OPINION
‘This Is an Act of War’: CIA Carried Out Drone Strike on Port Facility Inside Venezuela
One expert called the reported drone strike a “violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter and the Take Care Clause of the Constitution.”
US Air Force personnel prepare an MQ-9 Reaper drone for a mission on the tarmac at Rafael Hernandez Airport in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico on December 27, 2025.
(Photo by Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo/AFP via Getty Images)
Jake Johnson
Dec 30, 2025
COMMON DREAMS
The US Central Intelligence Agency reportedly carried out a drone strike earlier this month on a port facility inside Venezuela, marking the first time the Trump administration launched an attack within the South American country amid a broader military campaign that observers fear could lead to war.
CNN on Monday was first to report the details of the CIA drone strike, days after President Donald Trump suggested in a radio interview that the US recently took out a “big facility” in Venezuela, prompting confusion and alarm. Trump authorized covert CIA action against Venezuela in October.
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According to CNN, which cited unnamed sources, the drone strike “targeted a remote dock on the Venezuelan coast that the US government believed was being used by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to store drugs and move them onto boats for onward shipping.”
To date, the Trump administration has not provided any evidence to support its claim that boats it has illegally bombed in international waters were involved in drug trafficking. No casualties were reported from the drone strike, and the Venezuelan government has not publicly commented on the attack.
“This is an act of war and illegal under both US and international law, let’s just be clear about that,” journalist Mehdi Hasan wrote in response to news of the drone strike.
Brian Finucane, senior adviser with the US Program at the International Crisis Group, called the reported drone attack a “violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter and the Take Care Clause of the Constitution.”
“Seemingly conducted as covert action and then casually disclosed by POTUS while calling into a radio show,” he added.
CNN‘s reporting, later corroborated by the New York Times, came after the Trump administration launched its 30th strike on a vessel in international waters, bringing the death toll from the lawless military campaign to at least 107.
The Times reported late Monday that “it is not clear” if the drone used in last week’s mission “was owned by the CIA or borrowed from the US military.”
“The Pentagon has stationed several MQ-9 Reaper drones, which carry Hellfire missiles, at bases in Puerto Rico as part of the pressure campaign,” the Times added.
U.S. Counter-Smuggling Operation Hits its First Land Target
The U.S. military has repeatedly attacked suspected drug-smuggling boats in international waters off South and Central America over the past few months, including a new strike announced Monday. But it has held off on striking land targets - at least, until last week. On Monday, U.S. President Donald Trump said that American forces had hit a dock allegedly used by smugglers.
"There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs," Trump said, adding new clarification to earlier comments. "We hit all the boats and now we hit the area. It's the implementation area. That's where they implement. And that is no longer around."
Trump did not name the country where the strike occurred, nor would he confirm which American units carried out the explosion. "I know exactly who it was, but I don't want to say who it was. But you know it was along the shore," he said. However, U.S. officials later confirmed to the New York Times that it was a CIA operation, and was conducted in Venezuela.
On Friday, Trump told press that American forces had hit a "big plant" where suspected smuggling vessels start their journeys. U.S. assets had hit that facility "very hard" midweek, he said.
Trump did not discuss the location of the site, or whether there may have been any possible casualties on scene.
The announcement is a significant escalation of the administration's effort to fight cocaine traffickers in the southern approaches to the U.S. market. So far, American forces have destroyed 30 suspected smuggling boats, killed more than 100 people, and rescued and repatriated two survivors. The latest attack was announced on Monday night, and targeted a suspected narco-trafficking boat in the Eastern Pacific. U.S. Southern Command released a video of the attack, below.
The strike campaign began as a way to pressure the regime of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. The drug is not manufactured in Venezuela, but it is widely known to be trafficked through the country in substantial quantities, much of it headed for Caribbean seaports and onwards to European consumer markets.
Given the scale and the value of the Venezuelan cocaine transport corridor, the Maduro regime and its military officials are widely suspected to be aware of and benefitting from the illegal trafficking network. White House officials view the strikes on suspected Venezuelan drug trafficking operations as a way to pressure Maduro, along with other stringent economic measures like steep restrictions on the country's gold and oil exports.
The strikes have since expanded into the Eastern Pacific, targeting the boats that depart Colombia and transit north to Central America, where the drugs are offloaded for onward delivery over land or for infiltration into containerized freight. One burned boat has been recovered by locals in a town on Colombia's Guajira Peninsula, located on the Gulf of Venezuela, according to the New York Times.
The Venezuela Escalation Ignores a Long History of U.S. Hypocrisy on Drugs
Image by Jon Tyson.
