Why Is Trump Targeting Venezuela?

0:06Hey, John Lee. Hi, Tyler. How are you? I'm good. Thanks so much for being here. A real pleasure. So just to start out, you know, you've reported on conflict zones, revolutionary movements, strongmen, extensively on Latin America, and a lot on U.S. intervention across the globe. And so when you look at U.S. policy toward Venezuela today, specifically what we've been seeing with the Trump administration referring to vessels as narco-terrorist targets and striking small boats, is this best described as a drug war, a political pressure campaign, or is it just like a return to old-school gunboat diplomacy?

0:47Like, what is actually, like, the operating logic in the White House right now, in your view? I would choose the latter. Performative gunboat diplomacy. You know, if you take together the sort of rhetorical vilification campaign by Trump and his coterie towards Venezuelans, first as, you know, criminal migrants, beginning in his campaign this time around, to assigning roles to Nicolas Maduro, the president of Venezuela, as a cartel chief. putting a putting a narco terrorist label on him and giving him a you know 50 million dollar bounty it's rhetorical it's performative this is black ops at its most baroque you know you have a president who tweets constantly you have a defense secretary who calls himself the secretary of war and you see back and forth statements by trump about what he might or might not do to the Venezuelans.

1:45So it's all about creating a drama, creating suspense. In that sense, it's great theater. Here we are all watching and waiting, and the entire world is asking, what's going to happen? And I think Trump loves this kind of thing because he's the master of ceremonies. And ultimately, it'll be what he decides will be the curtain raiser. But the only actionable part of this so far very, you know, grandiloquent rhetorical exercise of bellicosity by Trump towards Venezuela is these rather horrific, gruesome killings of men on boats in the Caribbean, these small, really fishing boats and launches, mostly, which may or may not be carrying drugs.

2:28And then the videos of the action of the killing of these people displayed for the world as some kind of exercise in showing who's boss. And there we are. That's as far as we've gotten, Tyler. That's John Lee Anderson, who's been covering global conflicts for The New Yorker for more than 20 years. For the past three months, the U.S. has been conducting strikes on boats in the Caribbean that it says are carrying members of Venezuelan drug cartels. The administration cast this operation as a legal effort to combat drug trafficking and eliminate narco-terrorists who threaten U.S. national security.

3:09But experts have questioned whether the strikes violate U.S. and international law. This weekend, Congress announced plans to launch an investigation into Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth after a Washington Post report alleged that he ordered that no survivors be left during a September strike. I wanted to talk with John Lee about the legality of these boat strikes, Trump's larger war on drug trafficking in the region, and how effective it's been, and whether this escalation of military action has less to do with drugs and more to do with the Trump administration's attempts to put political pressure on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

3:43This is The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker.

3:53Can you give us more information on what has happened up until this point? I mean, we're all talking right now about this recent Washington Post story that the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, ordered basically everyone aboard an alleged drug boat to be killed. You know, kill them all was the quote. And even before that, and, you know, I think in early September, we were starting to get stories about these boat strikes. And so I guess I'm just wondering if you can talk a little bit about how many people have been killed so far and what we know about these boats. I mean, I think you were just talking about how it's kind of maybe unclear if there's even drugs on these boats, or at least if there is drugs on the boats, then that's not like intelligence that's been, you know, declassified.

4:35This isn't like JFK giving us information, you know, during the Cuban Missile Crisis or something. It's just it seems like we're all kind of in this black hole of information right now. Exactly. Yeah. Well, since I think it's September 2nd, there have been now 15 or 16 strikes, whether they're by missiles or aircraft or drones, we don't even know. But against various launches and boats, a couple of what they call semi-submersibles in the Pacific, which are these sort of handmade submarines that go just below the water. But most of them are these open boats without boards like you might see anywhere, you know, 20, 30 foot long boats.

