Trump hints at possible talks with Maduro as US ramps up pressure on Venezuela
President Donald Trump said on Sunday the United States “may be having some discussions” with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, signalling a possible diplomatic opening as Washington expands its military presence near Venezuela. The arrival of the world's largest aircraft carrier as part of a US counterdrug operation has raised concerns of escalating pressure tactics.
Issued on: 17/11/2025
By: FRANCE 24
The USS Gerald R. Ford spotted in the North Sea during NATO's Neptune Strike 2025 exercise on September 24, 2025. © Jonathan Klein, AFP
Trump said Sunday the US “may be having some discussions” with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, a potential diplomatic avenue as the US further builds up its military presence near the South American country with the arrival of its most advanced aircraft carrier.
Trump didn't offer details about the possible discussions with Maduro, but he said “Venezuela would like to talk."
The US military has been carrying out a series of strikes against vessels suspected of transporting drugs. The arrival of the USS Gerald R. Ford and other warships, announced by the Navy in a statement, marks a major moment in what the administration insists is a counterdrug operation but has been seen as an escalating pressure tactic against Maduro.
When asked Sunday what he meant when he said Maduro wants to talk, Trump simply said: “What does it mean? You tell me, I don’t know.”
“I’ll talk to anybody," he added a few moments later. "We’ll see what happens.”
This screen grab from a video posted by US President Donald Trump on his Truth Social account on September 15, 2025, shows what President Trump says is US Military forces conducting a strike on a boat carrying alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean Sea in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility on Monday, September 15, 2025. The US military has destroyed at least two boats carrying a combined 14 people who were allegedly transporting drugs across the Caribbean this month, with Trump posting videos of the strikes on his Truth Social platform. AFP - HANDOUT
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Venezuela’s government didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment. Maduro, who faces charges of narcoterrorism in the US, has said the US government is “fabricating” a war against him.
The Ford rounds off the largest buildup of US firepower in the region in generations. With its arrival, the “Operation Southern Spear" mission includes nearly a dozen Navy ships and about 12,000 sailors and Marines.
The carrier’s arrival coincided with the military announcing its latest deadly strike on a small boat it claims was ferrying illegal drugs. The military’s Southern Command posted a video on X on Sunday showing the boat being blown up, an attack it said took place Saturday in international waters of the eastern Pacific Ocean and killed three men. The military did not immediately respond to a request for more information.
Since early September, such strikes by the US in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have killed at least 83 people in 21 attacks.
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The carrier strike group, which includes squadrons of fighter jets and guided-missile destroyers, transited the Anegada Passage near the British Virgin Islands on Sunday morning, the Navy said.
Rear Adm. Paul Lanzilotta, who commands the strike group, said it will bolster an already large force of American warships to "protect our nation’s security and prosperity against narco-terrorism in the Western Hemisphere”.
Adm. Alvin Holsey, the commander who oversees the Caribbean and Latin America, said in a statement that the American forces “stand ready to combat the transnational threats that seek to destabilise our region”.
Holsey, who will retire next month after just a year on the job, said the strike group's deployment is "a critical step in reinforcing our resolve to protect the security of the Western Hemisphere and the safety of the American Homeland”.
In Trinidad and Tobago, which is only 7 miles from Venezuela at its closest point, government officials said troops have begun “training exercises” with the US military that will run through much of the week.
Minister of Foreign Affairs Sean Sobers described the joint exercises as the second in less than a month and said they are aimed at tackling violent crime on the island nation, which has become a stopover point for drug shipments headed to Europe and North America. The prime minister has been a vocal supporter of the US military strikes.
The exercises will include Marines from the 22nd Expeditionary Unit who have been stationed aboard the Navy ships that have been looming off Venezuela's coast for months.
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Venezuela’s government has described the training exercises as an act of aggression. It had no immediate comment Sunday on the arrival of the aircraft carrier.
Meanwhile, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said Sunday that US troops have been training in Panama, underscoring the administration’s increasing focus on Latin America.