Every accusation is a confession. This is clearly true of the Trump administration’s insistence that Venezuela operates as a “narco-state,” exporting terrorism to the U.S. via fentanyl, now labeled as a “weapon of mass destruction.” The charge is not only false, given that virtually no fentanyl enters the country from Venezuela, but transparently political and pretextual.
This hypocrisy was made unmistakable with Trump’s recent pardon of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted in 2024 in a U.S. federal court on drug trafficking charges. Hernández presided over a regime long treated as a strategic ally within Washington’s regional security architecture, a reminder that the label of “narco-state” is applied not according to fact but according to the shifting imperatives of U.S. imperial power.
This accusation collapses further when placed in broader historical context. For decades, the most powerful state actors facilitating and protecting narcotics trafficking have not been Washington’s adversaries but Washington itself. Throughout the Cold War and the so-called War on Drugs, the United States, above all through the CIA, repeatedly subordinated drug enforcement to geopolitical priorities, enabling narco-networks so long as they advanced perceived U.S. interests.
These dynamics became especially pronounced in the 1980s, with disastrous consequences both at home and abroad. The decade marked an intensification of the Cold War under Ronald Reagan. His administration insisted that communist “advances” could not only be contained but rolled back. Upon taking office, Reagan launched his promised global offensive, intervening wherever alleged Soviet influence appeared. Turning a blind eye to drug trafficking became a central feature of this crusade, as anti-communism consistently took precedence over anti-narcotics efforts.
Carter and the Crisis of Confidence
Reagan’s rise followed a brief but meaningful thaw. In the wake of Watergate and the Vietnam War, Americans’ faith in political institutions had been profoundly shaken. Years of economic stagnation, inflation, and the reverberations of the 1973 OPEC oil embargo convinced many that the postwar promise of endless upward mobility, the ideological core of the American dream, was collapsing.
It also became impossible to ignore that the U.S. was not only failing to deliver on its economic promise but had also long abandoned the democratic values it claimed to champion. In 1975, the Church Committee laid bare what much of the Global South had known for decades: the United States had been operating as a global anti-democratic force, orchestrating coups and assassinations, sabotaging leftist movements (at home and abroad), and imposing political outcomes that served the interests of American capital rather than the aspirations of people around the world.
Then, in 1977, came Jimmy Carter. Carter promised a new foreign policy rooted not in reflexive anti-communism but a commitment to human rights. In doing so, he broke, at least in his rhetoric, with decades of bipartisan Cold War orthodoxy. For the first time, a president openly challenged the axiomatic belief that every leftist movement was a Kremlin proxy that demanded immediate U.S. intervention.
As Carter put it, “we are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in that fear,” acknowledging that “for too many years, we’ve been willing to adopt the flawed and erroneous principles and tactics of our adversaries, sometimes abandoning our own values for theirs.” Washington, he admitted, had “fought fire with fire, never thinking that fire is better quenched with water,” a strategy that had ultimately backfired.
Carter would also come to critique not only the misguided zealotry of U.S. foreign policy but, to an extent, capitalism itself. As he turned toward the root causes of the nation’s intersecting crises, he warned that “too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption,” and that “human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.” Conservatives responded with derision, quickly dubbing it the “malaise speech,” a framing that captured many Americans’ refusal to confront the deeper structural problems Carter had identified.
The Reagan Rollback
Reagan ran on this response. He rejected everything Carter had come to represent. Carter, for his part, presided over a series of perceived foreign policy blunders, not all of them self-inflicted, including the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, the Iran Hostage Crisis, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and his actual record was far less radical than his rhetoric suggested. But Reagan seized the moment, casting Carter as weak, naïve, and insufficiently committed to American power and the American way of life, and he won in a landslide.
When Reagan assumed office in 1981, he claimed a mandate to pursue his promised program of unfettered capitalism at home and militant anti-communism abroad, raising the military budget to what were then unprecedented levels. Yet even with this political momentum, he faced constraints. Among them was a public skepticism toward foreign intervention, labeled “Vietnam syndrome,” which posed a direct challenge to his effort to reassert American military primacy on the global stage.
Reagan, however, was not inclined to let public sentiment, democratic constraints, or questions of legality impede his objectives. This saw its most notorious expression in the Iran-Contra Affair, in which administration officials sold weapons to Iran, then in a war of attrition with Saddam’s Iraq, whom the U.S. was backing, in exchange for assistance pressuring Hezbollah to release American hostages in Lebanon, while simultaneously generating funds to support the Contras in Nicaragua. Both were illegal: Congress barred aid to the Contras with the 1982 Boland Amendment, and arms sales to Iran violated U.S. law once it was designated a state sponsor of terrorism in 1984.
