On Wednesday, October 15th, President Donald Trump publicly confirmed earlier reports from insider sources which claimed that he had secretly authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations in Venezuela. This action would not begin any specific CIA operation in the country, but permit the organization to take lethal action in Venezuela, as well as expand the range of operations it can conduct in the Caribbean. The CIA is already actively operating in Latin America — for example, it collaborates with officials of the Mexican government to gather intelligence on drug production and trafficking operations — but this is a significant escalation.
The order appears to be part of a process of destabilizing the regime of Nicolás Maduro, the likely fraudulently-elected authoritarian president of Venezuela. The Organization of American States declared his presidency illegitimate in 2019, but he has remained in power, and his reign has been fraught with mass media censorship, extrajudicial arrest, torture, and execution, and executive interference in the judiciary. Maduro has survived multiple attempted coups and assassinations, including several which his regime has alleged were perpetrated by CIA agents and other United States operatives.
Most recently, Venezuela’s 2024 election was punctuated by a coalition of opposition parties claiming their candidate, Edmundo González, won based on official tally sheets, before having many of their leadership arrested as the regime-controlled Consejo Nacional Electoral (National Electoral Council) simply declared victory for Maduro without providing a tally. During the election, María Corina Machado, an opposition party leader and recent Nobel Peace Prize winner, was barred from running and went into hiding as a warrant was issued for her arrest. Machado and other opposition leaders have long received political support from the United States, and Machado has publicly praised President Trump for his opposition to Maduro, which includes the deployment of Naval forces to the Caribbean earlier this year.
Coinciding with this CIA authorization is a series of seven military strikes beginning in early September against motorboats allegedly carrying illegal narcotics off the Venezuelan Coast, killing an estimated 30 people. In early October, the Trump administration sent a notice to Congress justifying these actions by declaring a formal armed conflict against drug cartels and designating suspected drug traffickers as enemy combatants. In response, Democrats in the Senate, joined by Republicans Rand Paul and Lisa Murkowski, introduced a resolution which would block the administration from using military force against drug trafficking organizations without congressional authorization. The measure failed to move forward in a narrow vote. The resolution’s leaders contend that the continued use of military force against nonstate criminal organizations violated the War Powers resolution (which requires the president to withdraw military forces from combat after 90 days without congressional authorization, and consult Congress before deploying armed forces without a formal declaration of war) and risks bringing the United States into open armed conflict with Venezuela. Earlier this year, the White House issued a statement claiming that Nicolás Maduro had directed a Venezuelan prison gang to traffic drugs to and commit crimes in the US, which it designated as “irregular warfare”.
President Trump stated in a recent press conference that each boat strike saves 25,000 Americans from dying of drug overdose. The basis for this statement is unclear, as the US experienced around 80,000 total deaths from drug overdose in 2024, and Fentanyl (which the boats are alleged to have carried) is most often smuggled into the US by US citizens via the US-Mexico border. Democratic lawmakers have also criticized the administration for providing insufficient evidence that the boats were carrying the amounts of narcotics alleged — while footage of the strikes has been released, the contents of the boats are not clear from the videos.
The authorization of CIA action in Venezuela represents the latest in a series of American covert and military actions intended to destabilize the current authoritarian regime led by Nicolás Maduro. Statements by the Trump administration surrounding US action against Venezuela have inflamed skepticism of the legitimacy of American military action in the Caribbean and stoked fears that the US is approaching armed conflict abroad.
