Front Burner - Will the U.S. invade Venezuela?

Episode Date: December 1, 2025

Over the weekend, Donald Trump declared on Truth Social that the airspace around Venezuela should be considered closed. Venezuela’s foreign ministry responded by calling the comments "another extravagant, illegal and unjustified aggression against the Venezuelan people".Late last week, Trump also said that land action against alleged drug trafficking networks in the country could start very soon.All of this is happening amidst a serious military buildup in the Caribbean and escalating threats to remove Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro from power.Is this the buildup to an invasion? And is it really about drugs? Or do Venezuela's massive oil reserves have something to do with it?Jon Lee Anderson is our guest. He’s a staff writer with The New Yorker, and has written extensively about U.S.-Venezuela relations and U.S. interference in Latin America.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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Over the weekend, Donald Trump declared via true social, quote, to all airlines, pilots, drug dealers, and human traffickers, please consider the airspace above and surrounding Venezuela to be closed in its entirety. Thank you for your attention to this matter, exclamation point. This came after comments late last week that land action against alleged drug trafficking networks in the country will start very soon. And amidst a serious military buildup in the Caribbean, with around 15 warships near Venezuela right now and about 15,000 troops stationed in the region. And escalating threats to remove Venezuela's president Nicholas Maduro from power. We've almost stopped.

It's about 85% stopped if I see. You probably notice that. And we'll be starting to stop them by land also. The land is easier. Trump has accused Maduro of leading a multinational drug organization called Cartel de la Soles and use that to justify airstrikes on boats, which have killed some 80 people, as well as listing Cartel de la Soles as a terrorist organization. Maduro denies leading the group and its very existence.

Peace, yes. War. No. Never, never war. Is this the build-up to an invasion? Is the U.S. turning up the heat to force a coup? And is this really about drugs, or do Venezuela's massive oil reserves have something to do with it? John Lee Anderson is a staff writer with a New Yorker and has written a lot about U.S. Venezuela relations and the more than a century-long legacy of U.S. interference in Latin America. John, hi, thank you so much for coming on to the show. That's great to be with you. Thanks, Jamie. It's really great to have you. So these escalations towards Venezuela have been ongoing for what feels like months now, blowing up boats off the coast of the country, signing off on CIA ops, increased U.S. military presence.

As I mentioned, there's been all sorts of rhetoric coming from Republicans and those in Trump's orbit. cheering on these aggressions, pushing for regime change. Venezuelan President Nicolas Majoro has, of course, been framing all of this as an attack on Venezuelan sovereignty in an attempt to overthrow him. What have you made of the last few months of U.S. foreign policy in Venezuela? Well, first of all, to characterize it as foreign policy is something of a stretch, I think. We're witnessing the most theatrical, performative exercise in gunboat diplomacy that I think I've ever seen in my life coming from the United States in its backyard, you know, the

gunboat diplomacy was what the U.S. used to wage in the region in the battle days of the early 20th century. And now it's back. To be honest, I mean, I think a number of things. And of course, I'm in daily contact with people in the region, other Latin America or Venezuela watchers. and nobody knows what's up. Actually, no one does. What I mean to say by that is that, you know, as you framed your question, you know, is it about drug trafficking, really, or is it about regime change? It would appear to be about the latter.

Defiant and surrounded by supporters, Venezuela's president marched through the streets of Caracas in the face of aggressive rhetoric and growing military force. from the U.S. Raise your hand if you want to be a slave, he said to Venezuelans. Raise your hand if you want Venezuela to become a Yankee colony. Nobody did. They stand with Maduro, who's now mobilizing nearly 200,000 military personnel. But we see Donald Trump go through changes of behavior of mood.

He's very often on truth social, his social media outlet. announced or declared on it that, you know, as you pointed out, the airspace over Venezuela should be considered closed. Well, even if it was an executive order, it wouldn't necessarily apply to a foreign country. I gather there are some airlines still going in and out. So that was a bit of hollow rhetoric there. He's definitely ratcheting up the temperature on Venezuela. Venezuela is like most of the countries in the region, compromised by drug trafficking, which has, you know, made inroads into officialdom, so to speak, but how do you characterize one regime vis-a-vis another

as a narco regime or one compromise by drug trafficking, as many of them are? The fact of the matter is Maduro's regime in Venezuela is not liked by many people in the region and certainly not by the United States, but I think it's a real stretch to call it a narco regime, or for that matter, that Nicolas Maduro is the head of some kind of cartel.