Drug Traffickers and “Freedom Fighters”
Another method in which Reagan sought to bypass political constraints on his policies was through the funding of “freedom fighters” in covert proxy wars, an expensive endeavor financed not only by taxpayer dollars but also by enabling allies to engage in drug trafficking. The tactic was hardly new. Imperial powers had long leveraged drugs to consolidate geopolitical control, from alcohol’s role in Indigenous dispossession to Britain’s forced export of opium into China.
Nor was this unprecedented for the United States. During the American war in Vietnam, U.S. intelligence enabled local traffickers to fold an existing regional drug trade in support of their counterinsurgency effort. As historian Alfred McCoy has demonstrated, this helped transform the Golden Triangle into the world’s largest opium-producing region. Estimates during the conflict suggested that up to 25% of U.S. troops stationed in Southeast Asia used heroin in some units, and thousands returned home with addictions seeded with the complicity of Washington.
Under Reagan, such complicity only grew. As the administration aggressively expanded punitive anti-drug policing at home under the banner of the “War on Drugs,” it tolerated and indirectly facilitated the cultivation and transport of narcotics when doing so served Cold War priorities. This dynamic was most visible in two of the bloodiest proxy wars of the Reagan era: the Soviet-Afghan War and the Contra War in Nicaragua.
After the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States funneled billions of dollars to the mujahideen in an attempt to mire the Soviets in a Vietnam-like quagmire, ultimately producing the most expensive covert operation in U.S. history. It was clear at the time that this policy risked significant “blowback,” although the result was much worse than imagined, but the chance to bleed the Soviets was not one Reagan was willing to forgo.
The extent of U.S. support, indispensable to sustaining the anti-Soviet insurgency, led political scientist Mahmood Mamdani to refer to the insurgency as an “American Jihad.” But the flow of money and arms was not enough on its own, and drug trafficking helped to supplement the effort. Before the war, heroin production in Afghanistan was negligible. By 1989, Afghan-Pakistan supply routes dominated global markets, destabilizing the country and region and creating the conditions for a catastrophic CIA and drug-money enabled, warlord-led civil war that ultimately led to the Taliban’s consolidation of power in 1996.
This heroin not only fueled death and destruction in Afghanistan, where the American-Afghan victory was paid for with the lives of millions of Afghan civilians, but it also boomeranged back. As Mamdani documents, during the Soviet-Afghan jihad, this heroin came to account for some 60 percent of the heroin circulating on U.S. streets. The consequences were immediate and severe. As a White House drug-policy adviser acknowledged at the time, New York City witnessed a 77 percent increase in drug-related deaths.
In Central America, a parallel “logic” emerged. The Contras needed cash, and cocaine networks supplied it. The Contras needed cash, and cocaine networks supplied it. The Kerry Committee, convened in the wake of Iran-Contra, and tasked with investigating these links, concluded in 1989 that there was substantial evidence the Contras engaged in drug smuggling and that U.S. officials allowed them to operate without interference.
This support for traffickers unfolded at the very moment the U.S. was intensifying its domestic crackdown on cocaine. During this period, lawmakers and prosecutors entrenched and weaponized legal asymmetries between crack and powder cocaine, driving the militarization of policing and expanding infrastructure of mass incarceration, a campaign that disproportionately targeted and destabilized Black communities across the country.
When Gary Webb, an investigative journalist for the San Jose Mercury News, revealed in 1996 an even more direct connection between CIA awareness of Contra-linked cocaine profits entering the United States and the simultaneous domestic “War on Drugs,” the backlash was swift. Government officials and major media outlets launched a concerted campaign to discredit him, all but ending his career. Nonetheless, many of his findings would soon be corroborated, at least in part, by internal investigations conducted by the CIA and DOJ.
The Failures of the “War on Drugs”
Trump’s latest invocation of drugs as a pretext for war with Venezuela is unconvincing on its face. But situated within the long historical record of U.S. complicity in, or calculated indifference to, drug trafficking when it served strategic ends, even when those decisions inflicted direct harm on Americans, it becomes little more than farce. For decades, Washington has treated narcotics not as a public health challenge but as a political instrument, inflating them into an existential national security threat when expedient and minimizing them when inconvenient.
The “war on drugs” has never been a genuine campaign to curb the sale or use of narcotics or to protect Americans. Rather, it has functioned as a mechanism for advancing American power. This history makes clear that the U.S. cannot credibly condemn other nations for their entanglements in the drug trade until it reckons with its own record as a facilitator of state-sponsored terrorism and narco-trafficking.
