Is Trump going to war with Venezuela?

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:06Today, why is Trump sending warships to the Caribbean?

0:17It started with a video, an aerial shot in grainy black and white of a fishing boat travelling through the waters off the coast of Venezuela. Suddenly there's a flash of light and the boat is just gone. Andrew Roth, The Guardian's global affairs correspondent, knew this US airstrike was the start of something big. We had seen these kinds of strikes before and we've seen them as Americans for years and decades now, but often that is many thousands of miles away, far across the ocean where US forces have been sent. My first thought was basically that this is Afghanistan or this is Iraq come to the Western Hemisphere.

0:58That was September 2nd. Since then, 18 more boats that we know of have been blown out of the water, killing at least 76 people. Donald Trump, who ordered the strikes, says he's acting to protect the American people from so-called narco-terrorists. We're just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK? OK, we're going to kill them, you know? They're going to be, like, dead. OK.

1:27The International Criminal Court has denounced these killings as illegal, but they were only the beginning. Trump's now ordered the biggest US naval deployment in the Caribbean since the Cuban Missile Crisis. He's sent aircraft carriers, 10 ,000 troops, And there's a$50 million bounty on the head of the Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, who's mobilizing his own army. From The Guardian, I'm Annie Kelly. Today in Focus. Is Trump going to war with Venezuela?

2:05So, Andrew, all of this started with the boats. 76 people have been killed. How has Trump justified these strikes? First of all, Trump has said that these boats are smuggling fentanyl into the United States. The U.S. is in the midst of a major fentanyl crisis right now. It's something you can see throughout the country. And one thing that he said is that Venezuela is a major conduit for fentanyl to the United States and that we're targeting these boats, not just as, you know, necessarily drug smugglers, but as members of a foreign terrorist organization, you know, that basically is waging war.

2:42against the United States. The president has directed these actions, these strikes against Venezuelan drug cartels and these boats, consistent with his responsibility to protect the United States' interests abroad. Second of all, he said that they're involved in people smuggling as well. He's pointed to certain gangs, which he says that Venezuela's leader, Nicolas Maduro, is a member of. So I think that when a lot of journalists, including myself, heard that, the immediate thought was, OK, this seems to be a pretext for these strikes. What is this actually leading toward? And what this much more seems to be the case is that Donald Trump is much more focused on increasing pressure on Nicolas Maduro and looking at the possibility of regime change in Venezuela.

3:24This isn't the first time that Trump has tried to kind of strongman his way into Venezuela and challenge Maduro. Can you tell me a bit about how his approach to Venezuela has shifted from his first administration compared to what's happening now? Right. Donald Trump has actually used different approaches in terms of how he's challenged Maduro since his first term. But one thing is clear, Nicolas Maduro has always been an irritant to Donald Trump. Part of that is ideological. Maduro is, you know, a leftist and Donald Trump clearly leads a kind of right wing administration in the U.S. There's very strong anti-communist, anti-socialist views here as well.

4:02You can just look at the recent election of Zoran Mondani in New York to see the kind of reaction that the Trump administration has had. So there's always been an interest in the Trump administration of getting Maduro out. But during the first term, Donald Trump threw his support in behind Juan Guaido, who was the head of the opposition movement in Venezuela, who claimed, with some evidence, the 2019 election in that country was stolen and established a kind of parallel government. And the big backer of that parallel government was the United States. Maduro is an illegitimate ruler, a tyrant who brutalizes his people.

4:39But Maduro's grip on tyranny will be smashed and broken. Joining us in the gallery is the true and legitimate president of Venezuela, Juan Guaido. Mr. President... The problem was that Guaido didn't prove to be an effective opponent of Maduro. They weren't really able to oust him. In fact, he seemed to make his administration stronger. and it made the Trump administration seem pretty feckless and ineffective. So by the end of the Trump administration, he was actually in talks that were being held in secret with members of Maduro's team talking about the idea of a negotiated exit for Maduro in the future.

5:19You know, could they allow him to leave office but maybe give him a comfortable exile somewhere, make it possible to negotiate regime change in Venezuela? All that ended when, you know, Donald Trump lost the elections famously and was cast into the political wilderness. So Maduro's people exited those talks and that was the end of that. OK, and so what happened when Trump came back to the White House this year? There was an approach at first to try to negotiate once again with Venezuela. Rick Grinnell, who is a special advisor to Donald Trump, actually went down to Venezuela, negotiated with Maduro's people, brought back six Americans who were being held in jail there.

