The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to María Corina Machado, a woman who succeeded in unifying the Venezuelan opposition and spearheading the most effective peaceful social movement against the regime of Nicolás Maduro. Her award represents yet another international setback for Maduro’s government. It comes at a time when the Trump administration is intensifying its efforts to crack down on Caribbean drug-trafficking networks while holding the Maduro regime accountable for its criminal activities.
The Miraflores Palace is in a state of panic. In a bid to appease Washington, Maduro has offered US companies access to Venezuela’s oil and gold projects. The Miami Herald recently reported that Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez offered the Trump administration a proposal for a new government led by herself, and excluding Maduro, followed by the creation of a transitional administration. This offer sought to preserve the existing structure of the Venezuelan state while assuming that Washington’s problem was solely with Maduro and not with the entire regime.
That assumption is wrong. The Venezuelan Vice President’s proposal misses the fundamental reality of how Maduro’s regime actually survives. While conventional wisdom focuses on oil revenues and economic sanctions, the regime’s true lifeline flows through a far more sinister channel: drug trafficking. According to a report by Transparencia Venezuela, drug trafficking generated more than $8 billion in revenue for the country, most of which directly benefits the regime and the security, military, and bureaucratic apparatus that sustains it. To put this in perspective, during the year when the harshest sanctions were imposed on Venezuela, the illicit economy accounted for 21.7 percent of the country’s GDP.
This isn’t peripheral criminal activity; it’s central to regime survival. The report estimates that roughly 24 percent of global cocaine production passes through Venezuela. The Venezuelan government actively collaborates with powerful transnational cartels, including the Cartel de los Soles (comprised of Venezuelan military officers and government officials), the Sinaloa Cartel, and the Gulf Cartel. It further maintains cooperation with guerrilla and terrorist organizations such as FARC dissidents, the ELN (National Liberation Army), and criminal gangs like Tren de Aragua.
Traditional economic sanctions have failed to dislodge the regime. They hurt the Venezuelan people while the regime’s military and security elite continue enriching themselves through drug profits that flow outside formal economic channels. Oil sanctions can be circumvented, but more importantly, they’re no longer the regime’s primary revenue source. Drug trafficking is the financial engine that keeps Maduro’s apparatus loyal and operational. Any strategy that ignores this reality is destined to fail.
A Venezuela without Maduro but with a regime still dependent on drug trafficking does not solve the core problem. The drug crisis is a national security threat to the United States and to other nations. Addiction not only kills users but also inflicts grief and hardship on families, undermines mental health, fuels crime and violence, and robs young people of opportunities and their future.
In his address to the UN General Assembly in September, President Trump vowed to eradicate the cartels, threatening to “blow them out of existence.” Shortly after, two drug-laden vessels were destroyed by the US military. Democrats in the Senate unsuccessfully attempted to block military action against “any non-state organization engaged in the promotion, trafficking, and distribution of illegal drugs” unless specifically authorized by Congress.
Securing bipartisan support for such military operations is crucial for several reasons. First, drug cartels and related organizations are sophisticated vertically integrated enterprises. Their networks encompass transporting merchandise, designing trafficking routes, negotiating deals, securing payments, and laundering illicit profits.
Second, transnational criminal groups have transnational effects. Guatemala provides a clear example. There, Mexican cartels operate in cooperation with local gangs, deeply entrenching themselves in drug trafficking networks. Former President Otto Pérez Molina was imprisoned on charges of corruption and collusion with cartels, and vast portions of the country’s territory have effectively fallen under the control of criminal organizations.
Honduras offers another telling example. A recently released video shows that President Xiomara Castro’s brother-in-law, Carlos Zelaya, was offered half a million dollars by drug traffickers to fund an unsuccessful presidential bid in 2013. Moreover, Honduras’s former president Juan Orlando Hernández was convicted in a US court on three counts of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy and sentenced to 45 years in prison. These revelations underscore the deep entanglement between political elites and the drug trade, which has devastated governance and the rule of law in the region.
Given these circumstances, treating transnational criminal networks as foreign enemies or terrorist actors is a legitimate policy response. Ideally, the Trump administration should be able to secure congressional authorization to carry out military operations against drug-trafficking networks; narrow partisan calculations should not impede this urgent mission.
US military operations targeting drug traffickers should be accompanied by a plan for how to address the Venezuelan regime. Cutting off the regime’s sources of revenue and capacity to facilitate illicit trade is a sensible and necessary first step. And unlike economic sanctions that harm ordinary Venezuelans while leaving the regime’s structure intact, targeting drug trafficking strikes at the heart of what keeps Maduro’s cronies loyal and his security apparatus operational. Severing the regime’s financial lifeline is the path toward genuine regime change.
