What’s Happening with Venezuela and the US? EXPLAINER

Written By Leeja Miller

Sources:

Transcript:

Welcome to Why, America? I’m Leeja Miller. In the last 9 months of doing this work, following the tactics of the Trump regime as it erodes our democracy, my mental health has been, let’s just say, unstable. In the past few months I’ve reached a kind of balance through sheer force of my compartmentalization capabilities. But occasionally things still break through that wall, and a new article published today in the New Yorker did just that. The article is titled Enemies of the State: how the Trump administration declared war on Venezuelan migrants in the US, by Jonathan Blitzer. It describes not only the political steps Trump has taken to target immigrants in this country, especially Venezuelan ones, but it also follows individuals and their accounts of being detained, shackled, beaten, and sent to CECOT, including their treatment on the ground at CECOT, that terrorist prison in El Salvador. If you are a human being with any feelings left, reading that article it is impossible not to feel empathy, to think what if it was my partner, taken by masked men, disappeared, with no idea where he is until you see footage of men in shackles thousands of miles away being forcibly bent over to get their heads shaved, and you recognize him in the line up of people. What if it was me sent there, with shackles so tight it caused my limbs to go numb. “Don’t fall” the New Yorker reports the guards would taunt. Quote “Whenever one of the men did, guards would lift him up not by his limbs but by the cuffs. Blood and vomit sloshed on the floor, and some of the men fainted from the pain and the stress. … The monotony of their time in the cells was broken only by punishments: beatings, mainly, but also whole nights in which they were required to sit in stress positions facing a wall, with their hands behind their necks.” It’s impossible not to feel a deep sense of dread and panic, reading those words, and envisioning the level of mental despair a person would experience in that situation. That is what this Trump regime is doing to people, with zero evidence that they had committed any crime and, even if they had, in contravention of international and domestic laws against cruel and unusual punishment, against torture. But anyone of my generation grew up knowing that if you label someone a terrorist, rules against torture go out the window, and often the public and Congress is all too willing to turn a blind eye. It’s easier to say ah well they were criminals, they were terrorists, than to contend with the fact that our government is using our tax dollars to fund torture, crimes against humanity, human rights abuses. To contend with the fact that these people are human beings. And the Trump regime is betting that years of propaganda and disinformation will allow us to turn a blind eye so they can continue to commit atrocities in the name of freedom, in our name. Today we’re discussing Venezuela, the bombing on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat, increasing tensions with the government of Nicolas Maduro, and why the Trump regime seems intent on escalating its attacks on Venezuela and its people. First, let me pay the bills.

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Okay so here are the moves Trump has made in recent weeks, in addition to targeted attacks against Venezuelans living inside the US, that indicate something larger is afoot. I’m not sowing conspiracy theories here, we don’t know what’s going on, but it’s an important region to pay attention to given the Trump regime’s general attitude toward immigrants, especially from Latin America, especially from Venezuela. Trump has moved substantial amounts of military firepower into the Caribbean in recent weeks, including 4500 soldiers and marines, an attack submarine, and boats carrying Tomahawk missiles and a range of aircraft, plus 10 F-35 fighter jets that have been sent to Puerto Rico, where Marines are reportedly conducting amphibious landing training exercises, according to CNN.

In recent weeks, the administration has also doubled the bounty on Nicolas Maduro’s head from 25 million to 50 million dollars for any information leading to his arrest, and have frozen upwards of 700 million dollars worth of assets tied to the Venezuelan president.

