Venezuela’s regime is the archetype of a cartel-state synthesis.
Venezuela’s regime is the archetype of a cartel-state synthesis.
A t this writing, the United States appears to be on the verge of military action against the Venezuelan regime. The president of the United States has de facto closed Venezuelan airspace — via Truth Social, of course — and the largest concentration of American military power in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility since the 1989 Christmas season is gathered across the Caribbean basin. Naval assets are afloat to the north of the Venezuelan littoral, and American bases and facilities have emerged (or been reactivated) not just in U.S.-controlled territories like Puerto Rico and Guantanamo Bay, but in sovereign allies such as Trinidad and Tobago and the Dominican Republic. All this raises obvious questions, foremost among them: Why now, and why Venezuela?
Anyone outside of the administration who offers definitive answers to either is misleading at worst and incomplete at best. The decision-makers know their full rationales and will share them when they wish. For now, even the legal memorandum justifying the strikes on maritime traffickers remains undisclosed. What we may do, in that absence, is offer a framework for understanding what might be driving events, without the pretense of speaking for the White House or claiming unique insight into its policymaking.
It is a truism that policy emerges not necessarily when one overriding interest compels it (although that does happen with relative frequency, especially under a vigorous, Federalist No. 70 type president like the one we have now), but when multiple interests overlap and amplify one another. These are not mutually exclusive phenomena, but for the Venezuelan case, we should examine the latter to illuminate our understanding. Venezuela and its regime find themselves at the intersection of administration priorities. Among them are the reassertion of American primacy in the Western Hemisphere; security of the Panama Canal; a revivified Monroe Doctrine, including the Roosevelt Corollary; suppression of human trafficking and remigration; dismantling of the narco-state archipelago across the Americas; and the demonstration of American military credibility after the Biden-era decline.
Or, if one wishes to personalize it within the administration’s national-security leadership, Venezuela offers a case wherein the publicly stated priorities of the president, the vice president, the secretary of state, and the homeland security adviser all intersect and concur.
For those of us within the Latin American security and policy space, Venezuela’s regime is the archetype of a cartel-state synthesis, un estado de narco, in which state and criminal activity exist in cooperation, integration, and mutual reinforcement. The typical exchange between state and cartel in this model involves state provision of public rents and protection for the cartel, and cartel provision of enforcement and funds for the state. This is not necessarily a new phenomenon — the 1989 American invasion of Panama overthrew a comparable regime — but it is one that has metastasized and gone regional in the past generation of American strategic neglect. The signal example is the Mexican regime, where a state-cartel synthesis under the Morena party has existed for most of the past decade and remains in (increasingly uncertain) control.
Venezuela, with its visible integration of cartel and state activities (with Cartel de los Soles and others) differs from Mexico in that its regime offers no gestures of cooperation with the United States against its cartel partners whatsoever. Venezuela furthermore presents a relatively uncomplicated arena for action versus Mexico, with which the United States has both a land border and extraordinary economic integration. Prudence being a core quality of statecraft, if one wishes to unravel the state-cartel synthesis that grips nations across the hemisphere (including not just Venezuela and Mexico, but also Cuba, Nicaragua, elements of the current Colombian regime, and beyond), Venezuela is a plausible place to start. Its example will have an effect upon the Mexican regime in particular, which views itself as being within a common ideological-leftist bloc alongside the Caracas regime, to the extent that the president of Mexico refused to comment upon Venezuelan resistance leader Maria Corina Machado’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize. Mexico will note the circumscription of that movement’s regional power.
On Monroe Doctrine grounds, it is sufficient to note that Venezuela hosts a remarkable array of extra-hemispheric actors and their proxies, including Russian, Chinese, and even Iranian assets, which the United States has an interest in seeing curbed or expelled. Again, the salutary effect on regimes like Mexico’s, in which ruling-party elements are credibly alleged to have facilitated the expansion of Russian propaganda efforts in recent years, and in which Moscow maintains its largest “diplomatic” presence, should not be understated.
When considering the hemispheric crisis of mass migration, which Americans have seen made visible in their own communities, it is impossible to ignore Venezuela as one of its hypocenters. The Venezuelan regime, through a combination of repression and incompetence, has overseen the exile of nearly a quarter of its entire population — a collapse that typically requires a major war to achieve. The authors of this piece are well familiar with the resultant Venezuelan diaspora, having encountered it across South America, in Europe, and in one case, actually emerging from the waters of the Rio Grande onto American soil. If one wishes to facilitate the return of up to eight million Venezuelan migrants, one must start with the nature of the Venezuelan regime that first sent them forth. This is, again, a template for action elsewhere.
In the securing of American interests at strategic points, including the American-conceived-and-created Panama Canal, we should note that the deployment of forces and the creation of facilities across the SOUTHCOM AOR have already de facto achieved the strategic equivalent of the return of American forces to the old Canal Zone. Although that formal return is likely politically impossible — outside of a U.S. rotational force at the old Fort Sherman at the Canal’s Atlantic outlet, secured this past spring — the American posture now as a consequence of the Venezuela and southern-Caribbean actions has put the United States in a position to secure both the approaches to the canal and the canal itself for the first time in a generation. Venezuela has hosted forces that could have credibly threatened canal traffic on the Atlantic side, so this is a significant achievement that should not be overlooked.
Finally, the mere presence of American forces, as now achieved, reestablishes a regional status quo ante that pertained essentially from 1903 to 1990, when the United States had a permanent presence across the Caribbean basin and acted as the security guarantor for the region. The cession of American bases in the region during and after the 1990s, a side effect of post–Cold War strategic hubris, left that arena open, with the results we see now. The Trump administration, in closing that gap, has shown Americans two important things. One is that it understands America’s proximate strategic interests, arguably better than any preceding presidency of the past generation.
The other thing it shows Americans is that it is willing to put the Armed Forces of the United States on the line in their direct interest. Venezuela and the Western Hemisphere are, after all, literally dinner table issues for ordinary Americans. This is not to say that the nature of the Caracas regime is discussed over Thanksgiving leftovers anywhere outside of Georgetown and environs. It is, however, important to understand that Americans have lived through the crises created and amplified by that regime. They have seen their communities change and endure harm because of the mass migration it spurs. They have seen their neighbors and loved ones succumb to addiction or death by reason of the materials and substances it traffics. They have seen their local economies decline through trade with regimes that mean America and Americans harm. They have seen their tax dollars and their sons and daughters in the Armed Forces go forth to the defense of nations and places with no plausible connection to themselves. A lesson of both 2016 and 2024 was that they’ve had enough of all of it.
In the action off Venezuela’s coast, and perhaps soon within Venezuela, the Trump administration shows very clearly that it is listening to those Americans, and that it is willing to act to set things right.
Joshua Treviño is the senior adviser to the president at the America First Policy Institute.
Melissa Ford is the director of the Western Hemisphere Initiative at the America First Policy Institute.