Venezuela 2025

[HondurasKeiser]

Apparently, blowing up drug smugglers is fair and right, but sentencing them to 45 years in prison is "treating them harshly and unfairly."

https://www.wsj.com/politics/trump-to-p ... _permalink

OK, whatever...

You have no idea the ripple effects this has caused here.

[temporal1]

Drug trafficking (and all that goes with it) should have never been allowed to flourish.
At this point, it’s monumental. Big problems should be expected.

Prayers for better to come. World wide.

[HondurasKeiser]

JohnH is very fortunate to have you to tell him what he believes and what he means by what he writes.

Ken,
What do you think John is arguing for here?

Those in power indeed have no accountability or constraint, except from others who are also in power. I really don’t understand how you think the world works. Overall, I think we can be thankful when people in power decide, for whatever reason, to use force against other people like drug cartels who are also using force. We can also feel grieved that both parties didn’t decide to lay down their arms and turn away from doing things that are wrong.

I’m honestly curious how you interpret statements like these, because I don’t see how this a neutral or purely descriptive statement.

I read this excerpt from JohnH as purely descriptive but also feeling no love lost for those in the world that choose the path of violence and pursuit of power who then meet a violent and deadly reaction from others of the world that have also chosen a path of violence and pursuit of power. I don’t read it as making a moral case for blowing up narcos.

[JohnH]

Apparently, blowing up drug smugglers is fair and right, but sentencing them to 45 years in prison is "treating them harshly and unfairly."

https://www.wsj.com/politics/trump-to-p ... _permalink

OK, whatever...

You have no idea the ripple effects this has caused here.

I’ve noticed in Latin America it seems to be “standard” to put your opponents in prison once power changes after an election.

[mike]

Apparently, blowing up drug smugglers is fair and right, but sentencing them to 45 years in prison is "treating them harshly and unfairly."

https://www.wsj.com/politics/trump-to-p ... _permalink

OK, whatever...

You have no idea the ripple effects this has caused here.

I’ve noticed in Latin America it seems to be “standard” to put your opponents in prison once power changes after an election.

I think that Biden's unprecedented number of pardons of family and friends upon leaving office has probably started a standard procedure for US presidents. You just pardon everybody and his brother and you're good.

[HondurasKeiser]

You have no idea the ripple effects this has caused here.

I’ve noticed in Latin America it seems to be “standard” to put your opponents in prison once power changes after an election.

I think that Biden's unprecedented number of pardons of family and friends upon leaving office has probably started a standard procedure for US presidents. You just pardon everybody and his brother and you're good.

I am truly baffled by Trump’s pardons though. He seems to be just pardoning everyone that reaches out to him. The former president of Honduras is a convicted narco trafficker that his Trump’s own justice department began the prosecution of during his first term.

[JohnH]

You have no idea the ripple effects this has caused here.

I’ve noticed in Latin America it seems to be “standard” to put your opponents in prison once power changes after an election.

I think that Biden's unprecedented number of pardons of family and friends upon leaving office has probably started a standard procedure for US presidents. You just pardon everybody and his brother and you're good.

That could be combined with “the last guy’s pardons are invalid because an autopen was used”; so it will depend on which President doesn’t get a writer’s cramp.

[JimFoxvog]

This seems to be a little old, but I think it's mostly correct analysis:

The United States didn’t bomb drug traffickers. It bombed civilians in the Caribbean — and the cover story isn’t holding.

The strange thing about the new American drug war in the Caribbean is how little it resembles a drug war. If you listen to the White House, Venezuela has somehow become the fentanyl capital of the Western Hemisphere and every wooden fishing skiff is a floating Sinaloa superlab. None of it is true, and they know it’s not true. In 2024 the DEA’s own National Drug Threat Assessment ranked Venezuela fourteenth among cocaine transit countries, behind the Dominican Republic, behind Jamaica, behind freighters flying flags nobody can pronounce. Fentanyl was mentioned exactly zero times in connection with Venezuela. Fentanyl comes from Chinese laboratories and Mexican production lines. Cocaine is overwhelmingly Colombian. Venezuela is a minor transit country at best. Yet here we are, firing missiles at boats and pretending these skiffs were hours away from poisoning American teenagers. The storyline is so flimsy it falls apart under its own syntax, but it soldiers on because it has to. It is the fig leaf that keeps the public from seeing what this operation is actually about.

