President Trump’s plans for Venezuela’s oil industry, insofar as there are concrete plans, appear to be solidifying. On Wednesday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright indicated that the United States will control the flow of Venezuelan oil “indefinitely.” The announcement came hours after President Trump revealed that Venezuela would be “turning over” up to 50 million barrels of oil to the US, with revenue he intended to personally control. “The Oil will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States,” he wrote on social media. With oil trading at roughly $56 per barrel, the initial sale could be worth up to $2.8 billion. Speaking at an energy event hosted by Goldman Sachs, Wright said that the US will first sell Venezuela’s stored oil—stuck in the country in part due to the US sanctions on its exports—and then market all oil coming out of Venezuela moving forward. The revenue from those sales will then be “deposited into accounts controlled by the US government” and then “flow back into Venezuela to benefit the Venezuelan people.”  “We’ll enable the importing of parts and equipment and services to kind of prevent the industry from collapsing, stabilize the production, and then as quickly as possible, start to see it growing again,” Wright explained. The plan signals a stark contrast to the strict US sanctions on Venezuela’s oil before the capture of Maduro. The dual announcements came as the US military on Wednesday seized a Russian-flagged oil tanker and apprehended a “stateless” tanker it accused of “conducting illicit activities in the Caribbean Sea.” Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Exxon Mobil—the three largest US oil companies—are reportedly scheduled to meet Trump on Friday to discuss how to invest in Venezuela. (For context, according to the US Energy Information Administration, the US produced about 13 million barrels of oil per day in 2023, and world oil consumption was around 103 million barrels per day in 2024.)  Meanwhile, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is escalating Trump’s vision to take over Greenland despite international warnings to drop the threats, reportedly telling lawmakers on Monday that Trump intends to buy the territory. As I reported on Tuesday, European leaders have repeatedly defended Greenland in the wake of Maduro’s capture, writing that the country “belongs to its people.” Their joint statement, released Tuesday, named the United States as a NATO ally that must uphold “principles of the UN Charter, including sovereignty.” But in Venezuela, the EU has largely been quiet. A joint statement issued on Sunday stopped short of condemning the Trump administration and even upheld its justification for attacking Venezuela: “The EU shares the priority of combating transnational organised crime and drug trafficking, which pose a significant security threat worldwide.”  So why the tepid response in regards to Venezuela? Read my colleague Inae Oh’s conversation with Abe Newman about neo-royalism for a potential answer.

Word of the US military operation that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro reached Mayra Sulbaran while on vacation in Canada. Sulbaran—who fled Venezuela in September 2018 and lives in Washington, DC—was in Montreal to reunite with her brother, who she had not seen in nine years. “I was hugging him when we found out,” she told me over a Zoom on Monday morning. Soon after Sulbaran heard the news, she joined other Venezuelans to celebrate what so many have prayed for and thought they might never see happen: the downfall of Maduro. > “Until there is true justice in Venezuela and the economic means to return and > rebuild the country, I don’t believe Venezuelans can go back.” Last weekend, US forces executed a months-in-the-making incursion into the presidential compound in Caracas to extract the Venezuelan strongman and his wife, Cilia Flores, who are now being held in a Brooklyn jail facing drug trafficking charges. President Donald Trump declared the United States would “run the country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.” What happens next remains unclear. At first, Trump hinted at “boots on the ground,” while Secretary of State Marco Rubio talked of “leverage” to control the country.The US president also warned Maduro’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who has been sworn in as interim leader, that she would pay a bigger “price” than the removed president “if she doesn’t do what’s right.” For so many Venezuelans like Sulbaran—a lawyer and pro-democracy activist who founded Casa DC Venezuela, a cultural center for the Venezuelan diaspora in the Washington, DC area—this fraught moment is filled with a complex mix of relief, dread, and expectation. “It’s a very contradictory situation because we understand that [President Donald Trump] has a goal and we appreciate it…,” she said, “but we’re also very afraid because we don’t know what’s coming and whether a democratic process will truly be respected.” Sulbaran is one of 8 million Venezuelans who have fled the country since 2014, part of the largest exodus in Latin America’s recent history and one of the world’s worst forced displacement crises. For Venezuelans living in exile and scattered across the hemisphere and beyond, this juncture has sparked hope of one day returning to a Venezuela freed from Maduro’s oppressive grip. But it has also instilled anxiety among the thousands of Venezuelans—even those cheering the US operation—facing deportation to a nation now influx where their safety is all but guaranteed. “Until there is true justice in Venezuela and the economic means to return and rebuild the country, I don’t believe Venezuelans can go back,” said Sulbaran, now a US permanent resident. “It’s not just about changing a government, it’s about addressing an economic, social, and moral structure.” With the Maduro regime’s chain of command still ruling the country, she said the United States should offer protection to Venezuelans. Since retaking office, Trump has done the opposite. He has vilified and singled out Venezuelan migrants as a threat, accusing them of being gang members and taking over American cities. Last year, his administration ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS)—a discretionary reprieve from deportation for immigrants from countries stricken by natural disasters, wars, and other circumstances—for Venezuela, claiming conditions in the country had improved and allowed for people’s safe return. As I wrote then, that move impacted more than 600,000 Venezuelans and represented the largest de-legalization campaign in modern US history. It threw thousands of people into a legal limbo, with many losing legal status and the ability to work. Now, amidst the ousting of Venezuela’s sitting president and a nationwide crackdown by the regime, there appears to be no plan to halt the deportation of Venezuelans. In an appearance on Fox News on Sunday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was asked if the administration would continue to send Venezuelans back to the country. “Venezuela today is more free than it was yesterday,” Noem said, adding that the Venezuelans who were stripped of TPS have “the opportunity to apply for refugee status.”  