“We’re reactivating our jungle school in Panama. We would be ready to act on whatever” Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth needed, he told CBS’s “Face the Nation".
The administration has insisted that the buildup of American forces in the region is focused on stopping the flow of drugs into the US but it has released no evidence to support its assertions that those killed in the boats were “narcoterrorists.” Trump has indicated military action would expand beyond strikes by sea, saying the US would "stop the drugs coming in by land”.
On Friday, Trump was asked by reporters if he had made up his mind on what he intended to do about Venezuela. He did not offer details but said, “I sort of have made up my mind."
The US has long used aircraft carriers to pressure and deter aggression by other nations because their warplanes can strike targets deep inside another country. Some experts say the Ford is ill-suited to fighting cartels, but it could be an effective instrument of intimidation for Maduroin a push to get him to step down.
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Venezuela’s government recently touted a “massive” mobilisation of troops and civilians to defend against possible US attacks. Maduro and other officials in Venezuela’s socialist party also have been attending rallies this weekend to back the creation of neighborhood committees that will be in charge of increasing membership in Venezuela’s socialist party, and promoting the party’s policies.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the United States does not recognise Maduro, who was widely accused of stealing last year’s election, as Venezuela’s legitimate leader. Rubio has called Venezuela's government a “transshipment organisation” that openly cooperates with those trafficking drugs.
Rubio said in a statement released Sunday evening that the State Department intends to designate Cartel de los Soles, or Cartel of the Suns, a foreign terrorist organisation.
Rubio said the cartel is headed by Maduro and other high-ranking members of his government and is among those “responsible for terrorist violence throughout our hemisphere as well as for trafficking drugs into the United States and Europe.” When the designation takes effect on November 24, it will be a crime to provide “material support” to the cartel or its members.
Trump has justified the attacks on drug boats by saying the US is in “armed conflict” with drug cartels while claiming the boats are operated by foreign terrorist organisations.
He has faced pushback from leaders in the region, the UN human rights chief and US lawmakers, including Republicans, who have pressed for more information on who is being targeted and the legal justification for the boat strikes.
Senate Republicans, however, recently voted to reject legislation that would have put a check on Trump’s ability to launch an attack against Venezuela without congressional authorisation.
Experts disagree on whether or not American warplanes may be used to strike land targets inside Venezuela. Either way, the 100,000-ton warship is sending a message.
“This is the anchor of what it means to have US military power once again in Latin America,” said Elizabeth Dickinson, the International Crisis Group’s senior analyst for the Andes region. “And it has raised a lot of anxieties in Venezuela but also throughout the region. I think everyone is watching this with sort of bated breath to see just how willing the US is to really use military force.”
(FRANCE 24 with AP)
On Sunday, coinciding with the arrival of the supercarrier USS Gerald R. Ford in the Caribbean, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that the State Department intends to designate Venezuela's Cartel de los Soles as a foreign terrorist organization - a formal designation under U.S. law that imposes counterterror sanctions on a group.
According to InsightCrime, Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns) is less a formal organization than a loose network of cells within Venezuela's military. The name reportedly comes from the sun-shaped epaulette insignia of commanders in the country's national guard. "These groups operate essentially as drug trafficking organizations," writes InsightCrime. "It is not clear how these cells relate to one another, or whether they interact at all."
Organized-crime experts say that Venezuela has a growing and active cocaine-trafficking industry interlinked with Colombian crime groups, which operate across the border. Though this is vigorously denied by Caracas, multiple Venezuelan officials have been implicated in cocaine smuggling over the years, including some who have been sanctioned by the U.S. for trafficking.
The list of smuggling suspects extends up to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro himself, who was indicted in 2020 by a U.S. federal grand jury on charges of cocaine trafficking. The FBI has offered a $50 million bounty for information leading to Maduro's arrest. Other allegations have been substantiated in court: in June 2025, former military intelligence chief Hugo Carvajal Barrios pleaded guilty to trafficking charges in the Southern District of New York.
