Category: Washington Post

MEXICO CITY – The Trump administration’s justification for blowing up suspected drug traffickers off the Venezuelan coast has been clear and consistent: These people aren’t just criminals; they’re “narco-terrorists” smuggling a “deadly weapon poisoning Americans” at the behest of terrorist organizations.

“We take them out,” Trump told the nation’s three- and four-star generals and admirals last month. “Every boat kills 25,000 on average – some people say more. You see these boats, they’re stacked up with bags of white powder that’s mostly fentanyl and other drugs, too.”

Claiming the power to summarily kill traffickers as though they’re enemy troops, Trump has authorized the U.S. military to strike at least six speedboats the administration has deemed suspicious, killing dozens of people since the beginning of September. At least half of the strikes and 21 of the killings, locals say, have transpired in the waters between Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago – nations so close that on clear days they’re within eyesight of each other.

But records and interviews with 20 people familiar with the route or the strikes, including current and former U.S. and international officials, contradict the administration’s claims. The passage, they said, is not ordinarily used to traffic synthetic opioids such as fentanyl, present in 69 percent of drug overdose deaths last year. Nor are the drugs typically headed for the United States.

Trinidad and Tobago, a Caribbean nation more than 1,000 miles south and 1,200 miles east of Miami, is both a destination market for marijuana and a transshipment point for South American cocaine bound for West Africa and Europe, according to U.S. officials, Trinidadian police and independent analysts. The fentanyl seized in the United States, in contrast, is typically manufactured in Mexico using precursors from China and smuggled in through the land border, most often by U.S. citizens.

The military strikes are unlikely, as a result, to cut overdose deaths in the United States, officials say – but it has brought U.S. forces into striking distance of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Trump has accused the authoritarian socialist, who claimed reelection last year despite ballot audits showing he lost the vote, of leading the Venezuela gang Tren de Aragua to push lethal drugs into America.

“When I saw [an internal document on the strikes],” a senior U.S. national security official said, “I immediately thought, ‘This isn’t about terrorists. This is about Venezuela and regime change.’ But there was no information about what it was really about.”

The official, like others quoted in this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide his candid assessment.

The White House declined to share evidence to support the claims that Trump has used to justify the strikes. A spokeswoman defended the killings as necessary to protect Americans.

“All of these decisive strikes have been against designated narco-terrorists bringing deadly poison to our shores,” spokeswoman Anna Kelly said. “The president will continue to use every element of American power to stop drugs from flooding into our country and to bring those responsible to justice.”

Two family members of the 11 men killed in September in the first attack acknowledged by Trump did not deny that the men aboard had been taking marijuana and cocaine from Venezuela to Trinidad. But they said Trump’s allegation in his announcement was inaccurate that they’d worked for the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.

“I knew them all,” said one of the family members, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “None of them had anything to do with Tren de Aragua. They were fishermen who were looking for a better life” by smuggling contraband.

On Tuesday, Trump said, a new strike had killed “six male narco-terrorists” off the Venezuelan coast. That afternoon, one mother in the Trinidadian community of Las Cuevas received a call from her brother, a fisherman. Her son Chad Joseph, the second of her six children, had been killed in the explosion.

Speaking by phone Thursday morning, Leonore Burnley was furious. Her son had been deprived a trial. And she’d been deprived of any chance of closure.

“You can’t get the body to bury it,” she said.

Joseph had spent the last three months in Venezuela working odd jobs, Burnley said. He had written her recently to say he would be returning home.

She called Trump’s claim he had been involved in trafficking drugs a lie.

“They are judging him wrong,” she said. “He was no drug dealer. Chad was a good boy, anything you want, he would help; he was a loving child.”

“Twenty-six years he have,” she said.

How cocaine courses through Venezuela

In recent years, drug cartels in Colombia and other South American nations have supercharged cocaine production. The rush to bring it to market – largely the United States and Europe, but increasingly West Africa – has transformed the continent’s criminal landscape, fueling the rise of new transnational gangs and threatening weaker national governments with limited power of state.

