally change the flags and then they'll send a smaller boat out and then they'll like process the drugs and arrest the people and then bring them back onto the ship and then they switch it back to the Navy. They don't use lethal force typically. We aren't seeing the, you know, helicopters or drones being used against these drug smuggling boats in the past. Like typically it is a much smaller kind of we'll go out, we'll pick up the boat, we'll take the cocaine in and then we'll log it.

7:32So it is 100 % an escalation of the way that we approach drug interdiction. The White House has labeled members of these drug cartels unlawful combatants in order to explain the legal rationale for what many experts say is essentially murder. How often have we seen that designation used for alleged criminals? Depends on how we define criminality, right? Because, I mean, terrorism certainly is a form of criminality and we use them more for, you know, Islamist groups in the Middle East. or we'll use them for militia groups that are trying to destabilize large parts of the world, like Hezbollah or the Taliban and their allies all over the world.

8:07For these kinds of transnational criminal organizations that aren't necessarily, they don't have a political aim per se. Their goal is to make money and to offer value propositions. That's been a much more nebulous. We haven't typically done this. This is also very new legal territory and very uncharted legal territory. Julie, you're based in Bogota and recently reported from Caracas. From where you sit, how is this campaign being understood inside Venezuela? I think there is a mix of feelings and sentiments among Venezuelans of all different types about what is happening. There is clearly broad desire inside the country and among the Venezuelans in exile for change.

8:57that was demonstrated last year in a presidential election in which the vast majority of the country voted for Nicolas Maeloto to leave power, according to not only the opposition, but independent observers, including the Carter Center, who have called accurate the result of the election that showed that the opposition candidate won. But there is also concern about what any kind of action taken to create that change would cause, right? Nobody knows what might happen if there is some kind of military action inside the country, whether that is military action by the Venezuelan military, whether that is military action by the United States military or any of its allies.

9:55So there's both sort of this deep desire for change as well as sort of concern about how that would actually take place. We got this email from Marvin who says, Every nation in the world must be worried this could happen to them under the direction of this or any future U.S. president. Will any amount of accountability be enough to fix this disaster? Eric, how is this being viewed by other countries who are watching this escalation between the U.S. and Venezuela? that? There's certainly some antsiness in the rest of the hemisphere. When we talk to Latin American officials from different countries that the U.S.

10:30does different kinds of counter-narcotics collaborations, I mean, they very broadly insist, like, they're not expecting this to happen imminently, that they're not expecting the U.S. to turn on them. But they can't 100 % rule out the possibility. So there is some degree of worry. I mean, there's also the general concern that these strikes, if they continue, lead us down a path that destabilizes Venezuela further, especially if this becomes then land-based strikes on land targets that the U.S. alleges are part of Carte de los Soles. So if Venezuela destabilizes, that puts a lot of pressure on countries on the borders.

11:02That includes Colombia, like it includes Guyana, Brazil, that have in the past taken large flows of immigrants or have generally been very concerned about erratic behavior from Caracas. So in general, there's also the worry, not just that they will be the victims of this, because they do believe, broadly speaking, that this is about Venezuela, this is very specifically about a government that even over the course of months of negotiations with this administration, they just haven't been able to trust. Like there's a fundamental trust gap with Maduro that he's not going to keep his promises about, you know, collaborating on law enforcement issues or about immigration or about other, you know, the transition to democracy.

11:39Julie, briefly, when we talk about the relationship between the U.S. and Venezuela, how does Trump's approach during this second term differ from what we saw during the first term? I think that this, what we're seeing right now in the Caribbean can be viewed as a continuation and an escalation of the way that the Trump administration interacted with Venezuela and specifically the Venezuelan government in his first administration. in his first administration. He really tried to oust Nicolás Maduro. He threw his weight behind a different opposition leader, Juan Guaido, later supported sort of these broad sanctions on the oil industry.

12:25And there was this sort of both increasing tension and growing a policy of isolation of Venezuela from the US and from many of the US's allies. The big question in sort of Trump number two was, were we going to see a continuation of that relationship or were we going to see a relationship more based on economic deals, on a sort of normalization of the relationship based around the idea that Venezuela has a lot of resources that are very appealing to the U.S. And what we really saw at the beginning of this second Trump administration was that it seemed that the Trump administration was moving towards that relationship of some kind of economic or diplomatic normalization.

13:20You saw Donald Trump name a special envoy, Richard Grinnell, to Venezuela. Richard Grinnell went to Venezuela, had this sort of very unusual meeting with Nicolás Maduro and arranged the release of some Americans who were held prisoner in the United States as well as convinced Venezuela to accept deportees from the U.S. And the kind of question was, is this going towards normalization? And then around July, August, you saw a switch. And you saw a switch back to that sort of much more aggressive approach to Venezuela that seems to be much more focused on the possible ouster of Nicolás Maduro. Eric, I want to bring you in here because as national security reporter, you have a lot of insight into how the U.S.

