Denials and Defiance Shape Venezuela’s Response to U.S. Threats on Drugs
With U.S. warships in the Caribbean to stop Venezuelan cocaine shipments, Caracas claims it knows nothing about the trafficking of drugs
By Juan Forero and Kejal Vyas
Vladimir Padrino Lopez, Venezuela’s Defense Minister, speaks at a press conference. Photo: stringer/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesBOGOTÁ, Colombia—Venezuela’s generals say they are deploying thousands of troops to battle drug traffickers.
State television is broadcasting images of militia members training for combat.
And the U.S.’s deadly strike on a boat allegedly carrying drugs from Venezuela provoked a tart response.
Authorities have called it a hoax.
President Nicolás Maduro and his circle of ministers and military are constructing an alternate reality since the U.S. began a military buildup in the Caribbean and threatened to target narcotics traffickers in Venezuela and its waters.
The U.S. show of force came to a head last week when U.S. officials said an American airstrike killed 11 people on a boat headed toward Trinidad and Tobago.
The U.S. alleges that Maduro and his allies are deeply intertwined with drug trafficking through Venezuela.
Maduro has a $50 million American bounty on him for narcoterrorism charges.
The Venezuelans, though, say that drug trafficking in their country is a fiction cooked up by imperialists in Washington.
It is the Americans who fuel the trade by consuming drugs, they say, and the Trump administration is practicing psychological warfare against Venezuela.
“Imperialism always lies, lies, lies,” Maduro said in a televised address.
“They’re always coming up with Hollywood narratives.”
In recent days, state television and the ruling socialist party’s social-media accounts have bombarded viewers with videos of elderly militia members and youth activists climbing ropes and crossing obstacle courses to train for battle.
“The Fatherland will live on,” three aging recruits shout in one of the propaganda videos, holding their fists up in the air.
The recurring theme is that Maduro’s regime is an implacable foe of drug traffickers, shooting down aircraft and sealing borders.
Standing before a map of the country in one video, Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino outlined how he was moving soldiers to the borders to battle drug traffickers and other threats.
“No one is going to do the work for us,” said Padrino, decked out in army campaign gear and speaking before top military brass in a bunker draped with a camouflaged tarp.
“No one is going to step on this land to do what we should do.”
In another video edited with dramatic music, Venezuelan antinarcotics police walk on a beach and suddenly find a plastic-wrapped bale in the surf.
Cutting it open with a knife, they find smaller envelopes each bearing a label of “cannabis.”
The cocaine trade, though, has been substantial in Venezuela since the early 2000s when Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez, was in power, according to U.S. court documents and interviews with American and Colombian prosecutors and government officials.
“They can’t show that they fight narco-trafficking because they’re in that business,” said a former high-level informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, or DEA.
Powerful cocaine traffickers, among them leaders of Colombia’s North Valley Cartel and commanders of Colombian rebel groups, relocated to Venezuela under military pressure in Colombia.
High-ranking government officials, including Venezuelan generals and ministers, allied themselves with those groups to move cocaine produced in Colombia aboard northbound light aircraft, boats, semisubmersible vessels and other craft.
Several were later indicted in the U.S.
“There was money to be made,” said Walter Norkin, a defense attorney with Akrivis Law in Miami who worked on cases against Venezuela’s leaders as a federal prosecutor.
“It’s become a bigger part of the economy as the U.S. has tightened sanctions. More people have gotten involved at all levels of government.
It’s more pervasive.”
Chavez himself ordered top lieutenants in the mid-2000s to work with Colombian guerrillas to flood the U.S. with cocaine as part of his efforts to combat the then-Bush administration, according to documents prepared by federal prosecutors in New York.
Jeremy McDermott, co-director of the research group InSight Crime, said Maduro’s inner circle has sought relationships with criminal groups—from drug- to gold-smuggling gangs—to compensate for falling oil income while maintaining the regime’s patronage network.
McDermott estimated that some 500 tons of cocaine—nearly 20 percent of the drug produced in Colombia—moves through Venezuela before shipment to the U.S., Europe and elsewhere.
“We’re seeing a diversification of routes,” said McDermott, noting that trafficking disruptions through Venezuela could increase flows through northern Brazil and other adjacent countries.
“Drugs are like water, they follow the path of least resistance,” he said.
The DEA said about 5% of all Colombian cocaine—some 150 metric tons—passed through Venezuela, enough to consider it a “significant cocaine transit country.”
So-called “go-fast” boats, often outfitted with three or four powerful outboard engines, transport cocaine north to the Dominican Republic or other islands, then on to Puerto Rico or the Bahamas before transport to the U.S., the DEA said.
Other routes include Central America and Mexico before sale in American cities.
“Whether it’s 1,000 metric tons, or 5000 metric tons, he is one of the largest dictator drug traffickers, drug dealers, narco-terrorists, that is destabilizing the Western Hemisphere,” said the DEA’s administrator, Terrance Cole, referring to Maduro.
Cole said Maduro collaborates with gangs, including the Tren de Aragua.
It was members of that prison-based organization, U.S. officials said, who were aboard the boat struck last week after it departed from the fishing town of San Juan de Unare, where residents say drug trafficking has proliferated.
Members of the National Bolivarian Militia gather after responding to the president’s call to defend national sovereignty amid escalating tensions with the U.S. Photo: juan carlos hernandez/ReutersJuan Gonzalez, former senior Latin America adviser in the Biden administration, said the deployment of American warships appears to be “a short term political show” because halting drug flows requires the U.S. to sustain a costly deployment.
“As soon as they remove those ships, the trafficking will just start up again,” Gonzalez said.
Brian Naranjo, a retired senior State Department official who served two tours in Caracas, said the U.S.’s buildup would also do little to offset drug overdoses at home because the main source of the problem is fentanyl coming from Mexico.
He also said Maduro is trying to reap political capital as he portrays himself defending Venezuelan sovereignty.
“If their intention is to topple Maduro, it’s not working,” Naranjo said.
“It’s bolstering him.
Now he can point to a real threat, someone shot a first shot in anger.”
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