Pirates of the Caribbean:

Venezuela, the United States, and Us

  • America’s current policy of destroying suspected Venezuelan drug vessels in the Caribbean, killing their crews in the process, has attracted international opprobrium.
  • The US administration appears determined to topple the regime of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and to reassert US hegemony in a region where China is making critical inroads.
  • For now, Canada has distanced itself from America’s pre-emptive drug interdiction policy, although Canadian technology was used in some of the drug boat strikes.
  • The United States may try to pressure Canada to participate more actively in drug interdiction operations in the region.
  • Whether the United States would be prepared to take out suspected drug vessels in waters shared with Canada remains a critical wild card.

Drug Interdiction Then…

Since early September, the US military has attacked and destroyed about 20 alleged “drug boats” in the waters off Venezuela, killing an estimated 80 people.  Superficially, “Operation Southern Spear” appears to be a reboot of the so-called “war on drugs,” which dates back to the Nixon administration. But there are profound differences. Through the 80s and 90s, American maritime drug interdiction operations were the preserve of the US Coast Guard (USCG) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Working together, and sometimes in concert with military personnel and equipment, the two agencies patrolled Latin American coastlines and high seas smuggling corridors, boarded suspected drug vessels, seized shipments, arrested traffickers and smugglers, and handed them over for criminal prosecution. The legalities (and the ethics) of these operations continue to be debated. But, for the most part, they were based on cooperative agreements with countries in the region; agreements that also allowed DEA to undertake land-based eradication and interdiction operations in drug producing and staging areas, and to train and equip local law enforcement.

…And Now

Current US militarization of drug interdiction appears to be based, in large measure, on the administration’s decision to designate various drug trafficking groups, including the Venezuela-based Tren de Aragua, as terrorist groups. This effectively transforms criminal groups into enemy forces, and putative “drug boats” and their cargos into instruments of terror, in turn authorizing American forces to take pre-emptive defensive action by blowing them out of the water. The administration claims that this approach will save American lives, citing the quarter million and counting fentanyl overdose deaths since 2021.

Terrorists and Drug Traffickers…Really?

The United Nations, along with several European countries, have condemned the US actions off Venezuela, saying that they have no justification in international law since neither the boats nor the people aboard pose an imminent threat to the lives of others. Indeed, it is not entirely clear how groups that have never staged armed attacks against US interests can be characterized as either military or terrorist threats. When all bad, or potentially bad, actors are terrorists, the designation loses all meaning 

The US military is not prepared to release either the intelligence data upon which it bases its targeting decisions, or “after action” reports on the boat strikes themselves. The government of Colombia claims that at least one of the strikes took out an innocent Colombian fisherman and his vessel, and Caribbean fishermen who eke out a living off the Venezuelan coast are increasingly reluctant to put to sea. 

While the Caribbean has been a maritime drug smuggling route since at least the 1970s, drug boat crews are rarely cartel members or associates, but usually recruited from desperately poor communities in the Caribbean and on the South American mainland. To characterize them as “terrorists” defies reality. Moreover, suppression of fentanyl trafficking, the casus belli of US military action in the region, is a red herring. Fentanyl is not produced in Venezuela. The fentanyl that is killing so many Americans (and Canadians) is mainly produced in Mexico, using Chinese precursors, and smuggled directly across the southern border. Venezuela is historically a drug transhipment zone, but primarily for Colombian cocaine enroute to Europe via the Caribbean.

What’s Going On Here?

For what is being billed as an exercise in regional drug enforcement, the US military buildup in the region, which now includes a full Carrier Strike Group, is the largest since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. So, It appears increasingly likely that the US goal is regime change, whether by intimidating leftist President Nicolás Maduro (who remains in power despite losing presidential elections in 2024)  into fleeing the country, or by creating conditions that will cause the Venezuelan military and / or its political opposition to turn on Maduro and depose him. President Trump, who has had his sights on Maduro since first taking office in 2017, has been overtly signalling his intentions. Over the past few days Trump has allegedly authorized covert CIA action inside Venezuela (although revealing this seems counterintuitive) and characterized Maduro himself as a drug trafficker and terrorist mastermind.

