{"id":308867,"date":"2025-12-01T12:00:29","date_gmt":"2025-12-01T12:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=308867"},"modified":"2025-12-01T07:34:49","modified_gmt":"2025-12-01T07:34:49","slug":"venezuela-a-not-so-covert-cia-disaster-in-the-making","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/12\/venezuela-a-not-so-covert-cia-disaster-in-the-making\/","title":{"rendered":"Venezuela: A Not-so-covert CIA Disaster in the Making"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

US military aircraft fly over the US navy\u2019s Gerald R Ford Carrier Strike Group, which has been deployed in the Caribbean Sea around Venezuela.
[Handout\/US navy via Reuters]<\/p><\/div>\n

Venezuela doesn\u2019t even produce fentanyl, but Washington is still going forward with regime change efforts in Caracas as part of its \u2018war on drugs\u2019.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

23 Nov 2025\u00a0<\/em>– On Sat, 22 Nov, the Reuters news agency published an exclusive report<\/a> claiming that the United States is \u201cpoised to launch a new phase of Venezuela-related operations in the coming days\u201d. The report cited four US officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. Two of the officials said covert operations would likely be the first step in this \u201cnew action\u201d against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.<\/p>\n

This was less than shocking news given that more than a month ago, US President Donald Trump himself announced that he had authorised the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela \u2013 a rather unique approach since one does not normally broadcast actions that are supposed to be, um, secret.<\/p>\n

Anyway, it\u2019s no secret that the US has been overseeing a massive military build-up in the region with about 15,000 US troops currently stationed there under the guise of fighting \u201cnarcoterrorism\u201d. Since early September, Trump has also presided over wanton extrajudicial executions in the Caribbean Sea, repeatedly ordering the bombing of what he claims are drug-trafficking boats.<\/p>\n

In addition to\u00a0violating both international and US law, the strikes have produced little to show for themselves beyond terrorising local fishermen.<\/p>\n

To be sure, the US has never met a\u00a0\u201cwar on drugs\u201d it didn\u2019t love<\/a>, given the convenient opportunities the whole drug-war narrative offers for wreaking havoc worldwide, militarising the Western Hemisphere, criminalising poor Americans<\/a>\u00a0and all sorts of other good stuff.<\/p>\n

Never mind that US financial institutions have for decades reaped profits from the international drug trade \u2013 or that \u201cThe CIA Drug Connection Is as Old as the Agency,\u201d as an article on The New York Times website puts it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It should come as no surprise by now that the president who campaigned on keeping the US out of wars and then promptly\u00a0bombed Iran<\/a>\u00a0has now found another conflict in which to embroil the country. And as is par for the course in US imperial belligerence, the rationale for aggression against Venezuela doesn\u2019t hold water.<\/p>\n

For example, the Trump administration has strived to pin the blame for the fentanyl crisis in the US on Maduro. But there\u2019s a slight problem \u2013 which is that Venezuela doesn\u2019t even produce the synthetic opioid in question.<\/p>\n

As NBC News and other hardly radical outlets have\u00a0pointed out, Venezuelan drug cartels are focused on exporting cocaine to Europe, not fentanyl to the US.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, on November 13, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth \u2013 pardon, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, as per\u00a0administrative rebranding<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 took to X to\u00a0assure<\/a> his audience that the massive US military build-up off the Venezuelan coast is a mission that \u201cdefends our Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people\u201d.<\/p>\n

This is the same administration, of course, that was just\u00a0threatening to starve<\/a>\u00a0impoverished Americans by withholding essential food assistance, which suggests that the wellbeing of \u201cour people\u201d isn\u2019t really of utmost concern.<\/p>\n

Consider also the fact that Trump slashed federal funding for gun violence prevention programmes in a country where mass shootings<\/a>\u00a0have become a way of life. Obviously,\u00a0massacres in elementary schools<\/a>\u00a0are \u201ckilling our people\u201d in a way that has nothing whatsoever to do with Venezuela.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s so much more fun to blame Maduro for everything, right?<\/p>\n

Poverty itself is a major killer in America \u2013 as is the domestic pharmaceutical industry (speaking of opioids). However, none of these full-blown crises has merited a remotely gung-ho response from the valiant defenders of the Homeland.<\/p>\n

Like his predecessor\u00a0Hugo Chavez<\/a>, Maduro has long been a thorn in the side of US empire \u2013 hence the current campaign to discredit him as a \u201cnarcoterrorist\u201d and thereby set the stage for regime change. He also happens to be a pet target of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is seen as the main architect of Washington\u2019s war plans in Venezuela. Potentially eyeing a presidential bid in three years, Rubio is seeking to curry favour with his Florida constituency, which includes fanatically right-wing members of the Venezuelan and Cuban diasporas.<\/p>\n

According to the Reuters report on impending \u201cVenezuela-related operations\u201d, two of the US officials consulted told the news agency that \u201cthe options under consideration included attempting to overthrow Maduro\u201d.\u00a0If the plans succeeds, Rubio would join the lengthy roster of US politicians who have propagated deadly havoc abroad in the interest of political gains at home.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, The Washington Post reported on Saturday that the White House had \u201cproposed an idea for US military planes to drop leaflets over Caracas in a psychological operation\u201d to pressure Maduro.<\/p>\n

Sounds like a page \u2013 or a leaflet \u2013 out of the old Israeli military playbook<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And as the Trump administration barrels on with its not-so-covert plans for Venezuela, such hemispheric recklessness will secure neither the US homeland nor anyone else\u2019s.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Bel\u00e9n Fern\u00e1ndez is an <\/em>Al Jazeera columnist and <\/em>a contributing editor at <\/em>Jacobin Magazine. She has written for the<\/em> New York Times, London Review of Books, Current Affairs, and<\/em> Middle East Eye, among numerous other publications. She is the author of <\/em>Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021), <\/em>Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World (OR Books, 2019), <\/em>Martyrs Never Die: Travels through South Lebanon (Warscapes, 2016), and <\/em>The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work (Verso, 2011). <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 aljazeera.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On 22 Nov 2025, Reuters reported that the US is \u201cto launch a new phase of Venezuela-related operations in the coming days\u201d. Venezuela doesn\u2019t even produce fentanyl, but Trump goes forward with regime change in Caracas as part of a spurious \u2018war on drugs\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":308868,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[867,3143,2642,1441,417,393,541,559,3324,1190,2137,880,249,557,1892],"class_list":["post-308867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-anglo-america","tag-anti-hegemony","tag-anti-imperialism","tag-big-oil","tag-bullying","tag-coup","tag-latin-america-caribbean","tag-maduro","tag-north-america","tag-regime-change","tag-south-america","tag-state-terrorism","tag-trump","tag-venezuela","tag-war-on-drugs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=308867"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308867\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":308879,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308867\/revisions\/308879"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/308868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}