President Donald Trump has released a video showing a United States military strike on a boat in the Caribbean that he says was smuggling drugs out of Venezuela for the Tren de Aragua gang, stoking fears of a possible clash between the Venezuelan and US militaries.
In a post on his social media platform, Truth Social, Trump said 11 people were killed on Tuesday. He wrote: “No US Forces were harmed in this strike. Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America. BEWARE!”
The strike, apparently carried out in international waters, marks an escalation in tensions between the Trump administration and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whom Trump has repeatedly accused of assisting international drug gangs.
The incident is the first known attack the US has made against alleged smugglers since the Trump administration began increasing its military presence in the Caribbean last month to counter drug cartels designated as “narcoterrorist organisations”.
What happened?
The Trump administration dispatched warships to the southern Caribbean in August in a bid, it said, to counter threats to US national security posed by criminal organisations operating in the region.
The New York Times reported that Trump had signed a secret directive ordering the Pentagon to use military force against certain Latin American drug cartels that the US considers “terrorist organisations”.
On Thursday, the Reuters news agency reported that seven US warships and one nuclear-powered fast attack submarine were headed for the Caribbean. More than 4,500 sailors and Marines are on board the vessels.
Then on Tuesday, Trump announced the strike on the Venezuelan boat he said was transporting drugs.
What is Tren de Aragua and why does Trump link it to Maduro?
Trump identified the people on board the Venezuelan boat as “narcoterrorists” who were “at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States”.
The Tren de Aragua is one of Venezuela’s most notorious criminal organisations with operations spreading across Latin America.
Originating in the early 2000s among prison inmates in the state of Aragua, the gang initially controlled contraband and extortion networks inside jails before expanding outwards.
Today, it runs a diversified criminal empire spanning drug trafficking, human smuggling, extortion, illegal mining and contract killings.
The group is especially active along migration routes, exploiting vulnerable refugees and migrants through kidnapping, forced labour and sex trafficking.
The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed there is a direct link between groups like Tren de Aragua and Venezuela’s government. According to Trump, Maduro controls the gang as part of a “narcoterrorism” ploy to destabilise the US.
On August 7, the US Departments of State and Justice doubled their reward for information leading to the arrest of Maduro to $50m, accusing him of being “one of the largest narcotraffickers in the world”.
For his part, Maduro denies any connection to the group. At least two reports from the US intelligence community also contradict the Trump administration’s claim.
In May, a declassified National Intelligence Council report found that Maduro’s government “probably does not have a policy of cooperating with” Tren de Aragua.
The report also said Maduro is “not directing” the gang’s operations in the US although it did concede that Venezuela offers a “permissive environment” that allows Tren de Aragua to operate.
What does the US strike mean for Venezuela-US relations?
The US deployment piqued concerns over spiralling tensions with Venezuela after Maduro urged millions of Venezuelans in August to join nationalist “militias” to defend Venezuela in response to Washington’s aggressive new antidrug operations in the Caribbean.
In the run-up to the US strike on the Venezuelan boat this week, Maduro said on August 25: “No empire will touch the sacred soil of Venezuela.”
The Venezuelan president has long accused the US government of interfering in his country’s politics on behalf of the political opposition. In last week’s remarks, he also accused Trump of “seeking a regime change through military threat”.
Trump, meanwhile, has adopted the same “maximum pressure” campaign that defined his foreign policy towards Venezuela during his first term. It included heightened sanctions on the Latin American country.
In spite of this, the US energy group Chevron returned to Venezuela in July after a three-month hiatus after Trump’s decision in February to rescind a US Treasury licence that allowed the oil giant to export crude from Venezuela despite US sanctions.
Trump revoked the existing licence, which was issued during President Joe Biden’s administration in 2022, over what he saw as a “failure” by Maduro to implement electoral reforms and accept Venezuelans deported from the US, forcing Chevron to pause operations and wind down its activities.
But after intense lobbying, Chevron was granted a new restricted licence by the Department of the Treasury to export Venezuelan crude. That decision was considered to amount to an easing of sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector.
While the precise licence conditions remain unknown, experts said the agreement will bring benefits to Venezuela’s debt-strapped economy as Chevron is expected to send 200,000 barrels of oil per day from Venezuela to international markets.
Christopher Sabatini, senior research fellow for Latin America at Chatham House, said the Trump administration is facing “competing objectives” in Venezuela.
Sabatini told Al Jazeera that the Treasury’s recent move to reinstate Chevron’s (albeit restricted) licence “is a recognition, in part, of the failure of past sanctions” insofar as they ceded control of Venezuelan oil assets from Chevron to “governments opposed to US interests, … China, Russia and Iran”.
He added that “by mobilising this fleet [in the Caribbean], the administration is also trying to scare Maduro into potential regime change.” The upshot, Sabatini said, is that Trump’s two-pronged policy approach “risks causing an unintended conflict with Venezuela”.
How are US relations with the rest of the region?
In talks with leaders from Mexico and Ecuador, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio will make the case this week for broad cooperation on migration and drug trafficking, which the Trump administration views as crucial for security across the Americas.
Rubio’s trip on Wednesday and Thursday is likely to be complicated by the fact that Trump has rattled many leaders across the region with sweeping tariffs for not complying with his geopolitical aims, experts said.
The main problem, Sabatini said, is that US “demands are a moving target and prone to the whims of Donald Trump”.
In the case of Brazil, for instance, Trump slapped 50 percent tariffs on the country’s goods in August partly in retaliation for the government’s pursuit of criminal charges against former President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally.
Looking ahead, Sabatini expected countries in Latin America to “slow-walk their responses to Trump without cravenly buckling to his pressure, … [likely resulting in] geopolitical instability”.