Earlier this year the Trump regime officially labeled the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua or TdA as a terrorist organization. They have also labeled another cartel, the so-called Cartel de los Soles or Cartel of the Suns, as a narco-terrorist organization. The US government, without convincing evidence, claims the president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, is the head of that cartel. According to reporting from El Pais, “The name dates back to 1993, when the links of two Venezuelan National Guard generals to drug trafficking came to light. The suns are a reference to the insignia worn by military personnel on their uniforms. Three decades later, that term has expanded to encompass Chavismo’s alleged ties to organized crime.” So basically any purported corruption in the Venezuelan government is the work of the Cartel of the Suns, according to the US government. This despite the fact that it’s debatable whether the cartel actually exists, and even if it does it is likely an informal network, not a traditional hierarchical drug cartel. That’s not to say there isn’t widespread corruption in the Venezuelan government, let me be clear, it’s just easier for the US government to wrap it all up in a neat bow, call it a narco-terrorist organization, and give it a catchy name for the propaganda. Again, that is NOT to say there is no corruption in the Venezuelan government, there is a long history and well-documented proof that corruption does exist.

Entire volumes have been written about Venezuela so obviously I cannot do it justice here, but just a quick little recap, Hugo Chavez was democratically elected to the presidency of Venezuela in 1998 under the socialist banner. He nationalized Venezuela’s oil reserves and provided government support of goods and services for the Venezuelan people, which quickly cut the extreme poverty rate in the country by 15 percent. According to the Center for Preventive Action in the Council on Foreign Relations, quote “years of economic mismanagement and corruption under Chávez transformed the capably managed state-owned PDVSA oil company into a dysfunctional, corrupt, and bloated institution run by military and political allies that lacked experienced technicians. Chávez also deepened Venezuela’s dependence on oil exports, with fuel as a percentage of total exports rising from around 71 percent in 1998 to nearly 98 percent in 2013. The collapse of global oil prices in 2014 led to a rapid economic decline.”

Chavez died in 2013 and his Vice President Nicolas Maduro took over the presidency and was subsequently elected. His government tried to fix the economic crisis by printing a boat load of money, causing hyperinflation that was projected to hit TEN MILLION PERCENT by 2019. Like a bottle of ketchup cost 9 dollars but the monthly minimum wage was $6 dollars. This led to widespread anti-government protests as people were literally starving because they couldn’t afford a loaf of bread. The country held elections in 2018 and Maduro was declared the winner. Two weeks later his election was declared illegitimate and the opposition leader Juan Guaido assumed the office as interim president. This was during Trump’s first term and Trump, along with Canada and most of the EU, quickly recognized Guaido’s legitimacy, leading to a five-year presidential crisis. Eventually, the opposition against Maduro turned against Guaido when he wasn’t able to organize a new election to replace Maduro quickly. Cuba, China, and Russia continued to support Maduro’s claim to the presidency, which indicates to you why the US would want someone else like Guaido whose social democratic party represents a government more aligned with US interests in power and why the US is focused on Venezuela–it’s in part a continuation of a long-practiced US government policy of interfering in the affairs of other countries, especially in Latin America, as means of spreading “democracy”, emphasis on the air quotes, and fighting against the influence of Russia and China in the western hemisphere.

Despite strong evidence that the opposition candidate won the 2024 presidential election in Venezuela, and strong evidence that the elections were not free nor fair, including electoral fraud, blocking independent election observers, and banning popular opposition candidates from holding office, Nicolas Maduro declared he won the precedency, and the national Electoral Council supported his claim to the Presidency. The United States, Canada, and the EU have not recognized Maduro’s claim to the presidency, citing fraud in the election.

According to the Center for Preventive Action, quote “Since the crisis escalated in 2015, an estimated eight million Venezuelans have fled the country, with 85 percent resettling in other Latin American countries, including at least three million in Colombia alone. Armed groups operating across the porous Colombia-Venezuela border have further worsened security conditions for migrants. The exodus has also caused a regional humanitarian crisis as neighboring governments have struggled to absorb refugees and asylum seekers and failed to provide access to services.”