But the refugee program, which the Trump administration has gutted, is intended for people who apply for protection from outside of the United States, not those present in the country already, like one-time Venezuelan TPS holders. In response to questions from Mother Jones, a DHS spokesperson conceded that “applicants are only eligible for refugee status prior to entering the country,” which excludes the people Noem said could qualify. “Secretary Noem ended Temporary Protected Status for more than 500,000 Venezuelans and now they can go home to a country that they love,” the spokesperson said. “[Deportation] Flights are not paused.” (In 2025, the US government deported 14,310 Venezuelans back to their home country, according to a flight tracker initiative kept by Human Rights First.) Adelys Ferro, executive director of the Venezuelan-American Caucus, called on the Trump administration to restore TPS for Venezuelans. “This is not the right time to keep deporting law-abiding Venezuelan immigrants,” she said. “All of these vulnerable people that have already been hunted, discriminated against, and victims of all of these xenophobic and racist immigration decisions are in more danger than ever before.” Ferro pointed to a decree by the Venezuelan regime ordering the police to identify and arrest “everyone involved in the promotion or support for the armed attack by the United States.” There are reports of armed gangs patrolling streets and setting up checkpoints to question residents and look through their phones. On Monday, fourteen journalists were detained, according to the National Press Workers Union. If Venezuela descends into further instability, it could also push more people to leave the country. In that climate, Ferro expressed concern about what might happen to Venezuelans who celebrated the operation on the streets of the United States if they were deported back. “People are more terrified than before,” she said. “The ultimate hope is that there is a real goal of bringing back democracy for Venezuela and, as a consequence, the Venezuelans that are willing to go back can do it in a safe manner. But that’s not the case right now.” At first, Ferro said she felt relief, joy, and a “sense of justice” to see Maduro removed from power. But following President Trump’s initial press conference, and Rodríguez ascent, that was overtaken by “disbelief, shock, frustration, devastation.” She took issue with the US government’s sidelining of opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado and backing of Rodríguez. (Machado, who the Venezuelan regime barred from running in the 2024 presidential elections when Maduro declared victory despite evidence that the opposition candidate Edmundo González was the legitimate winner, has said she plans to return to Venezuela “as soon as possible.”) “At the end of the day, we’re not free,” Ferro added. “The opposition leadership was asking for the construction of a transition to democracy, not a long-term negotiation with a dictatorship.” Ferro said she had questions about what it means for the United States to “run” Venezuela, too—even if temporarily, as Trump promised. “What I know for sure is that the people of every country have the right to decide their own future,” she said. “Venezuelans have been waiting for more than a decade—if you talk about Chavismo, 27 years—and fighting to decide our own future. We have voted. We have protested. We have been killed. We have been persecuted. We have been imprisoned. We have been tortured. We have done everything in our power to have a path to democracy, and we deserve that opportunity.” Nathaly Maestre, who lives in Maryland with her partner and six-month-old baby, said there’s “a lot of tension and fear” in Venezuela right now. Her mother avoids leaving the house in an area where the pro-government armed civilian groups known as colectivos are active. They worry about having their conversations monitored and have stopped exchanging messages over WhatsApp, using phone calls instead. “The situation is worrisome because they’re intimidating people,” she said. After fleeing Venezuela, Maestre sought asylum in the United States and later applied for TPS as another layer of protection. Since the Trump administration ended the program, she’s now reliant on her pending asylum case. Some of her relatives lost their full-time jobs as a result of not having legal status. But despite their vulnerable position, she said they have no plans to leave because Venezuela isn’t safe, perhaps even less so now. “I think we’ve awakened a monster that will now turn against civil society and against anyone who expresses an opinion,” Maestre said. She thinks, at best, it’ll take time for the country to really change. During our call, Sulbaran also rejected a simplistic narrative that paints the reactions of Venezuelans to Maduro’s capture in broad strokes. She described Chavismo—the political movement of socialist leader Hugo Chávez—and the authoritarian government of his successor as a “farce.” Maduro, she said, is a “dictator” who oversaw a money-laundering “narco-state” as the Venezuelan people fell into extreme poverty and faced political oppression and violence. “We experienced firsthand, as a couple and as a family, what it meant to leave Venezuela to preserve our lives and the lives of our children,” she said. But Sulbaran also tries to remain clear-eyed about the risks that may lie ahead. She worries that the result of the United States’ intervention in Venezuela and ousting of Maduro could just be the exchange of one “executioner” for another. Her hope is that Rodríguez will engage in a peaceful transition period before handing the reigns of the country to the duly elected González. “Yes, we’re nervous,” she said. “But we’ve come from the worst, from rock bottom.”