I want to dig into that a little bit more with you here. So U.S. Republican Senator Rand Paul, who's currently the chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, has said fairly clearly that he doesn't buy this drug trafficking argument. They're pretending as if we are at war. They're pretending as if they've gotten some imprimatur to do what they want. When you have war, the rules of engagement are lessened. They want to say, oh, we can just say these people are terrorists, they're narco terrorists,

or we can blow them up. But it's extraordinary that when some of them survive, they pluck them out of the water. They don't prosecute them for drugs. They don't collect drugs. They don't tell us if they were armed or not. They just send them back to their country, most of the time, not being Venezuela. In one of the administration's main arguments is that Venezuela is responsible for all this fentanyl coming into the U.S. And Rampal is saying that Venezuelan drug cartels do not actually manufacture fentanyl.

That's right. Everything that I've seen from experts is that we're talking about cocaine more, if anything, right? And by the way, and the cocaine originates in Colombia, which is one of the bastions, the U.S. bastions in the hemisphere, and long has been. Fentanyl comes from China. its precursor chemicals and are then refined, put together and smuggled across the border from Mexico and the United States. So that's that, right? Some of the drugs that leave Colombia, some come via Venezuela or Haiti or other countries. But it's not by any means, even the bulk of the cocaine that comes to the United States, comes through Venezuela. I want to ask you about what they're doing

to these boats, these so-called drug boats. They have not provided any evidence about who exactly and what exactly is on them. They have now killed 83 people. They've struck 21 small vessels in the Caribbean. And these are attacks experts that the United Nations have described as extrajudicial executions. Could you walk me through a little bit more

about the logic behind these attacks and what we know about them today? Look, they're not sharing their intelligence, as you pointed out. We see these kind of graphic glories of, you know, almost video game killings, uh, explosions of, boats speeding below. My sense is that the majority of these boats that we've seen destroyed

have been carrying drugs. The majority, it's possible that a few weren't. But the point is here is that the men, by and large, that are hired on these really small craft, these are not, these are not boats that are going from, let's say, Venezuela to the United States. They're going to Trinidad, and from there it'll be taken by others on through the Caribbean up to the United States. so on. You know, these are small jaunts by hirelings. These are men very often were stevedores or fishermen or unemployed guys on the docks who, you know, were offered $500 or $3,000 for a trip instead of the nothing they were getting back home. And so these are the people that are being killed. We learned yesterday that Pete Hegg sat and I think it was the first or second boat

ordered that the survivors of one of the strikes be finished off in the sea. Yeah, I think it was the first one, I believe. The Washington Post is reporting. And we've also seen that there was a survivor who was picked up by the Navy from another boat, and he was set free. Andres to Vino Chila isn't a stranger to U.S. law enforcement. Court records show he was arrested, convicted, and jailed in 2020 for smuggling drugs off Mexico's coast before being deported.

Now, after surviving the latest U.S. strike on a society, suspected drug vessel in the Caribbean. He's believed to be back in Ecuador and free. Officials here say they have no evidence he broke local laws and released him. So Ecuador, I know the president, he's as anti-narco trafficker as you can find and pretty much a strong-armed guy. But his government chose to let this one of the hireling survivors, the only one that I know of, actually to go home rather than kill him on the spot, which is what the United States seems to be doing. These are rhetorically announced killings at sea in international waters, possibly some within the waters of some of our southern neighbors. And as you said, no evidence is being provided, as would be normally the case if it was, let's say, a real terrorist.

These are not the bosses of cartels who we might all decide, we despise, you know, the really rich guys. These are, in fact, poor men, usually, who are hired on as hired hands for a drug shipment operation. Would we kill mules arriving at Miami Airport that we find have, you know, condoms filled with cocaine in their stomachs, as sometimes happens or in their suitcases? Would we shoot them on the spot? No. So why are we doing it in the open seas? It seems to be a kind of a burlesque display of performance. formative propaganda, frankly.