During this same time, the cartel Tren de Aragua came to prominence, benefitting from the increased migration out of Venezuela not only to transport drugs but also to move people out of the country and exert control in other Latin American countries. They also began trafficking in migrants as well as sex trafficking. According to The New Yorker article I mentioned, quote “for the most part, the gang’s influence outside Venezuela amounted to disparate groups operating under the Tren de Aragua banner, either as minor partners in smuggling or drug-dealing rings or as something more akin to franchisees—independently run local organizations that used the name of the broader brand. One of the enduring principles of gangland public relations is that there’s no such thing as bad press; in fact, the more people talk about a criminal group, the easier it becomes to intimidate potential victims. … In 2023 the DHS ultimately estimated that there were about a thousand potential members in the country. “Even then,” [a DHS official] said, “the connections to the gang were weak or spurious.””

“Border Patrol employed highly subjective markers to identify alleged gang membership. One of these, which experts like Antillano and Rísquez dismissed as completely unreliable, was tattoos. U.S. authorities tried to index images and phrases that they associated with members of Tren de Aragua: clocks, nautical stars, crowns, the Michael Jordan Jumpman logo, and famous phrases from reggaetón songs…. It didn’t take long for vague suppositions to harden into dogma.”

So basically, there is a loose gang of criminals that has spread internationally, with many of the gang members only vaguely associated with TdA, potentially just in name only, and with only about 1000 members present in the US. But thanks to persistent propaganda and fear mongering, any Venezuelan immigrant, especially if they have any tattoos, can be loosely tied to TdA as an “associate” without proof and the people will go along with it.

A huge area of focus has been in Denver, Colorado, and the neighboring city of Aurora. A slumlord management company called CBZ, owned by brothers who live in Brooklyn, owns a series of properties that are poorly maintained and where a number of new migrants to Colorado live. Many people moved to Colorado through word of mouth and Venezuelans have formed a community there. According to The New Yorker “Between 2022 and 2024, the Denver metropolitan area received more new immigrants, per capita, than anywhere else in the country—some forty thousand, the vast majority of them from Venezuela.” This included about 20,000 sent there in buses by Texas governor Greg Abbott. The slummy apartment buildings began experiencing violence due to turf wars between rival groups of men, immigrants from Mexico and Venezuela. Some of the men were associated with TdA, again how closely, who knows, but its true there was TdA presence. According to the Aurora Police Chief, quote “Was there Tren de Aragua presence? Yes. Were parts of the city overrun? Total hyperbole.” (All told, the Aurora Police Department has arrested ten people alleged of being tied to the gang.)” Ten. But violent incidents, some of them caught on film, were latched onto by right wing media and whipped into sensationalized stories that entire towns were being completely overrun by gang members.

But when Trump took office a second time, despite having extended refugee and other protected status to Venezuelan immigrants during his first term, it was Colorado and the influx of Venezuelan migrants where Trump decided to begin his mass deportation efforts. On February 5th of this year, ICE, the FBI, the DEA, and the US Marshals Service launched a vast, sprawling operation in the Denver area, allegedly to target 100+ members of TdA. They went door to door, using battering rams and flash-bang grenades, demanding to know whether residents were US citizens. By the end of the extensive operation, ICE had arrested all of 30 people, only one of which was said to be a member of TdA. By March, planes full of immigrants, many of them Venezuelan with no criminal records, let alone proven ties to TdA, were en route to CECOT.

Then, in July, it was announced that the US and Venezuela had reached a deal for a prisoner swap wherein the Venezuelans being held at CECOT were being returned to Venezuela in exchange for the release of 10 US citizens and legal permanent residents who were being held in Venezuelan jails, along with dozens of Venezuelan political prisoners. Marco Rubio lamented that the Venezuelan government was holding those prisoners without proper due process. Yeah, how barbaric of them.

