What is Donald Trump’s Venezuela Policy?

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Fredericton Daily Gleaner

Donald Trump’s approach to the Western Hemisphere is designed to create a Fortress America. It explains the American president’s obsession with Venezuela. Once the wealthiest country in South America, it is now a failed state.

From the 1950s through the early 1980s, Venezuela was an economic dynamo, a nation with large oil reserves. But Hugo Chavez, who became president in 1999, adopted a form of socialism that resulted in many businesses collapsing or being nationalized. A purge of the state-run oil industry, a centre of opposition to his rule, removed thousands of workers, often replaced by political supporters with little or no technical experience.

Venezuela’s slide turned into a free fall under President Nicolas Maduro, a former union leader who inherited power after Chavez’s death in 2013. Critics say his government’s mismanagement and corruption, and Maduro’s own ruthless bid to cement power, even as oil prices tumbled, have broken the nation.

The Venezuelan elections of 2024 were marked by widespread fraud and condemned as stolen by the United States and the Organization of American States. The Nobel Peace Prize this year was awarded to opposition leader María Corina Machado, who is living in hiding.

The Trump administration has accused Maduro and the Tren de Aragua gang of trafficking drugs to the U.S. In March, Trump proclaimed that the gang, which was founded in a Venezuelan prison, was “conducting irregular warfare” against the United States under the orders of the Maduro government.

U.S. forces have destroyed at least 10 boats in the region since the start of September, killing more than 50 people. Administration officials have sought to justify the killings by claiming the United States is in armed conflict with Latin American drug cartels, which are now to be considered “Designated Terrorist Organizations,” responsible for “poisoning” Americans.

Trump has been quite clear that he’s willing to use all of the tools at his disposal in order to stop narcotics flowing north. He alleges that the powerful drug cartels have been protected by Venezuela’s armed forces, at the orders of Maduro, his family, and his interior minister, Diosdado Cabello Rondon. The U.S. has announced a $50 million reward for any information leading to the arrest of Maduro on drug trafficking charges.

Through economic sanctions, covert lethal CIA operations, and targeted strikes on vessels near Venezuela suspected to be engaged in drug trafficking, the Trump administration seems to hope to impose enough pressure on Maduro’s government to induce regime change.

CIA director John Ratcliffe has said little about what his agency is doing in Venezuela. But he has promised that the agency under his leadership would become more aggressive and less averse to risk.

“I think President Trump’s made a decision that Maduro, the leader of Venezuela, is an indicted drug trafficker, that it’s time for him to go, that Venezuela and Colombia have been safe havens for narco-terrorists for too long,” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told CBS’s “Face the Nation” Oct. 26.

Venezuela has rejected Trump’s “bellicose” language and accused him of seeking “to legitimize regime change with the ultimate goal of appropriating Venezuela’s petroleum resources.”

Millions of Venezuelans have fled the country, with tens of thousands crossing the narrow straits separating the country from Trinidad and Tobago, the island Caribbean nation of just 1.52 million people 11 kilometres off Venezuela’s northern coast. Former Venezuelan lawyers and bureaucrats now work there as day labourers and maids.

On Oct. 26, the USS Gravely, a guided missile destroyer, docked in Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, for joint exercises with the island nation’s military forces. Venezuela accused the island nation of acting as a “military colony” for the U.S. to conduct war against Venezuela and “all of South America.”

There are currently 10,000 U.S. troops in the Caribbean, most of them at bases in Puerto Rico. In all, the U.S. Navy has eight surface warships and a submarine in the sea. As well, Washington is massing a buildup involving the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford, fighter jets, and surveillance aircraft, off the coast of Venezuela. It includes B-52 and B-1 stealth bombers.

Will Trump mount a full-scale invasion? “In terms of sending in the U.S. military to defeat the Venezuelan military and occupy the country, I don’t see it,” said William LeoGrande, a professor of government at American University in Washington, D.C., and an expert on Latin America. “An invasion of Venezuela is not in the cards,” maintains Geoff Ramsey, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Centre. Of course, as we know, experts have been wrong before.

Trump is restoring a conception of national frontiers that existed before the heyday of international law, when it was assumed in much of the world that unauthorized incursions across a border for nefarious purposes, even by non-state actors, can be repelled with deadly force.

There are also reasons to suspect an ulterior motive. Venezuela has scattered millions of its citizens into exile, and some 770,000 have made their way to the United States, accounting for seven per cent of the migrants who arrived during the Biden administration. Trump wants them out. The United States appears to be retiring from global empire in order to shore up its hemispheric pre-eminence. This would also ease America’s immigration dilemmas.