5:16And then we see them being blown up just after they appear on the screen. And Pete Heggseth, or sometimes Donald Trump, shares the information that X number of men were killed on this boat. Narco-terrorists, no proof provided as to what was being carried on board or anything else or how they got the intelligence, or for that matter, how they were killed. We see the explosions. uh president trump has a number of times you know alleged that with every vote that they blow up 25 000 americans lives will be saved and the campaign itself has been anchored in the idea that america is stopping fentanyl through these strikes from coming into the united states and we all know that there's a fentanyl crisis that's killed hundreds of thousands of americans now we also know from lots of good reporting and the government's own communiques that the fentanyl's precursors are made in China, smuggled in Mexico, where various gangland cartels put them together and smuggled them across in the United States.

6:19Cocaine originates, for the most part, in Colombia, and it finds its way north and to Europe via a variety of countries and means. So yes, Some comes in launches. But these launches, by the way, these boats that are, and about 83 people, I think, have been killed, they say. We don't know for sure. By and large, these would appear to be men who are hired hands, stevedores, fishermen, guys who live in port areas and probably agreed to go along on a run to, say, Venezuela coast to Trinidad, a nearby island, or Aruba or somewhere else where the drugs would be offloaded. and another group would take them further on.

7:01You know what I mean? It's that sort of thing. We're not talking, you know, you don't go very far at sea in a 30-foot open dory with a couple of outboards on the back. So these are, assuming they are all drug boats, which again, we're not sure, these are men at the very lowest end of the business. These are hired hands. These are not narco capos or cartel leaders themselves. These are hired hands who are getting a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars for the risk they take in moving cargo from one place to the other. But they're just the first leg in a long leg that ultimately gets these drugs to their destination.

7:40So it's not really about a drug war. This is a kind of mashup, which seems to be a good way to describe, I think, much of Trump's behavior in the world. It's a mashup of interests, people lobbying him to do this or that. This idea that Venezuela is a pariah state that's sort of low-hanging fruit, this country that ascribes to a notional socialism that's mouthy and anti-American, where the Chinese have been able to do business and some of the Russians too, which has been a fly in the ointment in the region for the past 25 years. All of that sort of true. But in the past, administrations, including Trump, number one, usually resorted to diplomacy in order to try to get the regime to change.

8:33They use sanctions. I mean, yeah, it's like now we, you know, act like sanctions are, you know, the most, you know, normal, non-aggressive thing. But like, yeah, I mean, I just feel like it's there's been this crazy escalation. And I guess I'm wondering if you were anticipating that escalation with Trump's second term or if this is something that even given everything you've seen from Trump and just like these kinds of conflicts, if even you were surprised by what we're seeing now. I'm surprised by the killing of people on boats because it seems to be extrajudicial killing. This is probably the fact that we even qualify it.

9:08It's this, I'm not a legal scholar, but this is clearly illegal behavior. We don't execute drug mules when they're found in Miami airport with condoms stuffed with cocaine in their belly or in cars once they've crossed the border, stuffed with marijuana or cocaine or even fentanyl. We don't shoot them at the side of the road, which is effectively what we are now doing in the high seas. So this part of it could not have been expected, I don't think. But I did think that this Trump regime would up the ante against Venezuela, and for that matter, the other socialist regimes in the region, Nicaragua and Cuba particularly.

9:50And the story I did before last, last summer, was in fact on Cuba and Trump's policy towards it. And one of the things I was trying to ascertain was to what degree the Trump crowd wanted to use Venezuela as a sort of fall guy, as the first step in a series of actions that would ultimately try and take out Cuba 60 years on from its revolution. And the fact that we now had a, not just a Florida-based president with those, you know, Cuban-Americans around him, but a lot of Cuban-Americans in his regime, not least Marco Rubio and a couple of other people. You know, he's very close to that crowd in Florida.

10:36And it does seem that Marco Rubio is the man who lobbied the most for an aggressive policy towards Venezuela. And ultimately, most believe that the idea is, you know, there's a saying in Spanish, la vía Havana via Caracas, which is the way to Havana is through Caracas. And the thing is, Venezuela is low-hanging fruit in the sense that Maduro has lost a lot of friends. And in the last election in the country a year ago, which by all accounts was gerrymandered by him and he won in unfair circumstances, caused even some Ursaal allies to back off, like Lula's regime in Brazil, to back off and to chastise him for it.