This story was originally published by Popular Information, a substack publication to which you can subscribe here. In a Saturday morning military raid ordered by President Trump, US forces captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. After Maduro was apprehended and transported to New York to face criminal charges, Trump announced that the United States would “run” Venezuela for the indefinite future. The extraordinary attack, which legal experts said violated US and international law, has set up a potential windfall for a prominent Trump-supporting billionaire, investor Paul Singer. In 2024, Singer, an 81-year-old with a net worth of $6.7 billion, donated $5 million to Make America Great Again Inc., Trump’s Super PAC. He donated tens of millions more in the 2024 cycle to support Trump’s allies, including $37 million to support the election of Republicans to Congress. He also donated an undisclosed amount to fund Trump’s second transition. This past June, when Trump sought funds to bankroll a primary challenger to Thomas Massie (R-KY), who had raised his ire by supporting the release of the Epstein Files, Singer contributed $1 million, the largest contribution. Since Trump was first elected in 2016, Singer has met personally with Trump at least four times. “Paul just left and he’s given us his total support,” Trump declared after meeting with Singer at the White House in February 2017. “I want to thank Paul Singer for being here and for coming up to the office. He was a very strong opponent, and now he’s a very strong ally.” (Singer had initially supported Marco Rubio, who is now Trump’s Secretary of State.) In November 2025, Singer acquired Citgo, the US-based subsidiary of Venezuela’s state-run oil company. Singer, through his private investment firm, Elliott Investment Management, bought Citgo for $5.9 billion. The sale to Amber Energy, a subsidiary of Elliott Investment Management, was forced by creditors of Venezuela after the country defaulted on its bond payments. Elliott Investment Management is known as a “vulture” fund because it specializes in buying distressed assets at rock bottom prices. Citgo owns three major refineries on the Gulf Coast, 43 oil terminals, and a network of over 4,000 independently owned gas stations. By all accounts, Singer acquired these assets at a major discount. Advisors to the court that oversaw the sale valued Citgo at $13 billion, while Venezuelan officials said the assets were worth as much as $18 billion. Maduro’s government had sought to appeal the court’s approval of Singer’s bid for Citgo. But now that Maduro has been ousted, it seems unlikely that appeal will continue. Singer acquired Citgo at a bargain price in large part due to the embargo, with limited exceptions, on Venezuela oil imports to the United States. Citgo’s refiners are purpose-built to process heavy-grade Venezuelan “sour” crude. As a result, Citgo was forced to source oil from more expensive sources in Canada and Colombia. (Oil produced in the United States is generally light-grade.) This made Citgo’s operations far less profitable. Trump has sought to justify military action against Venezuela as an effort to disrupt narcotics trafficking. But Venezuela produces no fentanyl and is a minor source of cocaine that reaches the United States. Trump also recently pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, who was convicted of drug trafficking. Further, Trump has long made clear that he was interested in Venezuela for the oil. In remarks to the North Carolina Republican Party in 2023, Trump said that when he left office in 2021, Venezuela was “ready to collapse.” Trump said, had he remained in office, the US “would have taken [Venezuela] over” and “gotten all that oil.” In remarks on Fox News Saturday, Trump made clear that one of the motivations for Saturday’s attack was to increase the production and export of Venezuelan oil. Venezuela has the largest proven reserves of crude oil in the world. Trump said that, moving forward, the US would be “very strongly involved“ with the Venezuelan oil industry. Industry observers anticipate “a rapid rerouting of Venezuelan oil exports, re-establishing the US as the major buyer of the country’s volumes.” Jaime Brito, an oil analyst at OPIS, said access to Venezuelan oil imports “will be a game changer for US Gulf Coast…refiners in terms of profitability.” If that happens, Paul Singer, thanks to a well-timed transaction, will be one of the largest beneficiaries.

