Ameri-coup in Venezuela? Why Caracas fears regime change

Deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller said on Friday (September 26) that the military buildup was to “combat and dismantle drug trafficking organisations, criminal cartels and…foreign terrorist organisations in our hemisphere”.

But experts say that the White House’s reasoning does not pass muster, and the deployment represents a gross “operational overkill”.

After all, much of the seaborne drug trade travels stateside via the Pacific, and much of what passes through the Caribbean is flown in. “The massive naval flotilla off the coast of Venezuela…has little to do with actual drug interdiction — they represent operational overkill,” Adm. James G Stavridis (retd), a former head of the Pentagon’s Southern Command, told The New York Times.

Experts and Venezuelan officials believe that Donald Trump’s real motives are to force Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro out of power, by hook or by crook.

“I think what they are trying to do is put maximum pressure…on the regime to see if they can get it to break…It’s gunboat diplomacy,” David Smilde, a Venezuela expert at Tulane University, told Reuters.

A chequered history

The United States has a long history of meddling in the affairs of Latin American countries (and elsewhere), one which has seen Washington rig elections, facilitate coups, and undermine democratic processes, all to install acquiescent regimes in strategically important countries.

“Throughout the twentieth century and into the beginning of the twenty-first, the United States repeatedly used its military power, and that of its clandestine services, to overthrow governments that refused to protect American interests,” wrote author Stephen Kinzer in his book Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (2006).

“Each time, it cloaked its intervention in the rhetoric of national security and liberation. In most cases, however, it acted mainly for economic reasons — specifically, to establish, promote, and defend the right of Americans to do business around the world without interference,” Kinzer wrote.

Interventions in Latin America have been borne out of the Monroe Doctrine, a foreign policy position first articulated by President James Monroe in 1823, which holds the New World as the United States’ zone of influence. Post-1945, these were also in line with the Truman Doctrine of containment: the Cold War-era US foreign policy geared at arresting the spread of communism.

Over the years, the US has installed (or tried to) friendly regimes in a dozen Latin American countries, including Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, and Venezuela.

Reasons to be wary

Even if history alone was not enough to justify Caracas’ fears of regime change, Trump’s actions, in this term and his previous one, have not left much to imagination.

In January 2019, Trump had officially declared pro-Washington opposition leader Juan Guaidó as Venezuela President, and handed over the control of Venezuela’s bank accounts and property in the US to him. This came after Washington imposed sanctions on the sale of oil to the US, a major source of income for Venezuela.

Maduro’s personal assets were also frozen, and he was effectively barred from leaving his country. Notably, in 2017-18, ahead of the 2018 presidential polls in Venezuela, the Trump administration had held secret meetings with rebellious military officers from Venezuela to discuss plans for a coup to overthrow Maduro.

The NYT, in 2019, had described Trump’s actions as “one of Washington’s most overt attempts in decades to carry out regime change in Latin America”.

Soon after returning to power in January 2025, Trump resumed his attacks on Venezuela, this time under the guise of going after drug cartels. Notably, the White House has repeatedly called Maduro a cartel leader and a “fugitive of American justice”.

Draft legislation is circulating at the White House and on Capitol Hill that would give Trump broad powers to wage war against drug cartels he deems to be “terrorists,” as well as against any country he says has harboured or helped them, The NYT reported.

All about the oil

Unlike previous American interventions, Trump has not used esoteric ideas such as “exporting democracy” or “liberating the country” to justify his actions.

For Trump, “It is a national security initiative meant to eliminate a source of tons of cocaine from entering the United States,” José Cárdenas, a former National Security Council and US State Department official who has dealt extensively with Latin America policy, told Newsweek. “Main Street, USA, can identify with that,” he added.

That said, there is more to it.

Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world. Since 1999, when anti-Washington socialist Hugo Chávez was voted to power in Venezuela, the US has long struggled to exert greater control over the country’s oil reserves. This is what prompted the US to back an eventually unsuccessful coup against Chávez in 2002, and continues to be the bedrock of American interests in Venezuela today.

Tom Shannon, a career diplomat who served as undersecretary for political affairs during the first Trump administration, told Newsweek: “Venezuela is sitting on the largest reserves of oil and gas in the world, and OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control), through its licensing process, gets to control who works in the oil and gas sector”.

The belief in the US establishment is that if US companies were given licenses to operate in Venezuela, foreign competitors from nations viewed as hostile to US interests — such as China or Russia — would be expelled.

This is why international support for Maduro, a protege of Chávez, has largely been on geopolitical lines. After the US sanctions in 2019, China has emerged the largest importer of Venezuela’s oil.

After taking office in January, Trump sent special envoy Richard Grenell to strike a deal in Caracas to secure a license for oil giant Chevron to resume operations in the country, among other things.

Hope & skepticism

Maduro is not a popular leader. Decades of economic mismanagement, corruption, and allegations of human rights violations have taken a toll on his and his party’s image. Many independent watchdogs agree that Maduro lost the 2024 elections, but held onto power with the help of massive rigging.

Many in Venezuela want Maduro gone. Others, including those who disagree with Maduro’s politics, are skeptical of what such an ouster would mean for the country.

For one, given the history of US misadventures in Latin America and the violence it has often unleashed, many are staunchly opposed to any American intervention. Others fear that the US would not do enough to ensure stability in the country; they say that simply removing Maduro while not working toward broader reform would unleash a catastrophic political crisis.

As one opposition politician told The NYT, ““And the cost for us Venezuelans, what will it be? What guarantee do we have that this (removal of Maduro) will translate into a recovery of our democracy?”