On Sunday, amidst multiple reports that the administration is debating the scope of a planned naval strike on Venezuelan land targets, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that Venezuela's military drug traffickers would be designated as "terrorists."
"[The State Department] intends to designate Cartel de los Soles as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). Headed by the illegitimate Nicolás Maduro, the group has corrupted the institutions of government in Venezuela and is responsible for terrorist violence conducted by and with other designated FTOs as well as for trafficking drugs into the United States and Europe," Rubio said.
The secretary did not elaborate further on the nature of the alleged terrorist violence attributed to the Cartel De Los Soles.
An FTO designation has relatively few direct legal consequences outside of the U.S.: it bans giving "material support or resources" to the group, bans the group's members from the United States, and forces banks to freeze the group's assets. In general, it relies upon the cooperation of foreign governments for enforcement abroad; some critics suggest it is largely symbolic in nature, since it gives no authorization for the use of military force on its own.
"Remember that by designating the Cartel of the Suns as a foreign terrorist organization, it allows us to attack them militarily within the framework of U.S. law. Then they can't say they weren't warned," said Rep. Carlos A. Gimenez (R-FL), a longtime opponent of Maduro, in a social media statement Sunday. "It's almost over."
US State Dept Says Venezuela’s Cartel De Los Soles To Be Designated As Foreign Terrorist Organization
Corrupt Venezuelan Regime presented by the United States Department of Justice
The US Department of State said Sunday it intends to designate Cartel de los Soles as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO), effective November 24, 2025
In a press statement, the State Department said that the Cartel de los Soles, based in Venezuela, is headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime “who have corrupted Venezuela’s military, intelligence, legislature, and judiciary.”
“Neither Maduro nor his cronies represent Venezuela’s legitimate government. Cartel de los Soles by and with other designated FTOs including Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa Cartel are responsible for terrorist violence throughout our hemisphere as well as for trafficking drugs into the United States and Europe,” the statement continued, adding that, “The United States will continue using all available tools to protect our national security interests and deny funding and resources to narco-terrorists.”
Sunday’s action is taken pursuant to section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. FTO designations go into effect upon publication in the Federal Register. Cartel de los Soles was previously designated by the Department of the Treasury pursuant to Executive Order 13224
'Be quiet': Ex-CIA official warns Trump is 'undermining' foreign policy with 'overt action'
White House photo
The Trump administration’s moves to push for a regime change in Venezuela have been far from discreet, and one former CIA official warns that this approach and the overall operation are liable to blow up in the president's face.
Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump and his administration have pushed heavily for a regime change in Venezuela, pressuring President Nicolás Maduro to resign from office. This push has involved a heavy increase in military and defense posturing, including the authorization of covert operations in the South American nation, the buildup of aircraft carriers off of its northern shore and the prospect of ground deployments in the near future.
Speaking with CNN on Monday afternoon, Kevin Carroll, a former CIA case officer and official with the Department of Homeland Security, said that the administration should “be quiet” with its handling of the Venezuela and warned that any sort of military operation in the country could go poorly in a number of ways.
“The very first thing the administration should do is be quiet in public,” Carroll said. “You know, they've been discussing covert action, it’s more like overt action at this point."
"I think they shouldn't undermine whoever comes next there [after Maduro] by making them look like an American puppet by so publicly discussing the CIA’s involvement," Carroll added.
Carroll also warned that despite the history of successful U.S.-backed regime changes, there’s no guarantee that things won’t go sideways in Venezuela and noted such a move could have negative reverberations.
“The U.S. has demonstrated repeatedly that we're capable of forcing regime change from the air, as in Libya in 2011 or in Afghanistan in 2001, with air power and just some special operations forces," Carroll said. "But that doesn't mean that you can control what happens next. We obviously weren't able to get a government to our liking in power in [Libya], and it took a massive investment of U.S. forces to try, ultimately unsuccessfully, to keep a government that we favored in power in [Afghanistan]. So I think the reverberations could be could be really poor."