5:58And crucially, he also agreed that Venezuela would take deportation flights from the United States. ...directives from the president of the United States. Number one, Rick Grinnell has been instructed to identify a place and ensure that repatriation flights of Trendy Aragua members, Venezuelan nationals who have broken our nation's laws, will land in... So basically, the US wants to deport migrants, it doesn't know where, and is negotiating with countries around the world to take them in. So for Donald Trump, this is a very big priority. And it looked for a little while like there might be, you know, some kind of negotiations or even a kind of detente between Donald Trump and Maduro on this.

6:41But in the ensuing months, the debate within the administration changed. And why is that? What happened? I think Donald Trump got tired of trying to deal with Maduro. You know, the deportation flights were not happening quickly enough. He didn't feel like he was getting enough respect. And he turned away from listening to people who talked about negotiations and started thinking a lot more about, you know, how can I get this done more quickly, maybe by using the U.S. military. So at the end of August and early September, there was a sudden shift and there was a meeting in the Oval Office where Donald Trump got Rick Grinnell on the phone and basically tells Rick Grinnell, you know, the negotiating has been good, thank you, but we're going to try something else now.

7:23And that is basically days before the first strikes against the boats take place.

7:36Right, so from what you're saying, it sounds like this potentially warmer chapter in Trump-Maduro relations is over now. seemingly over this inability to reach a deal over the migrant deportations from the US. And in recent weeks, we've seen things really escalate. How serious is this? From the US perspective, the situation is very serious. I mean, this is the biggest buildup of US military strength in the Caribbean since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. You know, the most aggressive use of American military force in the region since 1989, since the invasion of Panama. So it's an extremely serious situation.

8:13I mean, there is a U.S. aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, 10 ,000 soldiers that are already in the region. That includes, you know, various ships, soldiers stationed in Puerto Rico, where they are rebuilding American military bases, landing strips as well to serve as a base for, you know, air power. U.S. Special forces have been conducting operations off the coast of Venezuela, the same ones that were, you know, doing operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries like that. So these are very, you know, serious assets the U.S. is putting at play. U.S. drones are making flights. U.S.

8:50heavy bombers have also been flying off the coast. These are the same kinds of bombers that launched those strikes in Iran. That's a place earlier in the administration. So, you know, from the U.S. perspective, this is an incredibly large buildup of American military strength. Venezuela has responded by also, you know, bracing itself for an attack. We saw reports earlier that Maduro announced that, you know, his forces had 5 ,000 IGLA anti-missile systems. Those are usually used to take down lower flying aircraft. So they're bracing themselves for an attack and the U.S. is positioning itself at least for some kind of a strike.

9:24Like, whether or not this could be a full invasion is a different question. The US loves to have overwhelming force to protect its soldiers. And that would be something like, you know, 100 ,000 soldiers in the region. We're not quite there yet, but this is very close to unprecedented for the last 50 or 60 years.

9:53Tom Phillips, you're The Guardian's Latin America correspondent and you have reported from Venezuela through your career at The Guardian. Trump talks a lot about Venezuela being a crime capital, Nicolás Maduro as some kind of cartel drug boss. Is there any truth in all of that? I think a lot of people are very sceptical about the depth of the accusation, right? The accusation that he is the head of this narco-terrorist cartel and that he has weaponised the Tren de Aragua, which is a regional criminal gang, to invade the United States and flood the US with drugs. I think what's without doubt when you talk to people who know Venezuela is that over the last few years, Maduro has allowed huge amounts of illegal activity to proliferate under his authoritarian regime involving very senior members of the military.

10:42But a lot of people doubt actually whether this cartel of the sons in fact exists or whether it's just a sort of an umbrella term for very widespread corruption involving the military and illegal drug trafficking, illegal smuggling, illegal mining that have really blossomed over the last few years because of the economic crisis in Venezuela. Maduro took power in 2013 after the death of his mentor Hugo Chavez. And since then, Venezuela has suffered an absolutely historic economic collapse, from which it's recovered slightly in the past couple of years, but has been one of the worst ever economic collapses outside wartime.

11:23Venezuela already has the world's highest inflation, and it looks like the economic crisis there is about to get even worse. The International Monetary Fund projects the country's inflation rate will rise to an incomprehensible 1 million percent by the end of the year. And as a result, these kinds of illegal opportunities, running drug routes, smuggling, all manner of nefarious activity have become ways of helping your senior military officials, generals, etc. line their pockets because their salaries are frankly not very high because the government is cash strapped. But Venezuela is not a cocaine producer.

12:03The three top cocaine producers in South America are Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. It is not even thought to be the major cocaine smuggling route north to the US. Ventanil is not coming from Venezuela at all. It's coming through Mexico. So it all feels like a pretext for something quite different. Now, Maduro has publicly tried to laugh this off. I saw recently he said, oh, I'm as famous as Taylor Swift. I'm famous like Bad Bunny.

