The president justifies deadly military strikes against America’s deadly overdoses. However, Venezuela has been linked to cocaine, which is far less deadly than fentanyl.
Venezuelan Congress to investigate death toll from US ship collision
Venezuela’s Congress will create a special committee to investigate U.S. President Donald Trump’s deadly attacks on suspected drug-trafficking vessels off the Venezuelan coast and in the eastern Pacific Ocean, the president of the congress announced on November 30.
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump and his allies have accused Venezuela and alleged criminal networks operating on its soil, such as the Cartel de los Soles, of flooding the United States with deadly drugs, justifying a deadly military attack on a suspected drug-smuggling vessel from Venezuela.
“This mission is to protect our homeland, to rid the hemisphere of narco-terrorists, to protect our homeland from the drugs that are killing our people,” Secretary of the Army Pete Hegseth said on November 13, officially naming the mission Operation Southern Spear.
In August, the United States doubled its reward for information leading to the arrest of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to an unprecedented $50 million over his alleged ties to drug trafficking and organized crime. In a video message, Attorney General Pam Bondi denounced Maduro as “one of the world’s largest drug traffickers and a threat to our national security” and explained the bounty at the time.
President Trump and administration officials say that’s reason enough to launch attacks on U.S. forces that have killed at least 87 people in recent months, including two men clinging to the wreckage after surviving the first airstrike on Sept. 2 that killed nine other suspected smugglers. They claim it even justifies a potential attack on Venezuelan soil, which President Trump has hinted could happen soon.
However, U.S. and United Nations drug data show that Venezuela is not, and has never been, a producer or exporter of the lab-made synthetic opioid fentanyl, and that fentanyl plays a relatively minor role in the far less lethal cocaine trade.
Venezuela does not produce fentanyl
“On average, 25,000 people die on a single boat. Some say more,” Trump told U.S. military commanders in September. “As you can see, these boats are loaded with bags of white powder, but most of it is also fentanyl and other drugs.”
But Mexico is listed as a major, and virtually the only, bulk producer and exporter of fentanyl, with Chinese peddlers sending small quantities through the mail, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and other international and U.S. counter-drug organizations.
The opioid, which is 50 times more powerful than heroin, is made from precursor chemicals produced almost entirely in China and used by chemists in Mexican drug cartels to make a variety of pills, powders and other products for the U.S. market.
According to the DEA’s 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s 2025 Annual Threat Assessment, Mexico-based transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), specifically the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG in Spanish), are the primary suppliers of illicit drugs, including fentanyl, to the U.S. market and Congress. The Bureau of Investigation made this known in an explanatory document sent to members of Congress on August 26th. “Within the past six years, Mexico’s TCO has acquired the ability to manufacture illicit fentanyl in Mexico,” the Congressional Independent Investigations Division concluded. “They reportedly use pill compression machines, often imported from China, to manufacture counterfeit medicines, including fentanyl and methamphetamine and veterinary drugs.”
Many of the victims are young people taking what they believe to be other recreational drugs or painkillers, but actually contain potentially lethal doses of fentanyl, which is only about the size of a grain or two of rice.
more: Is President Trump’s attack on Venezuelan ships legal? Why Democrats want answers.
Venezuela plays a key role in trafficking cocaine grown and processed in Colombia and other parts of Latin America.
But the white powder, popular among recreational drug users in the United States since the 1920s, is responsible for at most a small percentage of overdose deaths in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control found that 74,702 of the 107,543 overdose deaths in the United States in 2023 involved synthetic opioids, usually fentanyl.
President Trump doesn’t seem to differentiate between cocaine and fentanyl, but according to the CDC, the number of drug overdose deaths from cocaine rose from 12,122 in 2015 to 59,725 in 2023. That’s because nearly 70% of recent deaths were caused by a mixture of cocaine and fentanyl.
What role does Venezuela play in drug trafficking?
Available data suggests that Venezuela is not a major source of cocaine and other major drugs destined for the United States, especially fentanyl.
Rather, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s (UNODC) World Narcotics Report 2025, it is considered to be primarily a transit point for cocaine, and in that respect is considered small, given that most of the drugs coming from Andean countries do not primarily pass through Venezuelan ports.
Both UNODC and DEA say the majority of the world’s cocaine continues to be produced in Colombia, with smaller amounts coming from Peru and Bolivia. Some human trafficking rings have moved at least some of their operations to neighboring Venezuela in response to Washington’s multibillion-dollar Plan Colombia crackdown.
more: Why is President Trump threatening attacks? Explaining tensions between the US and Venezuela
And as Venezuela completely ignores the UN report, the latest US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) assessment of fentanyl is flowing into the US.