“You could have some sort of civil war situation develop with competing factions and within Venezuela. Another thing is that for historical reasons, Latin Americans are sensitive about gunboat diplomacy and so forth by the United States. And so going down there and so obviously forcing regime change is going to raise the hackles of nationalists throughout Latin America.”
Escalating the Escalation: A Murder Incorporated Tale of the Drug Wars
Reprinted from TomDispatch:
There’s one rule in the age of Donald Trump. When it comes to him, you simply can’t rule anything out. It’s true that, only recently, when asked about the possibility that he would order military strikes not just on ships off the coast of Venezuela but in Venezuela itself, he bluntly said “no.” But he’s also said that military options remain “on the table.” And how strange, if he’s planning on doing nothing, that U.S. warships are now reportedly positioned for possible strikes inside that country, with destroyers off its coast and an aircraft carrier task force having only recently entered the Caribbean as well. And don’t forget the covert actions his administration has already secretly authorized the CIA to take inside that country. Or for that matter, the supposed “drug” ships his administration has been sinking regularly in the Caribbean (and the Pacific Ocean), even though it doesn’t faintly know who’s on them.
Mind you, we’re talking about the president who claims to have ended eight wars and considers himself the most eligible person on Earth (bar no one!) for a Nobel Peace Prize. But the world of Donald Trump simply couldn’t be stranger or both more predictable and — yes! — more unpredictable. Recently, in a social media post, Senator Bernie Sanders pointed out what’s constitutionally obvious, even if not, of course, to the president and his crew: “Trump is illegally threatening war with Venezuela — after killing more than 50 people in unauthorized strikes at sea. The Constitution is clear: Only Congress can declare war. Congress must defend the law and end Trump’s militarism.”
How truly strange — and, stranger yet, the recent Trump attacks on those “drug ships” in the Caribbean and this country’s ongoing “war on drugs” have a distinct history, which TomDispatch regular Greg Grandin lays out all too vividly today. When it comes to the United States of America and its presidents, while Donald Trump is now distinctly upping the ante, there’s nothing faintly new about the disastrous “war on drugs.” ~ Tom Engelhardt
A Short History of the Long War on Drugs in Latin America from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump
by Greg Grandin
Today, Donald Trump presides over his own Murder Incorporated, less a government than a death squad.
Many brushed off his proclamation early in his second term that the Gulf of Mexico would henceforth be called the Gulf of America as a foolish, yet harmless, show of dominance. Now, however, he’s created an ongoing bloodbath in the adjacent Caribbean Sea. The Pentagon has so far destroyed 18 go-fast boats there and in the Pacific Ocean. No evidence has been presented or charges brought suggesting that those ships were running drugs, as claimed. The White House has simply continued to release bird’s-eye view surveillance videos (snuff films, really) of a targeted vessel. Then comes a flash of light and it’s gone, as are the humans it was carrying, be they drug smugglers, fishermen, or migrants. As far as we know, at least 64 people have already been killed in such attacks.
The kill rate is accelerating. In early September, the U.S. was hitting one boat every eight to ten days. In early October, one every two days. For a time, starting in mid-October, it was every day, including four strikes on October 27th alone. Blood, it seems, lusts for blood.
And the kill zone has been expanding from the Caribbean waters off Venezuela to the Colombian and Peruvian coasts in the Pacific Ocean.
Many motives might explain Trump’s compulsion to murder. Perhaps he enjoys the thrill and rush of power that comes from giving execution orders, or he (and Secretary of State Marco Rubio) hope to provoke a war with Venezuela. Perhaps he considers the strikes useful distractions from the crime and corruption that define his presidency. The cold-blooded murder of Latin Americans is also red meat for the vengeful Trumpian rank-and-file who have been ginned up by culture warriors like Vice President JD Vance to blame the opioid crisis, which disproportionately plagues the Republican Party’s White rural base, on elite “betrayal.”