12:38But he must surely feel now that he is in the crosshairs and at the eye of a very troubling storm. And I mean, what is this moment like for Maduro politically? We would love to know firsthand. The last time I was in Venezuela was August last year, following the election that he is widely believed to have stolen. And it's very hard to get visas and many journalists are currently trying to get visas to go back into Venezuela. But 99.9 % of us have not had any luck. So it's really hard to get a sense of the mood on the ground or the mood around him to speak to people who are close to him. But what imagines he is, certainly nervous as you would be if you had one seventh of the US Navy lurking off your country's northern coast and aware that over the past few years, there have, of course, been several plots, some with US backing.

13:31to remove you from power, and that presumably there is conspiracy everywhere you look, and you're constantly trying to fend that off. And do we know how popular he is with the people? I think based on what we saw in the election last year, at the end of July 24, very, very unpopular. There's basically no doubt, given the data that the Venezuelan opposition provided in the wake of that election, that he lost, he lost badly all over the country. It was an absolute landslide. So very unpopular. I remember being in Caracas. I remember touching down just a few hours after the vote. And the city was in a complete state of upheaval.

14:10There were on the road from the airport into town, there were the remnants of burning barricades, because people had come down from the poor communities above to protest, to demand that he leave. And that had kind of been forgotten until August, when this big, renewed US push for change starts gaining strength. And three, nearly four months on, we're now faced with a very strange moment where it feels that at once we could be potentially on the verge of a war, the likes of which we've not seen in South America before, or some say actually complete normalisation of Venezuela-US ties because Trump will do a complete handbrake turn and strike a deal and build Trump International Hotel in Canaigas amidst its beautiful brutalist architecture.

14:59So, you know, you could frankly imagine either at this point.

15:11How scared do you think people feel inside Venezuela about the build-up of huge US military presence. In many countries across the region, there is real regional nationalism. And the idea of a US intervention appals people, even Maduro's biggest critics. But there are those on the hard line of the Venezuelan opposition, who frankly think they've spent so long trying to get rid of a man who has become a dictator, that they think the only way to get rid of him would be an operation like Operation Just Cause, which was the US invasion of Panama in 89. But I think many, many people are just so tired of economic distress of the grind of living in a country where it is so difficult to feed your family to buy medicine to get by where half your family has gone overseas and they've been disappointed so many times before when they've thought change was finally around the corner and it hasn't come i think they probably just don't believe any of this is real they probably just think they just ignore it and they've got more you know got daily issues to get on with and they think it's just a load of smoke and mirrors that once again will probably lead to nothing.

16:23So Tom, you just mentioned the US invasion of Panama in 1989, so-called Operation Just Cause, which is when the US got rid of the President Manuel Noriega, also on the pretext of being a drug trafficker. Last night I ordered US military forces to Panama. No president takes such action lightly.

16:50Do you think we might be about to see something similar? I think there's a consensus amongst both Americans and Venezuelans who I speak to that there is almost no chance of an actual US invasion. Operation Just Cause in 1989 involved something like 25 ,000 troops. I spoke the other day to the former US ambassador to Caracas and he said it's not going to happen, it's not Trump style and to invade a country the size of Venezuela, which is 12 times bigger than Panama, you would need 100 ,000 troops. Well, they don't have that available at the moment. And it frankly doesn't go along with the MAGA movement, not wanting to put boots on the ground stick.

17:24What people can imagine and do anticipate is that in the next month or so, we might go from the strikes we've seen on boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific to strikes on land. We don't know who they might target. are they going to target alleged narco airstrips or jungle camps? Or as someone I spoke to wondered, are they going to target major military installations like a naval base or an air force base in Maracay? Or as one former US diplomat said to me, perhaps they might even target very prominent and powerful allies of Maduro, although not Maduro himself, in order to send the message.

18:07And that message, this person said to me, would be, you've got two hours, you're done, get out, get on a plane and go. So might that be the card that Trump has up his sleeve, because clearly he doesn't want to commit troops into what potentially could be a very bloody and dangerous conflict. It's a game of chicken. They are trying to get Maduro to jump ship. But you know, he's a political survivor. He's shown this. He has survived several rounds of mass protests, assassination attempts, losing an election, and pressure campaigns from the US before. So one imagines that part of him and those around him, part of their thinking at the moment is we just need to ride this out.

