Early in President Trump’s second term, the United States appeared eager to work with Venezuela’s authoritarian leader Nicolas Maduro. Special Envoy Rick Grenell met with President Maduro and helped coordinate deportation flights to Caracas, a prisoner exchange agreement, and a deal that would allow Chevron to drill for oil in Venezuela.
Grenell told disappointed Venezuelan opposition members that President Trump’s domestic goals had taken precedence over democracy-promoting efforts. “We are not interested in regime change,” Grenell told the group, according to two people familiar with the meeting.
But President Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio had a different vision.
In parallel phone conversations with opposition leaders María Colina Machado and Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia, Rubio affirmed U.S. support for the “restoration of Venezuelan democracy” and called González, who fell into disarray after Maduro’s presidential election last year, the country’s “legitimate president” in his favor.
Mr. Rubio, who also currently serves as national security adviser, has grown closer to Mr. Trump and launched an aggressive new policy against Mr. Maduro, pushing Venezuela and the United States to the brink of military conflict.
Mr. Grenell was absent because the United States is conducting an unprecedented operation against suspected Venezuelan drug smugglers and building up military assets in the Caribbean, two people familiar with the matter told the Times. President Trump on Wednesday authorized strikes in South American countries and said strikes on ground targets could be next.
“I think Venezuela is feeling the heat,” he said.
The pressure campaign represents a major victory for Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants and an unexpected powerhouse in the administration who has managed to sway top leaders of the isolationist MAGA movement in a lifelong effort to topple Latin America’s left-wing authoritarians.
“It’s clear that Mr. Rubio won,” said James B. Storey, who served as ambassador to Venezuela under President Biden. “The regime is applying military pressure in the hope that someone within the regime will bring Mr. Maduro to justice, either by expelling him, sending him to the United States, or sending him to the country that created him.”
In a recent public message to Trump, Maduro acknowledged that Rubio is now driving White House policy. “You have to be careful because Marco Rubio is going to smear your hands with South American blood, Caribbean blood, Venezuelan blood,” Maduro said.
As a senator from Florida, Mr. Rubio represents exiles from three left-wing authoritarian countries: Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, and has long made it his mission to undermine those governments. He says his family was unable to return to Cuba after Fidel Castro’s revolution 70 years ago. He has long argued that removing Maduro would deal a fatal blow to Cuba, whose economy has been supported by billions of dollars in Venezuelan oil while facing U.S. sanctions.
In 2019, Rubio pressured President Trump to support Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó in his bid to overthrow Maduro’s government.
Mr. Rubio then encouraged President Trump to publicly support Mr. Machado, who was excluded from the vote in Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election and was awarded the Medal of Honor last week for his pro-democracy efforts. Mr. Gonzalez, who ran to replace Mr. Machado, won the election, according to vote tallies compiled by the opposition, but Mr. Maduro declared victory.
Rubio believed that military force was the only way to bring about change in Venezuela, which is in crisis under Maduro’s regime, where a quarter of the population has fled poverty, violence and political repression.
But there was a problem. President Trump has repeatedly vowed not to interfere in other countries’ politics, telling a Middle Eastern audience in May that the United States “will no longer give lectures on how to live.”
President Trump criticized decades of U.S. foreign policy, complaining that “interventionists are meddling in a complex society they don’t even understand.”
To counter that sentiment, Mr. Rubio hoped to paint Mr. Maduro in a new light and arouse the attention of Mr. Trump, who has focused on fighting immigration, illegal drugs and Latin American cartels since his first presidential election.
Mr. Rubio insisted that his pursuit of Mr. Maduro was not aimed at promoting democracy or regime change. It had drug lords fueling crime on America’s streets, an epidemic of American overdoses, and a flood of illegal immigrants flooding America’s borders.
Mr. Rubio linked Mr. Maduro to the Venezuelan street gang Torren de Aragua. Its members have been described by the Secretary of State as “worse than al-Qaeda.”
“Venezuela is ruled by drug lords who have strengthened their powers as a nation-state,” he said during his Senate confirmation hearing.
Meanwhile, prominent members of Venezuela’s opposition party also insisted on the same message. “Mr. Maduro is the head of a narco-terrorist organization,” Machado told Fox News last month.
Security analysts and U.S. intelligence officials have suggested that the relationship between Mr. Maduro and Mr. Torren de Aragua is exaggerated.
Documents declassified by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found no evidence of extensive cooperation between the Maduro regime and gangs. He also said Torren de Aragua is not a threat to the United States.
The gang does not traffic fentanyl, and the Drug Enforcement Administration estimates that only 8 percent of the cocaine that reaches the United States transits through Venezuelan territory.
Still, Rubio’s strategy appears to be working.
In July, President Trump declared Torren de Aragua a terrorist organization led by President Maduro and subsequently ordered the Pentagon to use military force against cartels that the U.S. government has labeled terrorists.
President Trump sent thousands of U.S. troops and a small fleet of ships and military aircraft to the Caribbean and ordered attacks on five boats off the coast of Venezuela, killing 24 people. The government says the victims were “narco-terrorists,” but has not provided any evidence.
Elliott Abrams, a veteran diplomat who served as special envoy to Venezuela during the Trump administration’s first term, said he believes the White House will carry out a limited strike in Venezuela.
“I think the next step is for them to do something in Venezuela. I don’t mean step on the ground. That’s not Trump,” Abrams said. “This is a strike and that’s it. The risk to the United States is very low.”
“Now, what if such activity were to prompt the colonel to stage a coup? Well, that would be nice. But the regime would never say that.”
Even if President Trump refrains from a ground invasion, there are significant risks.
“If it’s a war, what is the purpose of the war? Is it to overthrow Maduro? Is it more than Maduro? Is it to get a democratically elected president and a democratic government?” said John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who served as chief legal adviser to the George W. Bush administration. “The American people are going to want to know what the end state will be and what the purpose of all of this is.”
“Anytime you have two militaries this close, there is a potential for real action,” said Christopher Sabatini, senior fellow for Latin America at the Chatham House think tank. “Mr. Trump is trying to do this on the cheap, perhaps hoping he won’t have to commit. But it’s a slippery slope. This could drag the United States into war.”
Sabatini and others added that even if US pressure ousts Maduro, what will happen next is by no means certain.
Venezuela is ruled by a patchwork of guerrilla and paramilitary groups that have made their fortunes through gold smuggling, drug trafficking and other illegal activities. No one has any incentive to lay down their weapons.
And the opposition in this country is by no means unified.
Machado, who dedicated the Nobel Prize to Trump in an apparent effort to win his support, said he was ready to rule Venezuela. But there are others, both exiles and Maduro’s government, who want to lead the country.
Machado supporter Juan Fernandez said anything is better than maintaining the status quo.
“Some say we are not ready and that a transition will lead to instability,” he said. “How can President Maduro be a safe option when 8 million Venezuelans are out of the country, there is no gasoline, there is political persecution, and inflation is rampant?”
Fernández praised Rubio for pushing the Venezuelan issue toward a “tipping point.”
What a difference it makes, he said, to have a decision-maker in the White House with family roots in other countries long oppressed by dictatorships.
“He completely understands our situation,” Fernandes said. “And now he holds one of the highest positions in America.”
Linthicum reported from Mexico City, Willner from Dallas and Ceballos from Washington. Special correspondent Mary Mogollon in Caracas contributed to this report.