The murders, which Trump insists are part of a larger war against drug cartels and traffickers, are horrific. They highlight Vance’s callous cruelty. The vice president has joked about murdering fishermen and claimed he “doesn’t give a shit” if the killings are legal. As to Trump, he’s brushed off the need for congressional authority to destroy speedboats or attack Venezuela, saying: “I think we’re just gonna kill people. Okay? We’re gonna kill them. They’re gonna be, like, dead.”
But as with so many Trumpian things, it’s important to remember that he wouldn’t be able to do what he does if it weren’t for policies and institutions put in place by all too many of his predecessors. His horrors have long backstories. In fact, Donald Trump isn’t so much escalating the war on drugs as escalating its escalation.
What follows then is a short history of how we got to a moment when a president could order the serial killing of civilians, publicly share videos of the crimes, and find that the response of all too many reporters, politicians (Rand Paul being an exception), and lawyers was little more than a shrug, if not, in some cases, encouragement.
A Short History of the Longest War
Richard Nixon (1969-1974) was our first drug-war president.
On June 17, 1971, with the Vietnam War still raging, he announced a “new, all-out offensive” on drugs. Nixon didn’t use the phrase “war on drugs.” Within 48 hours, however, scores of newspapers nationwide had done so, suggesting that White House staffers had fed the militarized phrase to their reporters.
Nixon’s call for a drug offensive was a direct response to an explosive story published a month earlier in the New York Times, headlined “G.I. Heroin Addiction Epidemic in Vietnam.” Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers were addicts, with some units reporting that more than 50% of their men were using heroin.
At press conferences, Nixon was now being questioned not just about when and how he planned to end the war in Vietnam, but whether drug users in the military would be sent to rehab or punished. What, one journalist asked, was he “going to do about” the “soldiers who are coming back from Vietnam with an addiction to heroin?”
What he did was launch what we might today think of as Vietnam’s second act, a global expansion of military operations, focused not on communists this time, but on marijuana and heroin.
In 1973, shortly after the last U.S. combat soldier left South Vietnam, Nixon created the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Its first major operation in Mexico looked eerily like Vietnam. Starting in 1975, U.S. agents went deep into northern Mexico, joining local police and military forces to carry out military sweeps and airborne fumigation. One report described it as a terror campaign of extrajudicial murder and torture against rural marijuana and opium producers, mostly poor peasant farmers. The campaign treated all villagers as if they were the “internal enemy.” Under the cover of fighting drugs, Mexican security forces, supplied with intelligence by the DEA and the Central Intelligence Agency, ferociously suppressed peasant and student activists. As historian Adela Cedillo wrote, rather than limiting drug production, that campaign led to its concentration in a few hierarchically structured paramilitary organizations that, in the late 1970s, came to be known as “cartels.”
So, the first fully militarized battlefront in the War on Drugs helped create the cartels that the current iteration of the War on Drugs is now fighting.
Gerald Ford (1974-1977) responded to pressure from Congress — notably from New York Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel — by committing to a “supply-side” strategy of attacking drug production at its source (as opposed to trying to reduce demand at home). While countries in Southeast Asia, along with Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, had been major suppliers of heroin to the U.S., Mexicans, long a source of marijuana, had begun to grow poppy to meet the demand from heroin-habituated Vietnam vets. By 1975, it was supplying more than 85% of the heroin entering the United States. “Developments in Mexico are not good,” a White House aide told Ford in preparation for a meeting with Rangel.
Ford increased DEA operations in Latin America.
Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) supported the decriminalization of pot for personal use and, in his speeches and remarks, emphasized treatment over punishment. Overseas, however, the DEA continued to expand its operations. (It would soon be running 25 offices in 16 Latin American and Caribbean countries.)
Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) reigned in an era when drug policy would take a turn toward the surreal, strengthening the linkages between right-wing politics and illicit drugs.