11:22So Maduro is more isolated than he's ever been. Over the past 10 years, we've seen an outflow of between a third and half the population, something like 8 million people out of a population of, I think it's 24 billion, throughout the hemisphere and to the United States. They are a noisome presence in the region. And so everybody would like to see the Venezuelan issue crisis go away. My feeling, Tyler, is that bottom line, and again, this is sort of, it's a gut read, is that Trump basically, you know, oil is certainly part of it, right? The fact that Venezuela is known to have the world's largest, depending on who you talk to, oil reserves in the world.

12:04So there's money to be made, you know. And so I think there's that as a kind of main incentive. And there's also, I think, this idea that Trump wants to, we saw from the moment he gave his inaugural speech this time, which is that he wants to be boss man in this hemisphere. You know, Xi's got East Asia, Putin's got the stands and that periphery he wants, including that country Ukraine, right, that used to be his. And Trump wants this hemisphere. What are the Danes doing up there in Greenland? And who are the Canadians anyway? And as for the canal, why did Carter give it away? Those Democrats gave it away.

12:44This is my hemisphere. This is my near beyond. I'm going to impose my will on it. And he has done ever since he got in. Bullying first Petro, the president of Colombia, by sending deportees, using the deportation policy as a way to get leaders to bend to his will. He, you know, he used different bullying tactics in various countries and, of course, reserved the most performative for Maduro in Venezuela. And that's what we're seeing now. And I mean, it seems to me that Trump has gone just way too far here. I mean, it's not even a controversial thing to say, but it seems like even Republicans are upset about this particular strike on September 2nd.

13:25And now there's this congressional investigation. Would you be able to talk a little bit about that strike and why it has become a flashpoint in this conversation and how it's complicated Trump's larger strategy? I mean, it seems like, you know, you're mentioning that he has all these Republican allies who want him to take a hard line toward Venezuela. But I guess I just wonder if this is going to be something that sort of jeopardizes that approach. I think it has the potential to jeopardize that approach. You're right. And I think the guy out on a limb here is Pete Hegseth, who, by all accounts, has alienated a lot of people in the security establishment through his own misbehavior, really, and his posturing.

14:06And the story is that in the first of these strikes, a number of men were killed and a number were seen to be alive in the water or hanging onto wreckage. and that Hegseth told the military to finish them off, that he wanted no survivors. And a second strike came and did kill them. Now, that's my understanding of this current revelation and ongoing controversy, which, if it's true, is really shocking. The last time I think any of us heard about an equivalent kind of behavior, you have to go back almost to World War II. The Japanese or the Germans, machine gunning survivors, you know, of a ship they wrecked in the Pacific or somewhere like that, U-boat behavior.

14:55It's a hallmark example of a war crime. But the idea that our country might be doing this sort of thing, this goes against every law of history. First of all, naval law. If even if it's your enemy, if there's someone in distress at sea, you must help them. This is required. To my knowledge, by the way, going on beyond that particular incident, which frankly, look, I know that Trump says that Hegseth told him that's not true. I didn't order that. However he said it, whether he said kill them all or whether he said I don't want survivors, it wouldn't surprise me coming from this particular person.

15:31I think this person is unbalanced and should not be in that job. And I do think that quite beyond killing survivors after you've struck their ship or their boat in the water being a war crime, the whole panoply of shooting these boats in the water is most certainly some kind of war crime. Apparently, there was one survivor, I don't know whether it was the fourth or fifth or sixth boat that was struck, and everybody was killed except one, and I think he was an Ecuadorian. I don't know the circumstances of how he was plucked out of the water and returned to his homeland, but guess what? he was set free by his government.