14:13is viewing this relationship. Yeah, and I would say, like, I think some of the shifts started, I think Julie's right that they really calcified in the summer, in July and August. But I think we started to see some of the shifts in April. And in part, we've reported about this, especially when I used to anchor National Security Daily, the Politico newsletter, that there are three groups within the Trump administration when it comes to Venezuela, within its orbit and sometimes also within the class of officials that is running the Venezuela brief. The first is your traditional kind of hawks that believe in maximum pressure.

14:42These are folks that are very much embodied by Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, and Mauricio Claver-Curon, who was, you know, for a while, he left earlier this year. He was the special envoy for Latin America. And in the first term, he was the architect of maximum pressure against Venezuela. And then you had a second camp of people who were more friendly to the oil industry and wanted to see the oil majors like Chevron have better access to the country's mineral resources and the country's energy resources. And there was a third group, which I think is actually the most critical center of gravity in this administration when it comes to the Western Hemisphere.

15:13It's the immigration folks. It's the Stephen Millers and Tom Homans of the world who – it's not that they're Pollyannish about Venezuela. they really understand the threats posed by Venezuela, but they have a primer on just immigration cooperation above all other policy priorities. And you're starting to see the unity between Camp 1 and Camp 3 right now. We're discussing the U.S.'s bombing of boats in the Caribbean and its relationship with Venezuela. We'll be right back.

15:45Let's jump back into the conversation. We got this question from Marilyn. She asks, are these attacks a violation of international law? If so, can all members of the administration who are involved be prosecuted for blowing up boats and people without proof of who is on board or what they might be doing? Eric? So the United States is not a member of the Rome Statute, which governs the International Criminal Court, which makes any kind of multinational accountability for U.S. leaders in this situation and in others very, very difficult, pretty much next to impossible. And the reality is that these strikes, they're being conducted off the waters of Venezuela.

16:21It does seem that they're in international waters where it's a little bit more of a no-man's land about where the U.S. has some authority. So that dubious kind of legal standing actually gives them a lot of cover. Unfortunately, it seems very unlikely for those who believe that this is a gross violation of international law that the U.S. government, outside of maybe a civil lawsuit from these families against the U.S. government, could actually be held to account for the strikes. And Congress also isn't doing anything. We'll get to Congress in a moment. But we also got this question from Valerie who says, would your guests explain how blowing unidentified fastboats out of the water affects immigration?

17:00I don't see the connection. Now, we should note here that as conditions in Venezuela deteriorated under Maduro, Venezuelans became one of the fastest growing groups of migrants to the U.S. So, Eric, how, if at all, does the question of immigration play into the push to oust Maduro? In terms of the push to oust Maduro, it certainly adds more pressure to the elites that are supporting Maduro and ensure that Maduro stays in power. Because a leader, of course, does not govern alone and needs the keys of power to be in his favor. So Maduro needs military elites and he needs political elites in Caracas to feel comfortable.

17:33And a lot of that goes to what Julie was discussing about how Cartel de los Soles as a transnational criminal group has allowed these illicit economies to flourish that inevitably the Venezuelan elite is benefiting from. Putting pressure on that, the theory goes that it will increase the fragility of Maduro's standing such that maybe down the line as this escalation ladder continues, there may be some effort to ause Maduro. or Maduro loses the backing of the Venezuelan elite in some kind of protest movement forms, and that results in a transition of government. And so how does that connect to Stephen Miller's approach to immigration policy?

18:08I don't think Stephen Miller or the immigration folks, they're very agnostic about whether Maduro should stay or Maduro should go. That's not the focus. Their focus is on deterring illegal immigration. And when you see the video of a boat being blown up to smithereens in the Caribbean, it'll make you very less likely to take your chances by sea, And it will certainly make you less likely to consider partnering with potentially like a human smuggler that's part of these cartels to try to get through Colombia and then through the Darien up to the U.S. border. So it all fits in this broader strategy of projecting strength from Washington and saying that there's a zero tolerance policy for this.

18:44And whether it will work is still to be seen. The numbers are down, but we still got four years of – three years of an administration left. Julie, I'd love your thoughts on this as well. Yeah, I would say that almost in parallel to what the Trump administration is doing in the Caribbean as far as blowing up boats, I would say that they sort of parallel policies of Stephen Miller and others sort of in this immigration camp being described have been so far very effective in limiting migration from Venezuela toward the United States. I mean, we saw numbers at the U.S. border going down sort of towards the tail end of the Biden administration, and they've really plummeted in the Trump administration.