But let’s backtrack a bit. The convergence of rightwing politics and drugs began at the end of World War Two when, according to historian Alfred McCoy, U.S. intelligence in Italy came to rely on crime boss Lucky Luciano’s growing “international narcotics syndicate,” which would reach from the Mediterranean Sea to the Caribbean Sea and from Istanbul to Havana, to conduct covert anti-communist operations. Then, in 1959, after the Cuban Revolution shut down that island’s lucrative drug trade, traffickers moved elsewhere in Latin America or to the United States, where they, too, joined the anti-communist cause.
The CIA then used those gangster exiles in operations meant to destabilize Fidel Castro’s Cuban government and undermine the domestic antiwar movement. At the same time, the CIA ran its own airline, Air America, in Southeast Asia, which smuggled opium and heroin as a way to support that agency’s secret war in Laos. And the FBI notoriously used the pretext of drug policing to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” political dissidents, including the Black Panthers. They worked, for example, with local police in Buffalo, New York, to frame African American activist Martin Sostre, who operated a bookstore that had become the center of that city’s Black radical politics, on trumped-up charges of selling heroin.
Nixon’s creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration drew those threads together, as its agents worked closely with both the FBI in the U.S. and the CIA in Latin America. When, after the war in Vietnam ended in defeat, Congress tried to rein in the CIA, its agents used the DEA’s expansive overseas network to continue their covert operations.
By the time Reagan became president, cocaine production in the Andean region in Latin America was in full swing, with a distinctly curious dynamic in operation: the CIA would work with rightwing, repressive governments involved in coca production even as the DEA was working with those same governments to suppress coca production. That dynamic was caught perfectly as early as 1971 in Bolivia when the CIA helped overthrow a mildly leftist government in the first of a series of what came to be known as “cocaine coups.” Bolivia’s “cocaine colonels” then took as much money as Washington was willing to offer to fight their version of the drug war while facilitating cocaine production for export abroad. President Carter cut off drug-interdiction funding to Bolivia in 1980. Reagan restored it in 1983.
The rise of Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet followed the same dynamic. Pinochet partly framed his 1973 CIA-enabled coup against socialist President Salvador Allende as a front in Nixon’s drug war. Working closely with the DEA, the general tortured and killed drug traffickers along with political activists as part of his post-coup wave of repression. Meanwhile, Pinochet’s allies began “to deal drugs with impunity,” with Pinochet’s family making millions exporting cocaine to Europe (with the help of agents from his infamous security forces).
Once in office, Reagan began escalating the drug war as he did the Cold War — and the bond between cocaine and rightwing politics tightened. The Medellín cartel donated millions of dollars to Reagan’s campaign against Nicaragua’s leftwing Sandinista government. The ties were murky and conspiratorial, part of what McCoy has termed the “covert netherworld,” so it’s easy to fall down the deep-state rabbit hole trying to trace them, but details can be found in reporting by Gary Webb, Robert Parry, Leslie Cockburn, Bill Moyers, John Kerry, and CBS’s 60 Minutes, among others.
George H.W. Bush (1989-1993) engaged in a very Trump-like move in making his case to the public that the war on drugs needed to be escalated. He had the DEA go to the poorest part of Washington, D.C., to entrap a low-level African American drug dealer, Keith Jackson, paying him to travel to the White House to sell an undercover agent three ounces of crack cocaine. Bush then held up the drugs on national television to illustrate how easy it was to buy narcotics. A high school senior, Jackson spent eight years in prison so Bush could do a show-and-tell on TV.
The president then ramped up funding for the war on drugs, expanding military and intelligence operations in the Andes and the Caribbean. These were the Miami Vice years, when efforts to suppress cocaine smuggling into Florida only shifted transport routes overland through Central America and Mexico. Bush’s signature contribution to the War on Drugs was Operation Just Cause, in which, a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall in late 1989, he dispatched 30,000 Marines to Panama to arrest autocrat Manuel Noriega on drug trafficking charges. Noriega had been a CIA asset when Bush was the director of that agency. But with the Cold War over, he had outlived his usefulness.