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just for one example, also talk about publicly that Venezuela's oil industry should be opened up to foreign investment. Ultimately, is this about drugs or is this about democracy or is this about oil? I think it's about all of the above, but in different ways. Maria Elvira Salazar, who is his right-wing congressman from Miami, didn't just point out that it would be a great for American business. She actually said there's one or two trillion dollars to be had for American oil companies. In other words, do the military invasion, make money. Venezuela, for those Americans who do not understand why we need to go in. Basically, for three reasons.

You're in Fox business. Venezuela, for the American oil companies, will be a field day because it will be more than a trillion dollars in economic activity. You know, it was an open invitation to invade a country and take its resources. It's unbelievable. I mean, you know, I covered the Iraq War of 2003, and there was a lot of speculation that the Iraq War was about oil as well.

No doubt the fact that these are resource-rich countries have something to do with the geostrategic thinking, to call it something behind these invasions, you know. We're still scratching our heads over why exactly George W. Bush invaded Iraq when he did. You know, if anything, it handed Iraq to our adversary. Iran. Did our oil companies benefit from it? I don't know. I remember on the second day of the American invasion in Baghdad, I came across an American tank. with a couple of, you know, boys in their 20s on it, American soldiers, and on the front of their tank, they had graffiti-toed in and paint, got oil. It was like a, it was, you know, it was soldier boys riffing on what they knew to be the psych geist. They didn't have it sorted out either. Now, the Rockefellers pretty much had Venezuela's oil sewn up for entire last century. And, you know,

Venezuela is known to have amongst the biggest reserves of oil in the world. It has huge potential as an oil exporting country, which as we know appeals to Trump. He seems to be transactional all about peace for minerals, oil for this. So I think with this crowd in the White House, or should I say Mara Lago, I don't think that you can dismiss the idea of oil as an incentive. The fact of the matter is also, though, that Venezuela has become a catchphrase for a disaster. in the region, and particularly for socialist disaster, you know, Chavismo, as the term is called for the so-called revolution that's been there for 25 years, has become a byword for left-wing catastrophe. You don't want this to happen to you. And because they've never diversified

their economy, it was based upon oil and finances when the market prices dropped of oil back in 10, 11 years ago, and Maduro took over after Chavez, the bottom fell. out of their economy. And we have seen about a third of the population of Venezuela spread out across the hemisphere. This is coincided with, you know, this anti-immigration mood, again, weaponized by Trump from the time he ran for election the first time.

Trump administration is imposing new sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. The new sanctions will make it harder for the presidents of these countries and their henchmen to do business with the US. Bolton says the countries represent, quote, destructive forces of oppression, socialism and totalitarianism.

President Trump taking a strong stance on immigration today, saying that the military will be ready to take aim at migrants on their way to the U.S. border with Mexico. The president also saying plans are in the works now to change America's asylum program. And Venezuelans have been singled out as, you know, criminals and so on. This was part of Trump's campaign in his to win office the second time. He singled out Venezuelans as like he did Mexicans in his first,

term as particularly egregious migrants, you know, as criminals, as violent people, as rapists, as murderers. And there's always one or another who, you know, you can hold up as an example, and he did. The Venezuelan gangs are the worst in the world. They're vicious, violent people. And you see what they've done in Colorado and other places. They're taking over, literally taking over apartment complexes and doing it with impunity. They don't care. They couldn't, they just are, they're in the real estate. You know, the local police say that is not the case in Colorado. Oh, it's totally the case.

I mean, I haven't on tape. You don't believe the local police. I play it. I used to play it. He and his crew began to alter the lexicon, the official lexicon towards Venezuela's, you know, calling Maduro the head of this cartel, which doesn't frankly exist and putting a $50 million reward on his head. So there's been a lot of work done. I would call it psychological warfare in the minds of the Americans.

to associate Venezuelans with all that they are supposed to abhor. First of all, violent migrants. Second, drugs, destroying our minds, our youth. So you have this kind of, you know, this group in the White House that's careering towards collision. Now, why is he doing this since he's supposed to be the no-war president? Well, he campaigned on getting out of these forever wars. Exactly. Well, look, I'll bet you anything.