19:27And you really see Venezuelan migrants in the U.S. even trying to self-deport. Much of that has to do with fear of being sent to a place like the prison in El Salvador, fear of being separated from one's family if part of the family is deported and the other part is not. So I sort of see these as very much as kind of parallel policies. Well, and Eric, really briefly, how has Maduro and his regime responded to the Trump administration's efforts to return people to their countries of origin? Venezuela has continued to take deportation flights. They are certainly a limited number, and there's always been the question of whether when the Chevron license that allows Chevron to join the country gets extended or they pause the revocation, whether that's tied to any kind of progress on negotiations.

20:17But they've accepted a baseline level of deportation cooperation, as have many countries, understanding that that is the minimum standard at which the U.S. will engage and the minimum bar for the U.S. to have a respectable relationship with the country is having some kind of migration cooperation. But as far as other things, they've also dragged their feet. They've put conditions on some of these deportation flights. And that's also muddied the waters of this relationship. Well, last week, Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Let's listen to a bit of the announcement.

20:50She is receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy. Julie, tell us more about Machado and her significance in Venezuela. Yeah, Maria Corina Machado is this former lawmaker, a conservative politician who really has spent the last two decades criticizing the government of Nicolás Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chavez, and really as a sort of foil against the government's socialist movement, advocating for protection of private property, open markets, etc.

21:41And she really emerged last year as this galvanizing figure in Venezuela that was really kind of exhausted by a series of opposition figures who had over and over again kind of failed to create change in Venezuela. She essentially created this movement that came out to vote for an opposition candidate. But the Maduro government stayed in power. And it stayed in power by imprisoning people. 25, more or less 25 protesters died in protest right after the election. And she went into hiding and the candidate fled to Spain. And the big question has been, how does she actually make this election worth something?

22:28How does she actually create change? The election happened, but there was no change. And the Nobel Prize Prize, of course, puts some wind under the sails of her movement, creates pressure for her to do something. And the question is, what can she do at this point to actually make change? Well, Julie, what and also how? Because as I'm hearing you describe her position in Venezuela, how Venezuelans view her, right now what we have happening is Machado being promoted as this voice and champion for democracy. But we also see this aggressive posture from the U.S. and certain people in the Trump administration saying there needs to be regime change against this backdrop of increasing military presence in the Caribbean.

23:19How is her relationship and her overtures towards President Trump being viewed? She said she thought that she dedicated the Peace Prize to him. Sure. Mariko Corina Machado has been very, very supportive of the Trump administration's actions in the Caribbean. She has been completely on board with this narrative and idea that Nicolas Maduro is the head of a cartel who is flooding the U.S. with drugs and also is undemocratic and must be ousted. The question, her team has told us that they have a plan for the first 100 hours and the first 100 days after regime change. The question is, how does that regime change happen?

24:11Her advisor, who I spoke with a couple of weeks ago, said that this should involve from the US diplomatic pressure, financial pressure, law enforcement pressure. And when I asked him, you know, will this also include some kind of military action? He said, yes, it must include military action because that's the only way to get rid of this regime. What is unclear is if that military action, in their view, is military action by the Venezuelan military or military action by the U.S. military. Well, let's talk about the U.S. military capability in the region. Since August, we've been building a presence in the Caribbean that includes assault ships, combat jets, Reaper drones, and 10 ,000 troops.

24:57Eric, what kind of military engagement might the U.S. be preparing for? It's very difficult to say because when we look at past U.S. military interventions in the Caribbean region, like, they've required a lot more troops. I mean, Panama was 35 ,000 troops. Even Grenada was just a bit more hardware. And I think about the same amount of troops as we have right now. And Grenada is much, much smaller in terms of military operations than Venezuela. But the administration has been telegraphing that if there is some kind of military operation against Venezuela, it would be incredibly tactical and surgical.

25:30It would be to take critical infrastructure. It would be to take ports. And in general, it would be very unlikely that then that would translate into tanks rolling down the streets of Caracas or Maracaibo. More likely than not, it would be a very limited military operation to just create the destabilizing conditions enough that the Venezuelan elite would turn on Maduro and secure the country's infrastructure to prevent a complete collapse. I mean, Julie, if we do see escalation by the U.S. military, how do you think that would be received by the Venezuelan public? that's a really good question um i obviously can't predict exactly what would happen and i think it really depends also on like what that looks like uh and what kind of toll that takes again there is clearly widespread support for for change and and in fact i think for for you know international support that creates that change.

26:32The question is, are there going to be people who are hurt, you know, sort of in the chaos of whatever that change looks like? And I think that there is a strong debate happening right now inside Venezuela around if there is some kind of military action, what would be the consequences and would it be chaotic? If you, you know, Maria Corina Machado and her team has a very strong position on that and they say that it's some kind of regime change would not be chaotic. It would not be a Syria, a Libya, a Haiti. There are others in the country and outside of the country who are scared that that would not be the case.