The U.S. seized a Venezuelan oil tanker on Dec. 9, just over three months since the first U.S. strike on Venezuelan boats alleged to be transporting drugs on Sept. 2, but opposition to U.S. government rhetoric, its attacks and the possibility of regime change is only now growing louder. On Dec. 6, thousands of people protested from Washington DC to Madrid to Buenos Aires. In Washington, some held banners saying “No War on Venezuela,” “Leave Venezuela Alone,” and “No Blood for Oil.” Protestors marched in 65 US cities.
According to a late November YouGov/Economist poll, only 21 percent of U.S. citizens view Venezuela as an “enemy,” 30 percent see it as “unfriendly” and only two percent consider it an “ally.” Only 15 percent of U.S. citizens—five percent of Democrats and 29 percent of Republicans—view the current situation in Venezuela as a “national emergency” for the United States. Forty-five percent of U.S. citizens oppose a US overthrow of Maduro, while 17 percent are in favor of such a plan. A full 70 percent oppose the strikes on boats in the Caribbean and the killing of their occupants.
Republicans in office, however, have voiced loud support. “Without a credible threat of the use of military force, nothing changes in Venezuela,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina in a Dec. 2 post on @x, after Pope Leo XIV, from Chicago, urged the U.S. government to halt the military strikes in Venezuela.
As reports emerged that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth might have issued the order to kill two survivors of the Sept. 2 strike, opposition surged noticeably, especially in US media. The commander responsible for executing the strikes, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, testified before Congress that it was his decision to order the second strike, but the taint of extrajudicial executions has gone straight up the chain of command and affected public opinion.
Perhaps most importantly, criticism has started to come from right-wing circles in the U.S.
“This is an act of a war crime,” said Judge Andrew Napolitano, a legal analyst on the conservative channel Newsmax. Napolitano formerly worked with Hegseth (now referred to by Trump loyalists as the Secretary of War). “Ordering survivors who the law requires to be rescued instead of being murdered–there’s absolutely no legal basis for it. Everybody along the line who did it, from the Secretary of Defense to the admiral to the people who actually pulled the trigger should be prosecuted for a war crime for killing these two people.”
The 22 strikes on small boats in the Caribbean, which Hegseth claims were “narco-boats” without offering evidence, have so far killed at least 87 people. More than 10 U.S. war ships are currently in the Caribbean near Venezuela, suggesting some sort of military strike is imminent or at the very least, that the threat of attacks might be enough to prompt regime change.
“We’re going to start doing those strikes on land, too. You know, the land is much easier…” President Donald Trump reportedly said at a Cabinet meeting on Dec. 2. “And we know the routes they take, and we know everything about them. We know where they live.”
On Nov. 31, Trump announced the closure of the air space over Venezuela. The United Nations has condemned the illegal order. Both Venezuela and the United States are signatories of the Chicago Convention, created in 1944 to guarantee that “every State has complete and exclusive sovereignty over the airspace above its territory.” Numerous national and international law experts have expressed concern regarding the violation of long-established laws and standards.
Venezuelans against intervention
Given the history of Republican animosity toward Venezuelan governments and the knowledge of where this all might lead, members of the Venezuelan diaspora are speaking out. “Like all members of the Venezuelan diaspora, I wish for a peaceful transition to democracy,” says Maria Corina Vegas of the Miami-Dade Democratic Hispanic Caucus. The Caucus has made statements over the years regarding Venezuela and Maduro, but they have not supported armed intervention and have distanced themselves from Trump policies toward the country and toward Venezuelan immigrants in the U.S.
“Donald Trump and his cronies continue to demonstrate their utter disdain for Venezuela and the Venezuelan American diaspora,” reads one statement from November 2024, before Trump won the election. “The facts are clear, Venezuelan gangs are not ravaging the United States and increasing crime rates.”
This rhetoric has boosted the Trump administration’s agenda. It has openly been mulling a military-led removal of the government of Nicolas Maduro since about 2017, although a Washington-backed coup in Venezuela has been a possibility discussed behind the scenes since the 1990s. A 2020 indictment drawn up by U.S. attorneys in the Southern District of New York loosely ties Maduro and some high-ranking Venezuelan generals to drug trafficking—dubbing them the so-called Cartel de Los Soles, a term used to refer to corrupt individuals in military and political circles in Venezuela. “It’s a loose group of people that usually work independently… military and politicians, sometimes they collude with each other… they’re not a cartel per se,” says Mike Vigil, who supervised Venezuela drug cases when he was stationed in Miami with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in the late 90s.
