Cocaine, War and Stagecraft - What Trump's Caribbean Strike on "Venezuela's Drug Boats" Is Really About

The images are made for the news primetime: a grainy video from a bird's-eye view, a boat in the southern Caribbean Sea, then an explosion. President Trump announces that on his orders US forces sank a smuggler boat belonging to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua - eleven dead. While several US warships cruise off Venezuela's coast, Washington triumphs over a "kinetic strike" against the cartels. Caracas claims AI forgery but provides no proof. And America asks: Is Venezuela really flooding the US with drugs - or is this security policy being played as theater? Those who read the sober data instead of the headlines see a different picture. Venezuela is not a significant producer of cocaine. It is primarily a transit country - a corridor fed by the porous, thousand-kilometer border with Colombia, the world's largest producer. US government estimates in 2020 placed around 200 to 250 tons of cocaine moving through Venezuela annually - roughly a tenth of the global amount. That is a lot, but not the epicenter. Other routes move far more product; in 2018 about 1,400 tons moved through Guatemala according to US data. The geography of logistics is also decisive: the main flow to North America runs through the Pacific. In 2019 around three-quarters of all shipments were registered via the Pacific corridor, primarily from Colombia and Ecuador; the Caribbean was the smaller, though more visible stage. Even with fentanyl - the real killer of the US opioid crisis - Venezuela is little more than a rhetorical lightning rod. The synthetic drug is produced almost entirely in Mexico from precursor chemicals often coming from China. It is proven that cocaine in the US is cut with fentanyl - but the cutting happens in Mexico or on US soil, not in Caracas. So anyone turning a strike on a boat off Venezuela into a strike on the fentanyl epidemic is mainly doing symbolic politics.

That does not mean Venezuela is innocent. The country is riddled with smuggling networks, aided by weak institutions and systemic corruption. US indictments and leaked investigative files from Colombia have for years painted a picture of security forces protecting shipments, accomplices taking bribes and state structures serving as the grease of the trade. In 2020 American prosecutors indicted President Nicolás Maduro for conspiracy to smuggle drugs - together with confidants and military officers, labeled collectively as the Cartel de los Soles. Little of this has been legally proven; politically it works all the more. Experts describe the "cartel" less as a classic drug firm and more as a patronage network: illegal gold, fat state contracts, embezzled aid funds - money flows that buy loyalties and feed the regime. Or, as one longtime Venezuela analyst put it: Maduro keeps the top ranks "fed and quiet."

Does the armada off Venezuela's coast now produce a measurable effect? Militarily, probably not. The cocaine routes are diffuse, adaptable, elastic. The US has spent decades and billions hunting them - the supply chain shifts, it does not dry up. Politically, however, the deployment delivers several dividends at once. Domestically it signals toughness, especially toward South Florida, where Venezuelan and Cuban communities abhor any form of "rapprochement" with Caracas - and where the recent restart of Chevron drilling and deportation flights to Caracas were perceived as betrayal. Abroad it masks contradictions: an oil deal here, a Navy ship there - and suddenly one has again the pose of the unyielding sheriff. But the louder the pose, the louder the legal questions. Under international law the strike is sailing in rough waters. Outside of armed conflicts the high seas are governed by the principle of non-interference. Interventions are narrowly defined: flag states, piracy, emergencies, hot pursuit from territorial waters - and even then non-lethal means must be used first. To justify a drone or missile strike on a suspected smuggler boat as a "drug war measure" is a stretch that numerous international law experts clearly reject. The UN Charter recognizes self-defense - but not the preventive killing strike against criminals in international waters when there is no imminent danger to the forces involved. The line to "extrajudicial, arbitrary killing" here is not thin, it is visible.

Constitutionally it is no less tricky. The president is commander-in-chief, but Congress declares war. Since 2001 the AUMF has served as a rubber clause for operations against groups connected to al-Qaida - Latin American drug gangs do not fall under it. So the White House simply labels the Tren de Aragua an "Foreign Terrorist Organization," links cartel violence with terrorism law and thereby claims a military latitude that the law does not actually provide. The War Powers Resolution requires consultation and reporting duties for hostilities. Whether and how that happened is left open by the Pentagon. Rule of law on call is no rule of law. The accompanying deportation policy also fits the picture of a political double grip. Citing the Alien Enemies Act, the administration recently tried to mass deport Venezuelans without due process - a federal appeals court struck it down because no state of war exists. A military strike in the Caribbean plus aggressive rhetoric about "narco-terrorist" enemies now creates exactly the interpretive corridor needed for the next legal round: an "open conflict" in which executive power grows where parliamentary power is absent. And the ships? They too are part of the staging. An Aegis cruiser like the USS Lake Erie in the Caribbean, plus destroyers like the USS Gravely and USS Jason Dunham, a dock landing ship like the USS Fort Lauderdale - dots on a map meant to signal capability. Whether this presence deters smugglers is doubtful. What is certain: it fulfills the camera angle this White House loves so much.

Reality remains behind the stagecraft. Yes, Venezuela's state is riddled with criminal networks. Yes, the regime has colluded with smugglers and profited. But no, Venezuela is neither the fentanyl heart of the US nor the sole hub of the cocaine flow. Those who reduce drug policy to the geopolitics of an enemy image do not fight causes, but pictures. Prevention, treatment, financial tracking, anti-corruption efforts and international prosecutions are more arduous than a warhead at sea - but they are what works. Trump's strike may pay off politically: it marks strength, shifts the discourse, drowns out the administration's own contradictions between oil licenses and law-and-order pathos. In foreign policy, however, it increases the risk of a dangerous precedent - of an America that executes at will, without war mandate, without clear legal basis, in international waters. Those who bend international rules for what is useful should know that other powers will do the same - and that they will cite this day in the future. The question of whether Venezuela is flooding the US with drugs is the wrong one. The right one is: Do the US want to solve the drug crisis - or use the drug crisis? The difference decides whether politics saves lives or just writes stories. A boat silhouette burned in the Caribbean, a narrative in Washington. The number of dead in America will be measured by neither.