16:14Now, President Noboa of Ecuador, I happen to know him, is very law and order. He has openly asked Trump to reopen a military base that a predecessor closed down there to help him fight the country's drug cartels and all the rest of it. Well, if President Noboa, who's seen as a law and order freak, goes to the extent of freeing One of the survivors of the American military strikes, it tells you something. And it may tell you that these men should not be getting killed. Now, the question is, let's say, even if it turns out that Hegseth did order these men killed, and that that would be a war crime, would Trump protect him based on his behavior thus far?

16:59Pardoning other criminals and ignoring calls to see people out of their jobs after egregious behavior? not least his own. I can't see it happening. I think you'll probably double down in the belief, not least, that by owning up to any kind of weakness, that it would just be the slippery slope for him. Yeah, that's certainly the behavior we've seen so far. So I think you're probably right about that. Let's take a quick break. And then when we come back, I want to talk more about drug cartels and this concept of narco-terrorism. This is The Political Scene from The New Yorker.

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18:45So we talked a little bit about this earlier, but I feel like we've seen Trump use his kind of crusade against the drug cartels to justify a bunch of different policies, whether it be the tariffs, you know, kind of invoking the fentanyl trade, which he then used also to, you know, put tariffs on countries like Canada. and, you know, of course, a lot of his immigration policies, you know, this idea that drugs are coming, you know, across the border. And like if Trump actually wanted to take down the cartels and curb the drug trade, what is the way to do that? You know, you mentioned earlier that even putting aside the enormous ethical and legal concerns that striking these boats full of, you know, civilians who are kind of at the lowest end of the totem pole, like that that probably isn't the best way to go about trying to curb the drug trade in Venezuela.

19:37If Trump were acting in good faith, what would that look like, in your opinion? Look, fentanyl is the biggie, right? If fentanyl comes across the border, there are obviously wholesalers. It's not just a retail industry. There's obviously people operating within the United States, Americans and perhaps others, who are physically in the United States who control that industry. Now, I'm unaware of any busts of those sorts of people. Are you? We hear about El Chapo, Chapo's son, and Juan Orlando Hernandez, who, curiously, Trump just decided to free the former president of Honduras, who had been sentenced to 45 years for cocaine distribution in this country.

20:22So who are they? It's something, by the way, that all my Latin American friends ask. It's a refrain in Latin American countries that are besieged by U.S. drug policy. They say, what happens to the drugs when they go to the U.S.? You're the guys who buy them. You're the people who use them. Where are your cartel leaders? Maybe they aren't cartel leaders. Maybe they are, you know, like we've seen in Breaking Bad, you know, some guy that owns a fast food chicken chain. We don't know. But it seems to me that the U.S. itself has been remiss in investigating within its own territory in terms of who controls the illegal drug trade in the United States.

21:05Right. So clearly, then, you know, the next there's another component, which is obviously dealing with our neighbors who are the receptacles or the transshipment points for some of these drugs, for a lot of these drugs, whether it's fentanyl or cocaine. And there you have a kind of mixed bag of American policies that have mostly failed since the drug war was announced by President Nixon in 1970, and therefore begs the question of how to change it, how to make it effective. I think the way Trump is going about it is certainly not effective because bullying tactics, I mean, we know this from history.

21:47It may work in the short term, but it's not going to work in the long term, and it's going to create a lot more enemies than friends. So our DEA, Drug Enforcement Administration, operates in our near beyond, that is to say, let's say, Mexico, Trinidad, Haiti, Colombia, much as our vice cops do in American cities. How is that? Well, Hollywood doesn't have it very far from the truth, actually. They tend to work with one group against another. They get down and dirty, and they do the same in these other countries, unfortunately. I have a friend who investigates, he's an investigative reporter, just a great investigative reporter, Josh Goodman in Miami.

22:28And he goes to all these trials. And I don't know, a few months ago, I called him, I said, what's going on? Because it seemed to me I'd read about the sixth, for the sixth or seventh time, the trial of a DEA agent who was involved in the drug trade himself. And I said, so what's going on with the DEA? And he said, hey, what you see is what you get. It's dirty, man. You know, and this is not some conspiracy theorist. It's a problem with an agency that has almost no oversight and is able to operate internationally. And ultimately, in order to do its work, it partners with people in the underworld to take out other people in the underworld.