there are people around him who say, don't worry, it's not going to be a forever world. They'll just go running when we hit them with a few tomahams. Well, that reminds me a lot of what people like Dick Cheney and others said back in the run-up to Iraq. The problem with war is it's like a virus. Once you let it out of the petri dish, you don't know where it's going to go. And the Venezuelans have had 25 years of sort of radical ideology. There's been a lot of military training there. They're not tested in war, but they have a strong.

sense of their national sovereignty, which is being more than besmirched at the moment. So I would expect a certain amount of kickback. Bottom line, what is it with Trump? He wants to dominate the hemisphere. Just as he see Putin dominates his near beyond the stands and the Northwest Passage, how Chi dominates Asia and is beginning to compete with the United States and the Pacific, he wants to reassert American control over the entire hemisphere. And if you go back to his inaugural speech when he talked about manifest destiny, territorial expansion, it was a rhetorical exercise to basically tell everyone, this is ours, this is mine, and I'm going to do what I want with it.

The United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations, and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons. And we will pursue our manifest. destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars. And Venezuela is the, I think, the case in point where he is going to try and make this country kneel to his power. And everyone else will hopefully salute him from then on. I think that's what's in his mind, frankly.

Ambition is the lifeblood of a great nation. And right now our nation is more ambitious than any other. There's no nation like our nation. Americans are explorers, builders, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts. The call of the next great adventure resounds from within our souls.

within our souls. I wonder if you could put this into a little bit more historical perspective for me. And I think this brings us to probably the Monroe Doctrine, right? Which was a policy prescription introduced in the U.S. 200 years ago now. It was first designed to keep Europe out of the Western Hemisphere, but became a tool of U.S. expansion. the doctrine later expanded to give the U.S. the power to intervene in Latin American countries. Could you talk to me about the Monroe Doctrine a little bit more, and whether you see this effort by Trump as part of a long, continuous tradition of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, or maybe to go back to what you were saying at the beginning, something different as well? Well, you're right. No, you've encapsulated what the Monroe Doctrine was, I think, very well.

You know, this was devised 50 years after the American Revolution at a time in which the new, you know, the independent United States was beginning to look around and try to assert itself in this area where the French, the Russians, the Brits, others, the Spaniards were still jockeying for turf. And the Monroe Doctrine basically was a signal to Spain to back off and others. at a time when restive colonials were beginning their independence wars in the region, the Caribbean, Latin America, and so forth, which, you know, the Americans sided with and ultimately, you know, beat Spain back, becoming themselves an imperial power, you know, and extending in the 19th, late 19th and early 20th century a kind of openly nakedly imperial behavior with Nicaragua, with the head ardent, so with Mexico, in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, and on and on and on. By the 1950s and 60s and 70s, at the height of the Cold War, the Monroe

doctrine wasn't invoked so much as a kind of new, more covert, pro-consular behavior by some of our ambassadors in places where, you know, left-wing regimes came into power. And then through the CIA, covert engagement and destabilization in the hemisphere from Guatemala to Chile all around. And it wasn't until, frankly, Carter, that this kind of behavior was curbed, and there was an effort to redress some of the bad behavior that had become excessive under previous administrations. Attention was diverted in the first 15 or so years of this century. But when Obama came into office, you'll remember that he made peace, so to speak, with Cuba,

which the United States had been locked in frozen combat, so to speak, since the 1960s. And which was somehow the wellspring for a lot of the Cold War confrontation in the region. Cuba's ability to inspire other left-wingers in the region had brought down American ire and Cold War and dirty wars throughout the hemisphere. Obama, you know, went to Havana in 2016 after they restored relations and said he wanted to bury the sword of the Cold War, the last vestiges of the Cold War.

I have come here to extend the hand of friendship to the Cuban people. I want to be clear. The differences between our governments over these many years are real and they are important. But before I discuss those issues, we also need to recognize how much we share.