18:48Trump is a paper tiger. And if we get past Christmas or into the new year, and then closer to midterms next year, perhaps Trump will just forget about it, move on. And, you know, hey, perhaps strike a deal with us. Because certainly there have been talks going on, back-channel talks between the Trump administration and Maduro and his people. Do you think he could be overthrown domestically? Do you think the army could turn against him or Venezuelans could kind of rise up and get rid of him if they think that the US threat is credible enough or that's given them the impetus they need to act? It's such an unstable situation.

19:25He has done a very good job, experts say, of coup-proofing his regime. So the way he has arranged the armed forces, the leadership with purges, exiles have said with campaigns of torture, with arrests, embedding all these Cuban and Venezuelan spies within the different parts of the military, and of course, giving military chiefs control of illegal industries, that he seems fairly well protected. None of the mutinies or coup attempts against him have thus far worked. But it's not a great situation to be in, frankly, to be constantly fending these kinds of things off. One of the most revealing moments I've had up close with him came last year after this election.

20:11One was that we were all summoned to the Supreme Court a couple of days after, and he presented their version of the election. And of course, under that version, they'd won. And he stood in front of a group of us reporters and sort of claim victory and you know said everything was jolly good and onwards and he seemed to have a nervous tick and I noticed it because I have the same nervous tick and I did it at my wedding and my wife was furious with me as he was talking he stood on the sides of his feet so the middle part of his foot was raised in the air and he kept moving his feet up and down and I saw in that a sign that this is a man who is feeling the pressure he obviously hadn't slept very well after that election result but now I think he's probably standing on the edges of his feet again nervously because he's thumbing his nose to the most powerful military in the world.

20:57And it's not clear that his allies, China, Russia, will truly come to his rescue. I think he's very isolated. And if I were in his shoes, certainly I would be standing on the edges of my feet. And I imagine all of this must also be spooking other countries in the region as well. We've seen Trump becoming more interventionist. I mean, he just bailed out Malay and Argentina to the tune of billions and billions of dollars, there's this now really pretty overt desire to get rid of Maduro. How is the rest of Latin America feeling about this whole situation? I think really, really worried about it. A very clear sign of that is that here in Brazil, Brazil's president, Luiz Anastalula da Silva, is hosting the COP30 climate summit here in the Amazon at the moment.

21:42And just as that started a few days ago, he flew to Colombia to take part in a regional summit, essentially ducking out of this massive event that Brazil is hosting to try and deal with this situation, to try and formulate some kind of regional position. Brazil are not happy with Maduro. Lula and Maduro, I don't think, have a good relationship. But the worry about a US intervention is even, you know, I think it goes beyond that. Brazil has a very big border with Venezuela. So I think the Brazilians are very worried about the potential for conflict. The border with Colombia, of course, is extremely complex.

22:11Countries across South America have been dealing with huge numbers of Venezuelan migrants coming in over the last few years. It's been a really desperate humanitarian situation. And some countries, I think like Brazil, to its credit, has done a very good job of trying to integrate hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans. But these countries cannot cope with yet another wave of what is already an absolutely historic Latin American migration. The Colombian president, as well as Furious, isn't he? I know that he said that he thought Trump should face criminal charges for his strikes on the boats. A Colombian national was killed, weren't they, relatively recently on a boat?

22:46Yeah, and he's called it murder. And, you know, actually, Lula's been clear that those are extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean on these boats. Although most countries, I think, have so far tempered their criticism. It has not been full-throated. But I think a direct US intervention in Venezuela might change that. Coming up, who are the people whispering war into Trump's ear?

23:29Hello, I'm Max Rushton, an Englishman in Australia, the host of the Guardian Football Weekly Podcast, but for the next few months, I'm also bringing you a new show, the Guardian Ashes Weekly. And I'm Geoff Lemon, Guardian Australia's cricket writer. In the coming weeks, I'll be travelling all around Australia to every Ashes test city to follow the battle for cricket's oldest, grandest prize. We'll be watching every ball, every nick, every catch, every cover drive, every bit of sandpaper, you know, you know. And every terrible joke that doesn't need to be repeated that many times. We'll have all the best commentary, we'll have all the best analysis from Guardian cricket experts in England, in Australia, coming to you.

24:06So join me and Geoff throughout the series for every episode of the Guardian's Ashes weekly on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. So Andrew Trump came into office pledging that he would end wars. He's been positioning himself as a global peacemaker. But here he is threatening military action against Venezuela, one of the US's close neighbours. What he's doing seems very at odds with his America First policy and must not be going down that well with much of his base. So why is he doing this? Donald Trump is very strongly influenced, we think, by the last person that he's spoken to. And at the moment, the people who are at the top of his administration are urging him and saying that, you know, this is something that we can do, if not a land invasion, because he might not have the assets, at least try to put enough pressure so that Maduro is pushed out of power.