To understand that, you have to go back almost twenty years, to the moment the world’s largest oil reserves slipped out of American hands. In 2007 Venezuela forced foreign operators into minority positions in its Orinoco Belt projects. Most companies accepted the new terms. Exxon and ConocoPhillips refused. They walked out, their assets were nationalized, and their claims were annihilated in international arbitration. It was one of the largest expropriations in the history of the modern energy sector. The bitterness lingers beneath everything Washington does in the region. It is the quiet resentment of a superpower that believes it was robbed and has spent nearly two decades waiting for the moment to claw back what it considers its rightful domain.

Even today, even battered and mismanaged, Venezuela runs on oil revenue. Ninety-five percent of its export income comes from the wells. The country is a petrostate by chemistry, not ideology. And while Americans debate fentanyl seizures at the border, the Gulf Coast refinery system is starving for the exact heavy crude Venezuela used to supply. China is sinking capital into the Orinoco. Russia is offering security guarantees. Iran is rebuilding refineries and pipelines. PDVSA is stumbling back toward partial recovery. If you’re an American administration desperate for cheap fuel optics and terrified of Beijing building a Western Hemisphere anchor, you don’t leave that situation alone. You poke it. You provoke it. You look for a justification to treat Venezuela’s coastline the way you treated Iraq’s airspace in 2003. You manufacture a threat where no threat exists.

That is what the boat strikes were. The first publicly acknowledged attack killed eleven people outright — passengers aboard a wooden vessel the Pentagon immediately labeled a “narco-smuggling boat.” Yet the details collapsed under scrutiny. And then, on November 14 and again on November 21, 2025, U.S. Navy MH-60R Seahawks fired Hellfires into two more wooden boats off Venezuela’s coast, killing additional civilians. The Pentagon called them narco-subs. Satellite imagery showed nothing of the sort. What appeared instead was what every Caribbean coastal resident recognizes instantly: long open fiberglass peñeros with outboard Yamahas, the working boats of the region.

And here’s the part they hope no one understands. Boats like that cannot reach the United States. At planing speed those triple-outboard rigs burn one hundred gallons an hour. They would need to refuel four or five times just to cross the Caribbean, or else carry so much fuel there would be no room left for anything else. These vessels aren’t designed for long transits. They are built for life along the archipelago. Gasoline in Venezuela is so cheap it’s practically a public utility, which is why peñeros are everywhere — ferrying families, fishermen, groceries, tools, workers, whatever the day requires.

And that matters because the first strike didn’t kill a cartel crew. It killed eleven people in a peñero. That is not a smuggling configuration. That is a ferry run — workers, relatives, or market-goers moving between coastal towns and islands the way they have for generations. These boats carry plantains to Grenada, cousins to Margarita, fishermen to the banks at dawn. They are the backbone of civilian life across the Lesser Antilles. Calling them narco-subs is not a misidentification. It is a lie crafted for people who have never lived near the Caribbean Sea.
The first missile was reckless. The second was deliberate. Survivors in the water don’t pose a national security threat, but they do pose a political one, because survivors talk. The point wasn’t interdiction. The point was messaging. It was the United States marking the Caribbean littoral as a zone of unilateral enforcement. A shadow blockade without naming it. A hint to Caracas that its shipping lanes, its export routes, and its access to world markets were now contingent on American pleasure. That is not drug policy. That is resource leverage dressed in tactical camouflage.