Where Bolivarian Revolution, China, and the Monroe Doctrine Collide

Venezuela has been a thorn in the flesh of successive American administrations, going back to the 1990s and the “Bolivarian Revolution” of President Hugo Chavez, which unleashed a wave of anti-Americanism across the region. For Trump, the most immediate problem with Maduro may be that he stands in the way of US influence and control over Venezuela’s oil reserves which, at an estimated 303 billion barrels, are the world’s largest. This makes Venezuela key to both American energy independence and dominance of world petroleum markets. More broadly, the United States may be responding to rapidly expanding Chinese influence in Latin America and the Caribbean, using foreign aid and soft power diplomacy as a vector. Since the days of the Monroe Doctrine, America has asserted its political and economic hegemony over the region, and China (to say nothing of uncooperative Bolivarians) represents a direct challenge in that regard. 

Regional stroppiness is already causing the United States difficulties. On November 18, Ecuadorians voted a resounding “no” in a referendum to decide whether the United States could establish an operational military base there. Grenada, which lies about 150 kilometres off the coast of Venezuela, has been stalling on an American request to erect a military radar array on the island. For many Grenadians, Venezuela is a positive presence in the region (unlike the United States, which invaded the island nation in 1983), a provider of physicians and medical assistance, development aid, and various forms of technical expertise. 

A Quagmire in the Making??

In Venezuela itself, meanwhile, the United States may find getting rid of Maduro harder than, say, the 1989 ouster of Panamanian president Manuel Noriega. Maduro may be unpopular and his presidency may be illegitimate. But his political support network remains in place, the Venezuelan army is a professional fighting force, and, like all successful autocrats, Maduro has done a good job of silencing opposition figures and cowing the populace into submission. Venezuela is also a big country, almost three times the size of Vietnam (to borrow an example from the American past). A ground operation, if it came to that, would require a huge commitment of troops and materiel, which might not sit well with Americans, especially in the aftermath of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Why We Care

The sinking of small vessels and the killing of their crews without due process or concrete evidence sets a dangerous precedent, especially given the rationale: fentanyl interdiction. Moreover, the US administration views Canada as part of the American “fentanyl problem,” characterizing it repeatedly as an out-of-control transhipment point. And while political rhetoric around “the 51st State” has subsided somewhat, it has not gone away.  President Trump and his inner circle recognize Canadian sovereignty only insofar as it does not obstruct American “grand strategy.” 

Canada and the United States share a lot of fresh and salt water, from the Gulf of Maine to the Great Lakes, to the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Beaufort Sea. To extract concessions from Canada – whether trade or resource-related, as discussed in previous CIBs, or around specific legal issues like the right of US law enforcement to operate in Canada – all the United States has to do is designate any one of these shared waters as a drug transhipment corridor and any unidentifiable maritime traffic, including private yachts, pleasure craft and commercial and fishing vessels, as a potential “terrorist attack” on the United States. 

Like the United States, Canada has listed several international criminal groups as terrorist entities, and there is a lot of overlap between the two lists. Canadian foreign minister, Anita Anand, and the Department of National Defence, have said that Canada has no role in US interdiction operations off Venezuela. In early October, however, research and advocacy group Project Ploughshares released an investigative report indicating that Canadian-built sensor systems were used in the initial drug boat strikes.  

But if they continue, and especially if US forces become more directly engaged in Venezuela proper, Washington may try to use Canada’s own terrorist listings, and its historic participation in hemispheric drug interdiction operations, to pressure the government, and CAF, to take a more prominent role in the American campaign against fentanyl and Nicolás Maduro. This would cause catastrophic and possibly irreparable damage to Canada’s reputation in a region where we are working hard to build goodwill and to extend trade relationships.