On September 2nd, last week, an appeals court ruled that Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to justify deportation without due process was unlawful. That was the same day Trump bombed that boat carrying 11 people, claiming they were TdA terrorists transporting drugs bound for Trinidad and Tobago. Just so we’re clear, this was an illegal attack against civilians. Another in a long line of examples wherein alleged terrorists don’t get due process they get bombed into oblivion, or detained and sent to CECOT, or waterboarded, but it’s FINE because they are TERRORISTS!! But this was illegal under US law–there is no law that gives the President of the united states, without approval from Congress, the right to bomb civilians especially of a government we are not actively in armed conflict against. This was also against the international laws of war, of humanity, and of the sea. The only time force is allowed to be used against civilians, even the ones you think have committed heinous crimes, is in times of emergency, in times where they are imminently about to attack, in self defense, or if there is an active armed conflict, a declaration of war between two countries. Trump made the unilateral decision to bomb a boat filled with Venezuelan civilians. That is illegal in the US and in international law, plain and simple. But the Trump administration has a habit of conducting these shock and awe activities, via a post on Truth social and a grainy video, without ACTUALLY providing details. We do not have confirmation of who was on that boat, what that boat was carrying, or what authority Trump claims to have had to conduct the attack. Which is par for the course. It’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission, set on the global scale, with access to the most deadly and sophisticated weapons of war that exist on the planet.

And administration officials are doubling down. On Saturday, JD Vance posted on Twitter, saying quote “Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.” When someone commented “Killing citizens of another nation who are civilians without any due process is called a war crime.” Vance shot back quote “I don’t give a shit what you call it.” The Vice President of the United States, who allegedly has a law degree from one of our nation's most prestigious institutions, doesn’t give a shit if his administration’s actions meet the legal definition of a war crime. Semantics shmantics, ya know, who cares what you call it. Committing war crimes is the highest and best use of our military. They were TERRORISTS come on people who CARES.

A recent article from the BBC laid out how starkly disturbing these actions are, in the larger context of just using the label “terrorist” as a blanket permission slip to commit all kinds of atrocities. Quote

“Under Article 2(4) of the UN charter, countries can resort to force when under attack and deploying their military in self-defence. Trump has previously accused the Tren de Aragua cartel of conducting irregular warfare against the US, and the state department has designated the group as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation.

But Prof Michael Becker of Trinity College Dublin told BBC Verify that the US actions "stretches the meaning of the term beyond its breaking point".

"The fact that US officials describe the individuals killed by the US strike as narco-terrorists does not transform them into lawful military targets," he said. "The US is not engaged in an armed conflict with Venezuela or the Tren de Aragua criminal organization."

"Not only does the strike appear to have violated the prohibition on the use of force, it also runs afoul of the right to life under international human rights law."

Prof [Luke] Moffett said that the use of force in this case could amount to an "extrajudicial arbitrary killing" and "a fundamental violation of human rights".

"Labelling everyone a terrorist does not make them a lawful target and enables states to side-step international law," he said.”

So now that Trump has been credibly accused of committing what likely amounts to a war crime, will the international criminal court step up? No!!! Of course not!!! Because international law has no teeth. The ICC can’t even get Benjamin Netanyahu for his active ongoing livestreamed genocide. 11 dead brown people in a boat? Get real! They’re not gonna lift a finger. Not from lack of international condemnation, which was swift in the wake of the bombing of the boat last week, but because international law has no real enforcement mechanism unless you’ve committed large scale crimes against humanity and even then it takes years to kick in.

And the Trump regime knows this. There will be no punishment for increased hostilities. Secretary of Defense, now dubbed Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has vowed that others will meet a similar fate in the area, leading the local fisherman whose livelihoods depend on being able to safely be on a boat to stay home, literal terrorism conducted by the US Government in an area already overrun with cartel violence. And despite the fact that Congress should be pissed that Trump is castrating its ability to have any say in acts of war, anti-war hawks have largely stayed quiet, with succubuses like Lindsay Graham quick to step up and condone the war crimes as legitimate and badly needed uses of force by our country’s military. In recent days, Trump has threatened that he would strike alleged areas of cartel activity on land inside Venezuela, which, in case you’re confused, is also definitely against international law, you can’t just start attacking civilians in a country you’re not at war with.