And now comes the talk of airspace. People underestimate how serious that step is. Closing another nation’s airspace isn’t a diplomatic reprimand. It is a confession that you no longer recognize that nation’s sovereignty. Every major conflict of the last fifty years began with some version of that move. Kosovo. Iraq. Gaza. You close the skies when you are preparing to strike targets beneath them. You close the skies when you want to control who enters and who leaves. You close the skies when you believe the next phase is military and you want the legal fiction on your side. If Trump and Hegseth close Venezuelan airspace, that is war in every meaningful sense, whether Congress debates it or not.

The drug narrative collapses on contact. Fentanyl is almost entirely a China-to-Mexico-to-border pipeline. Cocaine is overwhelmingly Colombian. None of that travels in peñeros. Yet here we are, bombing the only country in the region with minimal narcotics production but maximal petroleum wealth. You don’t need paranoia to notice the contradiction. You only need a map and a memory.

This is the old American story in a new costume. Iraq was sold as a WMD crisis that happened to sit on top of massive oil reserves. Afghanistan was counterterrorism layered atop mineral corridors and pipeline dreams. And now Venezuela, the country with the most oil on Earth, is being framed as the beating heart of the fentanyl crisis. It’s too neat. Too convenient. Too familiar. The policy makes no sense until you invert it. Pretend the oil is the point and the drugs are the excuse. Suddenly the entire puzzle locks into place.

The danger is where this leads. If Washington keeps escalating, if the rhetoric hardens and the airspace closes and the shadow blockade becomes a declared one, we may stumble into a war no one voted for and no one truthfully explained. A war sold as a narcotics crackdown but understood privately as an attempt to claw back lost resource dominance. A war born not of fentanyl flowing through Caribbean waters but of Exxon losing an arbitration case eighteen years ago and American power refusing to swallow the insult.

The truth is simple. Venezuela does not have a fentanyl problem. It does not have a cocaine empire. It has oil. A lot of it. More than anyone. Enough to make superpowers lie with conviction. Enough to make men like Hegseth imagine themselves as historical actors. Enough to make a peñero look like a threat worthy of missiles. When the story is this crooked, the motive is always straight.

Annotated Sources
DEA National Drug Threat Assessment 2024 — Venezuela ranked 14th among cocaine transit countries; no fentanyl link
Source: U.S. DEA, NDTA 2024 report
https://www.dea.gov/.../2024-national-d ... assessment
U.S. Strikes and Casualty Count — first strike killed 11; U.S. justification disputed
Source: AP News, CBS News reporting on Sept–Nov 2025 incidents
https://apnews.com
https://cbsnews.com
Venezuela boat type misidentification — peñeros identified via satellite analysis
Source: Reuters regional reporting & maritime imagery reviews
https://reuters.com
Orinoco Belt nationalization & Exxon/Conoco arbitration history
Source: ICSID arbitration records + Financial Times coverage
https://icsid.worldbank.org
https://ft.com
Venezuela oil dependency (90–95% of export revenue)
Source: OPEC & World Bank indicators
https://opec.org
https://worldbank.org

[ken_sylvania]

This seems to be a little old, but I think it's mostly correct analysis:

The United States didn’t bomb drug traffickers. It bombed civilians in the Caribbean — and the cover story isn’t holding.

The strange thing about the new American drug war in the Caribbean is how little it resembles a drug war. If you listen to the White House, Venezuela has somehow become the fentanyl capital of the Western Hemisphere and every wooden fishing skiff is a floating Sinaloa superlab. None of it is true, and they know it’s not true. In 2024 the DEA’s own National Drug Threat Assessment ranked Venezuela fourteenth among cocaine transit countries, behind the Dominican Republic, behind Jamaica, behind freighters flying flags nobody can pronounce. Fentanyl was mentioned exactly zero times in connection with Venezuela. Fentanyl comes from Chinese laboratories and Mexican production lines. Cocaine is overwhelmingly Colombian. Venezuela is a minor transit country at best. Yet here we are, firing missiles at boats and pretending these skiffs were hours away from poisoning American teenagers. The storyline is so flimsy it falls apart under its own syntax, but it soldiers on because it has to. It is the fig leaf that keeps the public from seeing what this operation is actually about.

