The Real Target of Trump’s War on Drug Boats
By August, however, hardliners began to prevail, according to a person with knowledge of the government’s internal deliberations. This change seemed to mark a victory for Rubio. But this change does not reflect Rubio’s influence so much as the involvement of a new player in the political struggle: Stephen Miller, deputy chief of staff to the president and head of the White House Homeland Security Council. “Miller sided with Rubio not because of regime change,” the source told me. Rather, it was because Venezuela offered “an outlet for the belief that the president can just kill these guys” as part of an open-ended war on drugs and crime. “Stephen is a big part of the energy behind the bombings,” the source said. “He owns the Western Hemisphere portfolio: immigration, security issues and anti-cartel issues. He convenes working groups almost every day. He has been very hierarchical with the Department of Defense about what he wants to see. Hegseth’s team just says ‘yes.’ a good idea.”
For Miller, military strikes help expand the president’s power, while reinforcing the narrative that Venezuelan immigrants are “foreign enemies.” As one former Trump administration official said, “This looks like the militarization of domestic politics. How do you stay in power? You create an ‘other’. You say we are under attack. You create a casus belli. You blame the other for everything. This is happening while National Guards are deployed in cities. You are getting people used to these kinds of actions. This broadens the definition of use of force.”
The implications of Trump’s use of the military, the former White House official said, are not lost on other Latin American countries either. “If you’re in Panama, you think it’s about you. If you’re in Colombia, you think it’s about you,” he told me. “You prove to the Mexicans that you will do what you say. The Brazilians thought it was about them. If you think it’s a signal, it’s East a signal.
During Trump’s first term, he asked his advisers whether the United States could carry out military strikes against Mexico, based on the assumption that the country was primarily responsible for America’s drug problems. “They don’t have control of their own country,” Trump told Mark Esper, his previous defense secretary. As Esper later wrote in his memoir, Trump had repeatedly asked if he could “fire missiles at Mexico to destroy the drug labs,” and proposed that, if necessary, this could be done “quietly.” “No one would know it was us,” Trump reportedly said.
Trump was ultimately forced to concede in the face of fierce opposition from the Defense Department: the Mexican government was the United States’ largest trading partner and a powerful ally in limiting the spread of regional migration. However, as 2023 began, the prospect of drastic action was becoming an increasingly dominant position within the Republican Party. Republican lawmakers in the House introduced, but failed to pass, authorization for the use of military force against the cartels, and they argued that the federal government should designate them as foreign terrorist organizations. Adding Tren de Aragua to this particular cause was a byproduct of the 2024 presidential campaign. In August, after a video from an Aurora, Colorado, residential complex went viral showing gunmen believed to be members of the gang, Trump began talking constantly about the group.
Once back in power, Trump wanted to see more dramatic military action on the international stage. “There was a desire, an energy to do something aggressive and different,” the person familiar with the administration told me. “It had to go somewhere. We were going to start killing cartel members. But there was a feeling that if we started getting kinetic in Mexico, it would have second- and third-order consequences that would be bad.”
The Mexican government, for its part, was quietly cooperative at the border, and the country’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, managed to balance public opposition to Trump with greater flexibility in private. Venezuela, on the other hand, was an obvious target. “There was no direct risk because Venezuela is not on our border,” the person said. Maduro has violently attacked his political opponents and presided over the country’s economic collapse. Over the past decade, nearly eight million people have fled. On October 10, Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado received the Nobel Peace Prize. She immediately dedicated it to Trump, whom she has been trying to enlist for years to oust Maduro. “We all know that the leader of the Tren de Aragua is Maduro,” Machado told Donald Trump, Jr., on his podcast in February. “The regime created, promoted and financed the Tren de Aragua. Under Maduro, she added, the country became a “haven for terrorists, drug cartels and groups like Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and China.”
When the United States struck the first Venezuelan boat in September, one detail immediately caught the attention of former government officials: eleven people were on board. In drug trafficking operations, it is very unusual for so many passengers to be on a single vessel. “There are almost always three or four: a navigator, a pilot, and someone to put gas in the boat,” Story told me. “There are never eleven people on a drug boat because each person is a drug that cannot be transported.”
It is possible that some men on the boat were involved in trafficking and others were simply hitchhiking. The boat was intercepted off Venezuela’s northern coast, near a small fishing village called San Juan de Unare, which over the past two decades has become a transit point for cocaine and marijuana smuggling. A Venezuelan woman told Times that her husband, a fisherman, went to work and never came back. Immediately after the attack, the families of the killed men posted testimonies on social media. But the Venezuelan government, for reasons that remain unclear, appears to have pressured them to close their accounts. “That’s the problem with the situation,” Ronna Rísquez, a Venezuelan crime journalist, told me. “Both governments” – the United States and Venezuela – “like to lie.”