Venezuela, too, has been swept into the boom. Economically battered by years of socialist mismanagement and punishing international sanctions, a nation that was once Latin America’s wealthiest has become increasingly involved in the trade. Along its border with Colombia, cocaine is now produced for sale and shipment abroad.

U.S. federal prosecutors in March 2020 accused senior government officials in the Maduro regime, including Maduro himself, of leading the Cártel de Los Soles – “Cartel of the Suns” – a criminal network that extorts drug trafficking groups and controls routes and product itself.

Venezuela, U.S. investigators say, is now a narco free-for-all filled with armed groups from throughout Latin America.

“The Mexicans are there,” one former Drug Enforcement Administration agent said. “The Colombians are there, sometimes on behalf of the Mexicans. Sometimes the Hondurans and Guatemalans have guys there, too.”

Most of the South American cocaine bound for North America flows through the Pacific, but some does depart Venezuela through the Caribbean, according to U.S. officials and analysts who track drug routes. Much of it courses overland through the western states of Zulia and Falcón before shipping northward to Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Dominican Republic. Some travels by air, departing clandestine airstrips in Maracaibo or Apure state for Central America and onward to Mexico and the United States.

It’s less common, investigators say, to ship U.S.-bound cocaine northeast into the Sucre peninsula and across the narrow Bocas del Dragón channel to Trinidad – the route the administration has targeted. Trinidad is used far more frequently as a gateway to Europe. Spanish authorities seized 1.65 tons of cocaine that had transited through the island, the State Department reported in 2024. Portuguese authorities in June recovered 1.66 tons of cocaine that traversed the same route.

“When you look at a map, countries like Trinidad and Tobago and Suriname are used as transshipment points of massive amounts of cocaine from Colombia into Venezuela [and then onward] to West Africa and Europe,” a former senior U.S. security official said. He added that routes may change based on pressure.

One recently retired senior Trinidadian police official, asked whether Sucre traffickers were bringing drugs intended for the United States, chuckled.

“Why would they use Trinidad and Tobago to transport drugs to the United States, when you have Colombia and Mexico and all of these other places that are closer?”

The waters between Sucre and Trinidad

The Sucre peninsula, known for its paradisiacal beaches and green-thatched mountains, has always been poor. But its fortunes turned decidedly for the worse in recent years, as the economy melted down and the state slipped into lawlessness.

With few opportunities to work, fishermen turned to the smuggling route that has long tethered Sucre to Trinidad, a half-hour boat ride away.

The former senior Trinidadian police official has investigated the route since 1989. It has historically carried many kinds of contraband: guns, cigarettes, alcohol, honey, exotic animals and people. But in recent years, as more drugs poured into Venezuela, it began to be used as a route to bring over marijuana and cocaine.

“It’s 80 percent marijuana,” said one Trinidad criminologist who has studied seizure data. “Cocaine is a much, much smaller amount.”

While Tren de Aragua has had a presence in Sucre, locals and drug trafficking analysts say it doesn’t control the trade. The drugs are instead moved by other local gangs.

“We have found no links between Tren de Aragua and multinational smugglers,” said Jeremy McDermott, co-founder of Insight Crime, whose team recently visited the region. “There was an attempt by them to penetrate Sucre, but they were ejected by local gangs.”

“The evidence,” he added, “does not support the claims” by the Trump administration.

One man who grew up in San Juan de Unare along the Sucre coast, but moved to Caracas after his community plunged into poverty, said his cousin Reibys Gomez was among the first fishermen to take drugs to Trinidad. He said his cousin had a young family to support.

“People are in need,” he said. “They live off fishing and hunting, and that’s it.”

Now Reibys is dead, and the man said his family has “deteriorated” in San Juan de Unare – unable to collect his body and haunted by questions over why the U.S. military killed him.

“They were going to Trinidad,” he said. “They weren’t going to the United States.”