To understand that, you have to go back almost twenty years, to the moment the world’s largest oil reserves slipped out of American hands. In 2007 Venezuela forced foreign operators into minority positions in its Orinoco Belt projects. Most companies accepted the new terms. Exxon and ConocoPhillips refused. They walked out, their assets were nationalized, and their claims were annihilated in international arbitration. It was one of the largest expropriations in the history of the modern energy sector. The bitterness lingers beneath everything Washington does in the region. It is the quiet resentment of a superpower that believes it was robbed and has spent nearly two decades waiting for the moment to claw back what it considers its rightful domain.

Even today, even battered and mismanaged, Venezuela runs on oil revenue. Ninety-five percent of its export income comes from the wells. The country is a petrostate by chemistry, not ideology. And while Americans debate fentanyl seizures at the border, the Gulf Coast refinery system is starving for the exact heavy crude Venezuela used to supply. China is sinking capital into the Orinoco. Russia is offering security guarantees. Iran is rebuilding refineries and pipelines. PDVSA is stumbling back toward partial recovery. If you’re an American administration desperate for cheap fuel optics and terrified of Beijing building a Western Hemisphere anchor, you don’t leave that situation alone. You poke it. You provoke it. You look for a justification to treat Venezuela’s coastline the way you treated Iraq’s airspace in 2003. You manufacture a threat where no threat exists.

That is what the boat strikes were. The first publicly acknowledged attack killed eleven people outright — passengers aboard a wooden vessel the Pentagon immediately labeled a “narco-smuggling boat.” Yet the details collapsed under scrutiny. And then, on November 14 and again on November 21, 2025, U.S. Navy MH-60R Seahawks fired Hellfires into two more wooden boats off Venezuela’s coast, killing additional civilians. The Pentagon called them narco-subs. Satellite imagery showed nothing of the sort. What appeared instead was what every Caribbean coastal resident recognizes instantly: long open fiberglass peñeros with outboard Yamahas, the working boats of the region.

And here’s the part they hope no one understands. Boats like that cannot reach the United States. At planing speed those triple-outboard rigs burn one hundred gallons an hour. They would need to refuel four or five times just to cross the Caribbean, or else carry so much fuel there would be no room left for anything else. These vessels aren’t designed for long transits. They are built for life along the archipelago. Gasoline in Venezuela is so cheap it’s practically a public utility, which is why peñeros are everywhere — ferrying families, fishermen, groceries, tools, workers, whatever the day requires.

And that matters because the first strike didn’t kill a cartel crew. It killed eleven people in a peñero. That is not a smuggling configuration. That is a ferry run — workers, relatives, or market-goers moving between coastal towns and islands the way they have for generations. These boats carry plantains to Grenada, cousins to Margarita, fishermen to the banks at dawn. They are the backbone of civilian life across the Lesser Antilles. Calling them narco-subs is not a misidentification. It is a lie crafted for people who have never lived near the Caribbean Sea.
The first missile was reckless. The second was deliberate. Survivors in the water don’t pose a national security threat, but they do pose a political one, because survivors talk. The point wasn’t interdiction. The point was messaging. It was the United States marking the Caribbean littoral as a zone of unilateral enforcement. A shadow blockade without naming it. A hint to Caracas that its shipping lanes, its export routes, and its access to world markets were now contingent on American pleasure. That is not drug policy. That is resource leverage dressed in tactical camouflage.

And now comes the talk of airspace. People underestimate how serious that step is. Closing another nation’s airspace isn’t a diplomatic reprimand. It is a confession that you no longer recognize that nation’s sovereignty. Every major conflict of the last fifty years began with some version of that move. Kosovo. Iraq. Gaza. You close the skies when you are preparing to strike targets beneath them. You close the skies when you want to control who enters and who leaves. You close the skies when you believe the next phase is military and you want the legal fiction on your side. If Trump and Hegseth close Venezuelan airspace, that is war in every meaningful sense, whether Congress debates it or not.