And he did briefly, but guess what? Donald Trump has revived that. He has not just revived the rhetoric or notion of the Cold War. He's gone one further with this confrontation, this sort of open display of military power in a region where recent administrations, even conservative ones, use diplomacy first in order to talk to their adversaries and work things out. This is something we haven't seen for a very long time. American invasions over the years, they often include leaders or proxies identified by the West inside these countries of interest, right? People believe to be able to govern in a way that the U.S. and countries, even like Canada, might be more comfortable with. This was the way many have framed recent Nobel Prize winner and Venezuelan opposition politician Maria Karina Machado, who has talked about opening up Venezuela. Venezuela's oil sector to the U.S. And some here listening might remember Wang Guido as well, right? Venezuela's self-declared interim leader in 2019, who was supported by the West to become

the next president of Venezuela after a widely disputed re-election of Maduro, and that effort it failed. I wonder if you could talk to me a little bit about both Machado and Guido and whether the policy of backing U.S.-friendly leaders in Latin America ever really works out. There's a history here of leaders like Maria Corina Machado, you know, who is no doubt a dauntless, you know, brave even woman who is holed up, let's just say, in an embassy in Caracas for safekeeping and, you know, mouthing off against the Maduro regime, which ostensibly, and by all appearances, stole the election. When she was given the Nobel Peace Prize, she offered it to Trump, who, of course, gladly said, well, she said I deserved it. I guess I do. Maybe next time. I dedicated this prize to the people of Venezuela and to President Trump because I think

he deserves it. He's the main supporter of this fight against this narco-terrorist cartel and also because we've seen in these last months impressive results in terms of conflicts that were stopped or solved. As we speak... And it was rather surprising choice because you might say a lot of things about Maria Konina Machado, such as I just did, that she's dauntless, that she's courageous. She's openly advocating a military intervention in her country and trying to incentivize the government and American oil companies to get on board with the idea because they'll make money there.

Now, I'm not sure if that's the posture or the rhetoric of a patriot or what it is, but maybe, maybe, Maybe, you know, maybe Venezuelans who have come from this oil country and who are always very close to the United States, a certain portion of them. Maybe they don't see national sovereignty as others do, you know, in less resource-rich countries. Maybe we're just in more transactional times. But Juan Guaido before her, whom I got to know fairly well at the time, was, you know, a young, streetwise, very charismatic young guy. and when the regime sort of gerrymandered things, not to go into a lot of detail, to prevent him from, and from the legislature, from exercising its powers, you know, he was declared by his co-legislatures, and by the then Trump administration in the first time, as the real president of Venezuela. And again, in a very performative way for several years, he was trotted out in foreign capitals in front of the American Congress as the president of Venezuela, when the real president was back in Caracas. So there's been this performative quality to the way the Trump regime is one and now two have behaved with Venezuela that it's not just borderline irresponsible.

It goes way beyond it. I happen to know because I spoke with several of the heads of state that were at the meeting that in Trump's very first meeting with Latin American leaders in February 2017, the first thing out of his mouth was, I want to invade Venezuela. how can we do that? That was the very first thing he said to them. Wow. And so that's eight years ago. And I think that it has to do with having a mansion in South Florida where you have the Cuban lobby, the Venezuelan lobby, and they're conservative. And yes, the oil interests are there too. And he probably was inclined to think that that would be a good thing to do. Now, the other presidents at that meeting told me how that they dissuaded him. And they tried to stop him from, I don't know, sending the Marines in it. And by the way, in those days, he was not calling himself an anti-war

president. He wanted to invade Venezuela. But what we saw as a result of that interest by him, even though it was put into abeyance, was a series of really cack-handed attempted invasions and conspiracies, which were somehow green-lit by people connected to Washington, Miami, and so forth. And then it just sort of fizzled out. The fact is, the matter is that the U.S., whether Democrat or Republican, they have not devised a policy that is free of partisan interest. And I think the Venezuelans, first Chavez and then Maduro, have figured out how to play this in order to stay in office. And the fact that they do have oil gives them a certain amount of bargaining power, which even Trump himself has shown himself

of to be receptive to in the past. What we're seeing right now, as I say, I do believe has to do with a kind of Trump psyche in this second term where he wants to be seen as the big guy in the hemisphere. And I don't know that it's much more thought through than that. Okay, that feels like a good place for us to end, though I could ask you questions all day.

It is such a pleasure to be able to listen to you. Thank you so much. Thank you, Jay. Jamie. All right. That is all for today. I'm Jamie Plesson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. podcasts.