Of course, according to the Trump regime we ARE kind of at war with drug cartels. They have been dubbed terrorist organizations. Trump has announced a national emergency at the border, characterizing it as an invasion. The regime is doing everything in its power, short of declaring actual war, to make all of us see immigrants as dehumanized enemy combatants. Especially Venezuelan immigrants. This despite the fact that the cocaine threat Venezuela poses is dramatically overstated by the US government. According to Al Jazeera quote “The UNODC report shows that a majority of the coca bush, from which cocaine is derived, was cultivated in Colombia, followed by Peru and Bolivia. The report also shows that most of the main routes of cocaine trafficking in 2023 and 2024 into the US passed through Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, rather than Venezuela.

Venezuela is used as a “transit corridor” for some Colombian cocaine moving into the eastern Caribbean, Regilme said. “But the dominant maritime pathway for US-bound cocaine remains the Eastern Pacific into Mexico and Central America.”

Which begs the question what the fuck is the end goal here? Is it regime change? When asked directly, Trump says it’s not about regime change. And perhaps it’s not. Maduro has been in power for over a decade, and Chavez was in power for 15 years before him. The US has proven pretty capable of instigating regime change wherever it wants to over the last century. Has Venezuela just been uniquely capable of staving off US-backed regime change? Maybe. But my instinct is that if the US had wanted to, they would have. I think this is more an effort by Trump to show brute force, for one thing, to try to further solidify his image as a “strong man” by taking on another strongman in the region. He’s failed at ending the war in Ukraine or the genocide in Gaza like he promised, and it’s making him look weak. Bombing a boat with a bunch of alleged terrorists is a nice distraction that people won’t be too sad about, because they’re just terrorists!!! I think it is also an opportunity to create greater pretext for the regime’s targeting of Latin American immigrants in the country. If the US decides to escalate tensions against Venezuela, or Venezuela makes moves that could be seen as aggressive, like, I don’t know, flying war planes near newly positioned US ships, which they’ve now done twice, how long before one or both countries crosses the line and it’s seen as an act of war? At which point all of the Trump regime’s fear mongering will have been justified, they’ll say, and Venezuelans in this country, which will include all brown people who look vaguely Latin American, will more easily be rounded up and booted out, enemy combatants just like Japanese-Americans were during World War II, the last time we allowed internment camps in this country under the guise of national security.

Instead of addressing the underlying factors that cause a demand for drugs in this country–childhood poverty, for example, systemic racism, things that actual studies have made actual links to–the US government is playing the victim, saying no no it is the brown people, the immigrants, the 11 people on that boat, who are POISONING innocent unwitting red-blooded americans with their evil cocaine, and so they must be stopped. Because it’s easier to latch on to home-bred xenophobia than it is to address the deep underlying issues that cause there to be such a massive demand for cocaine and other drugs in this country, issues largely caused by decades of right-leaning policies like massive tax cuts for the rich and reduction in social services.

As with most things this regime does, I don’t think it’s a clear-cut single motivator, but simply a strategy that is the means to a number of ends: a short-term boost to Trump’s strongman image, and a long-term strategy to further legitimize the white christian nationalist ethnic cleansing taking place in our country against Latin Americans who, no matter where they’re from, no matter how well they’ve toed the Good Immigrant line, can all be boiled down to gang members or affiliated with gangs somehow, thanks to decades of handy propaganda and now a regime intent on fulfilling its promise to deport 20 million criminal illegal immigrants that do not exist. So they have to lie, make up criminal affiliation, and round up immigrants not as they are committing crimes or stealing our welfare funds but instead as they are heading out to their jobs, as they are showing up to their legally sanctioned immigration hearings, as they are supporting local businesses, as they are bringing their children to school. The terror being inflicted in our immigrant communities by the US government, the terrorist tactics our government is conducting with our tax dollars dramatically outpaces any terror being caused by a few hundred members of the TdA that may or may not even exist on US soil.

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And if you liked this episode, you’ll like the one from last week about what the fuck is happening with vaccines in America.

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