Bill Clinton (1993-2001) escalated his Republican predecessor’s “tough on drugs” policies. He maintained mandatory minimum sentencing and increased the number of people serving jail time for drug offences.
In his last year in office, Clinton rolled out Plan Colombia which committed billions of dollars more to drug interdiction, but with a twist: privatization. Washington doled out contracts to mercenary corporations to conduct field operations. DynCorp provided pilots, planes, and chemicals for the aerial eradication of drugs (which had horrible environmental consequences) and worked closely with the Colombian military. A cyber start-up, Oakley Networks, now part of Raytheon, also received Plan Colombia money to provide “Internet surveillance software” to Colombia’s National Police, which used the tech to spy on human-rights activists.
Plan Colombia led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and widespread ecological devastation. The result? Estimates vary, but roughly twice as much Colombian land is now believed to be dedicated to growing coca as at the start of Plan Colombia in 2000 and the production of cocaine has doubled.
George W. Bush (2001–2009) again escalated the war on drugs, increasing interdiction funding both domestically and internationally. He also urged Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón, to launch his own brutal military assault on the drug cartels. By the time Calderón left office, security forces and the cartels combined had killed or disappeared tens of thousands of Mexicans.
Conceptually, Bush linked the post-9/11 Global War on Terror to the Global War on Drugs. “Trafficking of drugs finances the world of terror,” he claimed.
Barack Obama (2009–2017), like President Carter, emphasized treatment over incarceration. Nonetheless, he took no steps to wind down the war on drugs, continuing to fund Plan Colombia and expanding Plan Mérida, which his predecessor had put in place to combat cartels in Central America and Mexico.
In February 2009, the former presidents of Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia — Fernando Cardoso, Ernesto Zedillo, and César Gaviria — released a report entitled “Drugs and Democracy: Toward a Paradigm Shift,” which called for an end to the war on drugs, proposing instead decriminalization and the treatment of drug use as a public health issue. The authors were establishment politicians, and Obama could have used their breakthrough report to help build a new public health consensus concerning drug use. But his White House largely ignored the report.
Donald Trump (2017–2021) increased already high-level funding for militarized counter-narcotic operations at the border and abroad, calling for the “death penalty” for drug dealers. He also floated the idea of shooting “missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs,” but to do so “quietly” so “no one would know it was us.”
In Trump’s first term, he offered a now-forgotten (in the U.S. at least) preview of the killing of civilians on boats. On May 11, 2017, DEA agents and their Honduran counterparts traveling by boat along the Patuca River opened fire on a water taxi carrying 16 passengers. Overhead, a DEA agent in a circling helicopter ordered a Honduran soldier to fire his machine gun at the taxi. Four died, including a young boy and two pregnant women, and three others were seriously injured. The incident involved 10 U.S. agents, none of whom suffered any consequences for the massacre.
Joe Biden (2021–2025) supported de-escalation in principle and actually decreased funding for aerial drug fumigation in Colombia. He also issued blanket pardons to thousands of people convicted on federal marijuana charges. Nonetheless, like the presidents before him, he continued funding the DEA and military operations in Latin America.
Donald Trump (2025-?) has opened a new front in the war against Mexico’s drug cartels in New England. The DEA, working with ICE and the FBI, claims that in August it made 171 “high-level arrests” of “members of the Sinaloa cartel” throughout Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” investigative team, though, reports that most of those arrested were involved in “small dollar drug sales,” or were simply addicts, and had no link whatsoever to the Sinaloa cartel.
Trump insists that the “war on drugs” isn’t a metaphor, that it’s a real war, and as such he possesses extraordinary wartime powers – including the authority to bomb Mexico and attack Venezuela.
Considering this history, who’s to argue? Or to think that such a war could end anything but badly — or, for that matter, ever end at all?
Copyright 2025 Greg Grandin
Greg Grandin is the author of Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism, published in the American Empire Project Series by Metropolitan Books; the Pulitzer Prize winning The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall; and most recently, America, América: A New History of the New World.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.
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