The DEA report says fentanyl destined for the United States is transported north from Mexico using a network of smugglers and other intermediaries.
“Beginning around 2019, Mexico reportedly replaced the People’s Republic of China (PRC, or China) as the primary source of illicit fentanyl bound for the United States,” the CRS report said.
This report and other reports by the DEA and the United Nations typically do not mention Venezuela at all when discussing fentanyl flows into the United States. Republican staff on the Senate Homeland Security Committee also omitted Venezuela entirely in their major 51-page report, “Addressing the Synthetic Drug Supply Chain in the United States,” released in December 2022.
Critics of Trump’s policies say the president is conflating the two drugs to assert sweeping judge, jury and executioner powers that have previously been used only against terrorist groups intent on killing Americans after the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaeda attacks that killed about 3,000 people.
Legal experts say the attack raises increasingly urgent and unanswered questions about whether President Trump violated domestic and international law.
President Trump and his top officials have painted Venezuela as a “narco-terrorist” nation whose government-affiliated criminal networks pose a national security threat to the United States.
The administration designated the Venezuelan criminal organization Torren de Aragua and the Cartel de los Soles, a loose network of corrupt military officials accused of drug trafficking, as terrorist organizations under Executive Order 14157.
That executive order, issued in January, is officially titled “Designating Cartels and Other Organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorist Organizations.” The system aims to sanction transnational cartels that “constitute a national security threat beyond that posed by traditional organized crime.”
The order, Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued on August 8, gives the government the authority to treat designated cartels (including small boat smugglers who are likely carrying cocaine rather than fentanyl) as “armed terrorist organizations, not just drug-trafficking organizations.”
Trump was even more rhetorical.
President Trump said his administration was prepared to explain the attack to lawmakers after Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky publicly expressed concerns that the attack amounted to an illegal “extrajudicial killing.”
But on October 23, President Trump said there was no reason to ask them for Congressional approval.
Instead of asking Congress to “declare war,” President Trump said, “I think we’re just going to kill the people who are bringing drugs into our country. … They’re going to be like, dead.”
President Trump added, “Land is next.”
Trump also referenced a 2020 Justice Department first-term indictment that accused Maduro of collaborating with Colombia’s leftist guerrilla group FARC and using cocaine as a weapon against the United States.
“President Trump promised to fight cartels during his campaign and took unprecedented action to stop the scourge of narco-terrorism that has resulted in the needless deaths of innocent Americans,” White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly told USA TODAY. “All of these decisive strikes were against designated narco-terrorists who bring deadly poison to our shores, and the President will continue to use every element of American power to stop the flow of drugs into our country.”
Are Venezuelan criminal organizations trafficking drugs?
Cocaine typically travels north from Colombia through Central America and reaches the United States via the eastern Pacific and Caribbean shipping routes.
According to the UNODC Trafficking Map, a small portion of cocaine passes through Venezuela, particularly for shipments to the Caribbean and Europe. But the map shows virtually no cocaine heading from Venezuela’s coast to the United States.
Rather, maritime routes that bypass Venezuela entirely have historically been far more dominant in transporting cocaine to Mexico, where Mexican cartels smuggle it into the United States by various means.
Over the past several decades, the US-designated Cartel de los Soles has been involved in a variety of corrupt activities, including cocaine trafficking, usually in collaboration with the FARC.
Sacred Visitor London London London and Hugo “El Paul” Barrios Barrios.
Torren de Aragua, who has long been maligned by President Trump, has been implicated in a number of crimes, including extortion, extortion, drug and human trafficking conspiracies, and firearms crimes.
During last year’s presidential campaign, Mr. Trump repeatedly warned about the threat of Torren de Aragua to American society and used its association with some low-level crime to strengthen his case for mass deportations of illegal immigrants from Venezuela.
more: What does it mean that the US has designated Venezuela as a “Cartel de los Soles” terrorist group?
Some U.S. officials consider many offshoots of the group to be violent and locally influential. However, available international drug tracking data does not support claims that they are significantly involved in cocaine smuggling into the United States.
There is also conflicting evidence as to whether the group is working with President Maduro, as the Trump administration claims, or is hostile to the regime.
Last July, President Maduro said at a police ceremony that Venezuela had “ended Torren de Aragua.”
And last year, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Ivan Gil declared that Torren de Aragua no longer exists, according to Insight Crime, a think tank and media organization specializing in organized crime investigations in the Americas.
“We have proven that Torren de Aragua is a fiction created by international media to create a label that does not exist,” Gil was quoted as saying.
