Increased US pressure on Venezuela raises specter of regime change
President Trump is ramping up military pressure on Venezuela’s authoritarian leader Nicolás Maduro, raising the prospect of strikes inside the country, which would mark a major escalation from already controversial military attacks against alleged drug trafficking boats in international waters.
Trump’s confirmation on Wednesday that he authorized the CIA to carry out covert land strikes inside Venezuela is amplifying the possibility he could seek regime change in Caracas.
Such a move would return the U.S. to engagement in Latin America, where it pursued what is understood as a failed 20th-century policy of military intervention.
“One thing that’s been surprising to me, is even sort of in private conversation, people are very, very careful with this issue,” a House Democratic aide told The Hill, requesting anonymity to comment on internal discussions.
“Nobody is at all concerned about Maduro himself. … I don’t know anybody who’s shedding a tear for the guy. … I think the general feeling is more fear, not the fear of Trump succeeding, fear of Trump failing in a way he hasn’t predicted.”
At least one potential danger is whether Trump’s revelation of CIA operations in Venezuela will trigger blowback from Caracas.
“This is no longer a covert operation, maybe not even clandestine … if something goes wrong there’s no deniability for CIA operatives,” said Evelyn Farkas, executive director of the McCain Institute at Arizona State University and a former senior Pentagon official in the Obama administration.
“They will be seized and used as pawns by Maduro, as he has already done with countless Americans and Venezuelans, including our McCain Global Leader alumnus Jesús Armas, who sits in prison simply for going to a demonstration.”
Trump’s earlier diplomatic outreach to Maduro, through his envoy for special missions Richard Grenell, succeeded in bringing home at least seven Americans unjustly detained in the country and facilitating Caracas’s acceptance of repatriation flights of migrants without legal status from the U.S.
But The New York Times reported on Oct. 8 that Trump ended diplomacy with Caracas.
Trump on Wednesday said he wants to stop drug trafficking and illegal immigration.
The Times reported Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who also serves as national security adviser, is leading the charge on a harder policy toward Maduro, ultimately with regime change as a goal.
Rubio’s stock has risen exponentially in Trump’s inner circle. The president, celebrating on Monday the release of hostages held by Hamas and a ceasefire, described Rubio as one of the greatest secretaries of State in America’s history.
“It’s important to note the confidence and the influence of Sec. Rubio on all things Latin America, in particular for Sec. Rubio: Venezuela, even dating back to his time as a senator, has long been a priority, and dislodging Maduro has been a priority for Sec. Rubio,” said Jason Marczak, vice president and senior director at the Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht Latin America Center.
“I think the president’s end goal is, he does fundamentally see Venezuela as a problem,” he added.
“But I think the announcement [Wednesday] is meant to provide even more fear in the political leadership in Caracas, that the U.S. is serious this time and the question is, serious to what end? Is it serious on the illicit trafficking? Or is the U.S. serious that it’s time for Maduro to leave? And I think that question is still yet to be answered.”
By the time diplomatic talks ended, the administration had already built up a sizable force in the Caribbean and had carried out four strikes against suspected drug trafficking boats, killing 21 people. The latest strike, on Tuesday, killed six people and was carried out in international waters off the coast of Venezuela.
Trump on Wednesday said he wanted to expand to “land” operations to target drug traffickers but would not answer as to whether he had authorized the CIA to take out Maduro. There are 10,000 U.S. forces supporting counternarcotics operations in the region of U.S. Southern Command.
Farkas, of the McCain Institute, said it’s within the president’s powers to expand CIA operations, but the escalating military operation in the Caribbean Sea would be made stronger with bipartisan support from Congress.
But predictable partisan divides have emerged. Republicans are galvanized behind the president in public, in particular Florida GOP representatives appealing to the Cuban and Venezuelan diaspora.
“I am glad that President Trump and Marco Rubio are dedicated to getting rid of all narco-traffickers. Maduro is one of them, so if that means Maduro is out of power, that will be a great day for the world,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) said on Fox News.
Democrats are trying to strike the balance between raising alarm about unauthorized military action while expressing zero tolerance for the scourge of deadly illicit drugs and reinforcing Maduro’s illegitimacy.
“I support cracking down on the cartels and traffickers,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“But the Trump administration’s authorization of covert CIA action, conducting lethal strikes on boats and hinting at land operations in Venezuela slides the United States closer to outright conflict with no transparency, oversight or apparent guardrails. The American people deserve to know if the administration is leading the U.S. into another conflict, putting service members at risk or pursuing a regime-change operation.”
The CIA’s history of covert action in Latin America is usually held up as a cautionary tale about the overreach of American intervention, which undergirds criticism of American imperialism in the Western hemisphere. The New York Times, first reporting Trump’s CIA directive, laid out some of the agency’s most high-profile involvement in the region.
In 1954, the CIA orchestrated a coup that overthrew Guatemala’s democratically elected president, who was replaced with a military dictatorship that led to decades of instability.
The Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 failed, and the agency repeatedly tried to assassinate Fidel Castro.
Also in 1961, the CIA supplied weapons to dissidents in the Dominican Republic who assassinated the authoritarian leader, Rafael Trujillo. The CIA was also not far from the action in other major developments in Latin America in the mid-20th century — the 1964 coup in Brazil, the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia, and the 1973 coup in Chile.
In the 1980s, President Reagan authorized the CIA to fund Contra rebels to oust the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
“The reality is that we have a checkered past when it comes to using the CIA in the hemisphere, and so it feels retro — going back to the days of J. Edgar Hoover, when the FBI and the CIA ran operations with very little congressional oversight, if any, and unlimited power given to them by the executive. And that ended up in a lot of mistakes,” Farkas said.
But members of Venezuela’s opposition movement are welcoming Trump’s tough talk against Maduro and say the U.S. charges against the Venezuelan strongman as head of the cocaine-trafficking Cártel de Los Soles are legitimate American national security issues, on top of decades of malign activity.
“The regime’s links to organized crime and even terrorist networks have been documented for years by outlets like CNN and denounced by leaders across the political spectrum, including leftist Chile’s President Gabriel Boric. Even during the Obama administration, the U.S. formally recognized Venezuela’s regime as a threat,” Freddy Guevara, an exiled Venezuelan opposition member who was a political prisoner under Maduro.
Guevara was referencing a 2017 investigation by CNN uncovering how members of Maduro’s regime gave passports to individuals with ties to terrorist groups like Hezbollah.
“U.S. actions should be seen both as self-protection — since the regime’s criminal and terrorist ties pose a regional danger — and as humanitarian support for a population suffering hunger, repression, and mass exile.”
Likewise, María Corina Machado, the recent Nobel Peace Prize recipient and leader of Venezuela’s opposition, dedicated her award to Trump and put her support behind the president’s tough stance against Maduro.
Machado led a movement in the 2024 presidential election to independently certify the results and demonstrate that the opposition, led by Edmundo González, had won. Maduro’s claim of victory was rejected by most of the international community.
Machado described Maduro’s power seizure as declaring war on the Venezuelan people in an interview with CNN, and Trump’s targeting of drug trafficking as cutting off the sources of Maduro’s “criminal, narcoterrorism structure.”
“We need the help of the president of the United States to stop this war because it is about human lives,” Machado said.