A legal morass and a moral challenge
Secretary of State Marco Rubio strongly supports the indictment. “[Maduro] is into the drug business,” he said in a recent interview with Fox News. “By the way, it’s not me saying it. I’m not just making this up. This was an indictment that came out of the Southern District of New York back in 2020. An indictment. It was undisputed until the President decided to do something about it… We have an indictment by a grand jury. Not by politicians, by a grand jury in the Southern District of New York.”
The State Dept.’s terrorist designation for Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang, issued on Feb. 20, gave the Trump administration a bit of legal leeway in going after boats in Venezuelan waters that was reinforced by the designation of the Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization on Nov. 24. Those designations are disputed by experts in the fields of antiterrorism and counter-narcotics.
Debate over the legality of the strikes continues to rage, but there has been less debate about the morality of the Trump administration’s actions. Using the Transnational Drug Trafficking Act of 2015 (signed by Obama in 2016) and narco-terrorism Patriot Act statutes introduced in the early 00s when George W. Bush was president, any lawyer could justify the arrest of those on the boats. But murdering the crews of boats that might be carrying drugs appears to have become standard operating procedure. “It would be equivalent to a law enforcement person walking to the corner of a street in Chicago and saying, ‘I think you’re a drug trafficker,’ and shooting him in the head,” says Vigil. “It’s against the law, it’s against domestic law, international law and it’s a violation of human rights.”
Trumps’ order to close off airspace in Venezuela was met with shock but relative silence from key opposition voices. “To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY,” Trump posted from his Truth Social account on Nov. 29. Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry called Trump’s comments “another extravagant, illegal and unjustified aggression against the Venezuelan people” and a “colonialist threat.” Regardless, Trump’s threat prompted six airlines — Spain’s Iberia, TAP Air from Portugal, Avianca from Colombia, Latam Airlines Colombia, Turkish Airlines and Gol Airlines from Brazil — to temporarily suspend flights to Venezuela. The Maduro regime, in turn, banned the airlines from landing after they failed to meet the Venezuelan deadline to resume operations. On Dec. 9, two US fighter jets were tracked circling the Gulf of Venezuela, very near Venezuelan air space.
Most of the loudest rhetoric in the United States is still coming from the right. Republican Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar, from Florida, said on Fox that “this is going to be very similar to Panama” before describing how she remembers the U.S. armed invasion in 1989. Salazar, a news reporter who covered Operation Just Cause that toppled Manuel Noriega, said that US Marines were welcomed and lauded for their role, which resulted in the death of a thousand Panamanians and at least 23 U.S. military casualties. “The Marines were walking in and the Panamanian girls were asking them to marry them… I think it’s very similar.”
“I salute President Trump to have the political will to do this.” Salazar called Maduro a “thug” and alleged that he is “good friends with Hezbollah” and that his government provides “uranium to Hamas and to Iran and to North Korea and to Cuba and to Nicaragua. It’s time for the United States to do what we need to do and thank God Trump is doing it.” These claims have not been substantiated. For good measure, Salazar, who says she is in contact with Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, added that toppling Maduro would mean a “windfall for us when it comes to fossil fuels.”
Whether opposition voices will continue to be drowned out by regime-change cheerleaders remains to be seen, but as the U.S. government spends millions more each week on pressuring the Maduro government, the public’s appetite for what could well be a foreign quagmire is waning. On Dec. 3, the Washington Post, which initially reported that Hegseth had personally ordered the second strike on the boat survivors Sept. 2, published a critical column by conservative George Will, another sign that the powerful in Washington are more skeptical of the administration’s actions, even if belatedly.
“Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement,” Will wrote. “The killing of the survivors by this moral slum of an administration should nauseate Americans.”
**Malcolm Beith is a freelance journalist and author based in Arlington, Virginia. He is the author of two books about the drug war: The Last Narco: Inside the Hunt for El Chapo, the World’s Most Wanted Drug Lord, and Hasta El Ultimo Dia.