The drug narrative collapses on contact. Fentanyl is almost entirely a China-to-Mexico-to-border pipeline. Cocaine is overwhelmingly Colombian. None of that travels in peñeros. Yet here we are, bombing the only country in the region with minimal narcotics production but maximal petroleum wealth. You don’t need paranoia to notice the contradiction. You only need a map and a memory.

This is the old American story in a new costume. Iraq was sold as a WMD crisis that happened to sit on top of massive oil reserves. Afghanistan was counterterrorism layered atop mineral corridors and pipeline dreams. And now Venezuela, the country with the most oil on Earth, is being framed as the beating heart of the fentanyl crisis. It’s too neat. Too convenient. Too familiar. The policy makes no sense until you invert it. Pretend the oil is the point and the drugs are the excuse. Suddenly the entire puzzle locks into place.

The danger is where this leads. If Washington keeps escalating, if the rhetoric hardens and the airspace closes and the shadow blockade becomes a declared one, we may stumble into a war no one voted for and no one truthfully explained. A war sold as a narcotics crackdown but understood privately as an attempt to claw back lost resource dominance. A war born not of fentanyl flowing through Caribbean waters but of Exxon losing an arbitration case eighteen years ago and American power refusing to swallow the insult.

The truth is simple. Venezuela does not have a fentanyl problem. It does not have a cocaine empire. It has oil. A lot of it. More than anyone. Enough to make superpowers lie with conviction. Enough to make men like Hegseth imagine themselves as historical actors. Enough to make a peñero look like a threat worthy of missiles. When the story is this crooked, the motive is always straight.

Annotated Sources
DEA National Drug Threat Assessment 2024 — Venezuela ranked 14th among cocaine transit countries; no fentanyl link
Source: U.S. DEA, NDTA 2024 report
https://www.dea.gov/.../2024-national-d ... assessment
U.S. Strikes and Casualty Count — first strike killed 11; U.S. justification disputed
Source: AP News, CBS News reporting on Sept–Nov 2025 incidents
https://apnews.com
https://cbsnews.com
Venezuela boat type misidentification — peñeros identified via satellite analysis
Source: Reuters regional reporting & maritime imagery reviews
https://reuters.com
Orinoco Belt nationalization & Exxon/Conoco arbitration history
Source: ICSID arbitration records + Financial Times coverage
https://icsid.worldbank.org
https://ft.com
Venezuela oil dependency (90–95% of export revenue)
Source: OPEC & World Bank indicators
https://opec.org
https://worldbank.org

I'm curious how you concluded that it's mostly a correct analysis?

Who is Bruce Fanger?

The claim that the locals ride around the Venezuelan islands in boats that burn close to two gallons per minute of gasoline caught my attention. That's a lot of gasoline. An awful lot of gasoline. According to this resource only 32 gallons of gasoline can be bought for the "offical" price of thirteen cents per gallon, after which it rises to $1.89/gallon. $200/hr to run a boat around for normal day-to-day transportation seems awfully expensive, not to mention the environmental impact of all these fishermen burning 100 gallons of fuel per hour.

The links claiming to be "Annotated Sources" don't link to what is claimed. None of the links link directly to relevant articles - only to home pages of various websites. I can't even find a Reuters article that discusses satellite analysis of the boats and identifies them as peñeros.

I can, however, find an AP article in the LA times that includes an interview with a Venezuelan fisherman and that talks about it being a peñero.

GÜIRIA, Venezuela — On Venezuela’s Paria Peninsula, an idyllic stretch of Caribbean coast, it is an open secret that boats departing from its ports transport both drugs and fish.
Residents claim not to know who owns the illegal cargo, but they can tell when business is doing well because people eat out, get their hair and nails done and buy expensive meat. They also admit that none of this has happened since the U.S. military struck one of those boats earlier this month.

Speculation over the strike is still going around Venezuela, with people wondering who died and whether their deaths are part of a plan to topple President Nicolás Maduro. Some have questioned their government’s assertions that a video of the strike released by President Trump was created with artificial intelligence and that a boat of that size cannot venture into the high seas.
But fishermen in the peninsula immediately recognized some characteristics of the boat from the video. They said it was a 12-meter-long fishing boat known in Venezuela as “peñero” with four powerful and expensive motors. They estimated the engines were at least 200 horsepower each, a force five times more powerful than typically used on local peñeros.