23:12And the money that is running through these economies is so vast that inevitably a portion of those agents are paid off, are bought off, just as they are in Mexico, just as they are in Colombia. So it's a problem. Again, one other anecdote to show just how difficult and complex these problems are. President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, who did the FARC, the peace deal with the FARC guerrillas 10 years ago. I went to see President Santos just before he left office. And in our conversation, I congratulated him for this peace deal he'd done. He'd managed to get 15 ,000 armed men and women out of the jungle and reduce the scale of violence in his country hugely.

23:57And he said, yeah, but I'm worried about the growth of the cocaine trade in my country. And this was private. This is 10 years ago. I can say it now. But he said, I think he said it had grown the production nine times during the eight years he was president. So he left office knowing that, yes, he'd reduced guerrilla violence somewhat, but the drug trade was more powerful than ever. And that was in spite of a 10-year or 15-year,$10 billion U.S.-funded Plan Colombia program that had run in the country. And yet under their noses, somehow or other, the drug trade just escalated and escalated and escalated.

24:41So when you hear Trump or Hexas or whoever, Rubio, calling Nicolas Maduro a narco-guerilla, a narco-terrorist, it's just not true. You could have said the same thing about President Santos. So, Nicolas Maduro might know of a minister or a governor or even a general or more who he believes is involved in the drug trade, but how does he move against them? You know, what are the power plays he has to do to pull that off without getting killed or overthrown? It's a mixed bag. Every country has its own quotient of difficulties in dealing with it. Look at the wonderful Claudia Scheinbaum, the president of Mexico.

25:21I'm sure she knows some officials within her government who are involved, but it may not be just a simple matter of moving against them. We're talking about political economies and sovereignties that are vitiated and compromised by illegal drug networks and the underworld itself. And I think you could probably say the same about the United States. We just don't see it as well. I wonder if we can go back to Honduras really quickly. I mean, would you consider Juan Orlando Hernandez a narco president or like how does he fit into all of this? Because I think a lot of people are kind of confused by the fact that while Trump is going, you know, hard against the drug trade and, you know, striking boats in Venezuela, that he would pardon someone who was in prison for drug trafficking offenses.

26:11I mean, the New York Times piece about it was just the lead. It's like it's worth reading. He once boasted that he would stuff the drugs up the gringo's noses. He accepted a one million dollar bribe from El Chapo to allow cocaine shipments to pass through Honduras. A man was killed in prison to protect him. He orchestrated a vast trafficking conspiracy that prosecutors said raked in millions for cartels while keeping Honduras one of Central America's poorest, most violent and most corrupt countries. Yeah. Yeah. So I did a story on Juan Orlando Hernandez four years ago in the magazine while he was still president.

26:45Interesting. He wouldn't talk to me then. But when he was in prison, he began reaching out to tell his side of the story. And I gather he managed to tell it to Roger Stone and a couple of other people who, as we know, are friends of Trump. And then apparently they lobbied Trump to free him, which he has done. Now, without knowing for sure whether Juan Orlando Hernandez, as was being said five years ago, was a drug trafficker, what logic there is to freeing him, I have not grasped, other than what some of his defenders are saying, which is that he was railroaded by the American system, which means the Southern District of New York, right?

27:26That notorious temple of nefarious activity, I guess. That judiciary, the Biden judiciary, the maniac lefty communist who run that part of the judiciary in New York. And it was the lefty friends of the American Democrats that railroaded him because it made them look good and got rid of an ally. Well, it's true that when Trump was in office the first time, he was quite friendly with Juan Orlando Hernandez. And Juan Orlando Hernandez made a lot of noises that he was very friendly and happy with Donald Trump. And he also signed on to Donald Trump's request to make Honduras a partner in the expulsion of migrants from the United States.