“Fishing doesn’t pay enough to buy a motor like that,” said fisherman Junior González, taking a break from repairing a boat along the shore of Guaca. Only a handful of roughly two dozen sardine processing plants still operate in this community following years of overfishing, failed restoration and the country’s overarching crisis.

González explained that the motors he uses run between $4,000 and $5,000 each, while one of those needed to reach Trinidad and Tobago — the suspected destination of the targeted boat — sell for $15,000 to $20,000.

Several fishermen and a local leader who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation from Maduro’s government said the boat targeted on Sept. 2 departed Venezuela from San Juan de Unare, another fishing community on the northern coast of the peninsula. They said the men aboard hailed from that town as well as Güiria.
While some fishermen supplement their income with drug trafficking out of desperation, Christopher Sabatini, a research fellow at the Chatham House in London, said the Trump administration “has completely exaggerated” the scope of their illicit activities by linking them to the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang and deeming them an immediate threat to the U.S.
“If you look at [the boats], these could never make the journey all the way up the Caribbean to the United States,” Sabatini said. “These are small-scale fishermen — and now small-scale drug traffickers — that don’t represent the crux of the issue.”

She conceded that some fishermen in the peninsula turn to drug running for “easy money,” but ultimately, they do it because they have no other choice.
“Many make the mistake because they are in dire need,” Torres said, pointing at reasons like hunger or having a sick relative. “Need forces them to do anything, and since the government doesn’t come here to help, what is one supposed to do?”
The impact of the illegal trade in parts of the peninsula is clear: Businesses quickly deduce a successful drug run when people suddenly pay for goods and services with crisp U.S. dollar and euro bills. They buy more than a handful of things at convenience stores and treat themselves to a burger and fries.
Restaurant and bakery owner Jean Carlos Sucre has noticed this pattern in Güiria and is worried about the future. He said the recent U.S. strike has only worsened the “asphyxiating” conditions already facing his business due to Venezuela’s soaring inflation — leading to a significant drop in his weekly sales.
“Those who are working illegally aren’t setting sail for fear of being caught by the gringos, I imagine,” Sucre said. “Everyone here knows what happened, but very few talk. This week I sold 10 hamburgers out of the 90 I was selling [before the strike].”

[ohio jones]

And here’s the part they hope no one understands. Boats like that cannot reach the United States. At planing speed those triple-outboard rigs burn one hundred gallons an hour.

The claim that the locals ride around the Venezuelan islands in boats that burn close to two gallons per minute of gasoline caught my attention. That's a lot of gasoline. An awful lot of gasoline.

But fishermen in the peninsula immediately recognized some characteristics of the boat from the video. They said it was a 12-meter-long fishing boat known in Venezuela as “peñero” with four powerful and expensive motors. They estimated the engines were at least 200 horsepower each, a force five times more powerful than typically used on local peñeros.

https://www.marineenginedigest.com/spec ... wchart.htm

As a rule of thumb, running at Wide-Open Throttle, a gas outboard motor consumes about 10-percent of its rated horsepower. So a 250-horsepower outboard motor, at Wide-Open Throttle (6000 rpm), burns about 25-gallons per hour.

There seems to be some lack of agreement between Fanger and the locals as to whether the boat in question had three or four outboard motors. But four at 200 hp each would be in the neighborhood of 80 gph, with a variety of factors influencing that, so the maximum burn rate might not be too far off. But that is a worst-case number.

Know that an outboard motor is most efficient at 75- to 80-percent of its rated output and revving back even a little yields significant fuel savings with the only cost being a longer passage time. For example, throttling back that same 250-horse to 75-percent of the outboard's rated output (4,728 rpm) consumes 12.5 gph, yielding a whopping 50-percent fuel savings.

Even at that rate, though, this overpowered boat would exhaust the cheap gas within the first hour.