Il 2026 inizia con l'attacco al Venezuela, chiaramente motivato dal petrolio. Cosa si può dire di Taiwan? Quanto incide la produzione di chip sull'isola sugli equilibri geopolitici? Partiamo da lì, passiamo dai costi della RAM, e proviamo a fare qualche ragionamento sul tanto temuto (o auspicato?) scoppio della bolla dell'intelligenza artificiale. Notiziole: * In Uzbekistan, un leak nel sistema di sorveglianza delle automobili ne mostra il funzionamento e la pervasività * TikTok diventerà a guida Oracle, e le personalità più in vista sono decisamente schierate con il sionismo * L'Europa si accorge di essere alla mercé delle norme statunitensi (in particolare il Cloud Act) sull'accesso ai dati. Sarà la volta buona per sviluppare soluzioni alternative a quelle fornite dalle Big Tech statunitensi? * L'antitrust italiana sanziona Apple per delle regole sull'App Store riguardanti la privacy; e ordina a Meta di ammettere anche chatbot concorrenti su WhatsApp

Even some Republican lawmakers criticized the Trump administration’s assertion that it is engaging in a military campaign in Venezuela to block fentanyl trafficking into the US. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who is resigning from Congress on Monday following a split from Trump, said on Sunday that the president should target Mexico if he wants to stop fentanyl.  “The majority of American fentanyl overdoses and deaths come from Mexico. Those are the Mexican cartels that are killing Americans,” Greene told NBC’s Meet the Press. “If this was really about narco-terrorists and about protecting Americans from cartels and drugs being brought into America, the Trump administration would be attacking the Mexican cartels.” Greene compared the capture of Venezuela president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Celia Flores, to the US capturing Saddam Hussein and the war in Iraq, calling it the “same Washington playbook” that only “serves the big corporations, the banks, and the oil executives.”  According to the Drug Enforcement Administration’s 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment, Mexico is the primary mass producer and exporter of fentanyl into the US, while China is a leading manufacturer.  The UN Office of Drugs and Crime World Drug Report from 2025 only considers Venezuela as a minor transit center for cocaine. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) also condemned the Trump administration’s narrative on Venezuelan drugs on Sunday. “Wake up MAGA. VENEZUELA is not about drugs; it’s about OIL and REGIME CHANGE. This is not what we voted for,” Massie wrote on X.  But Vice President JD Vance defended Trump’s military operation, arguing that combating cocaine trafficking in Venezuela will weaken cartels.  “If you cut out the money from cocaine (or even reduce it) you substantially weaken the cartels overall,” Vance posted on X. “Also, cocaine is bad too!” He also weakly maintained the link between Venezuela and fentanyl—“There is still fentanyl coming from Venezuela (or at least there was)”—and acknowledged Mexico’s role in fentanyl and considered it “a reason why President Trump shut the border on day one.” But pinning fentanyl on Venezuela avoids a broader point on health policy. My colleague, Julia Lurie, wrote in April that the Trump administration was using the “name of reducing fentanyl overdoses” to levy tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and China and list cartels as terrorist organizations.  > The dramatic proclamations gloss over a glaring reality: The administration is > slashing funding for state and federal agencies that provide addiction > treatment and overdose prevention programs. And these cuts are likely just the > beginning. And Julia was right.  Since then, Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which includes nearly $1 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, which provided coverage to about half of all non-elderly adults with opioid use disorder. Health care subsidies on Obamacare have also lapsed, more than doubling the average cost for health insurance premiums. Trump’s attack on Venezuela is for himself and even his own party is beginning to realize it.

The US attack on Venezuela relies on the same deception that justified the war in Iraq: the idea of self-financing wars with oil. President Trump said Saturday that the US will run Venezuela following the capture of Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. “It won’t cost us anything because the money coming out of the ground is very substantial,” he said at a Saturday press conference at Mar-a-Lago following news of the US attack. But we’ve been down this road before. “There’s a lot of money to pay for this. It doesn’t have to be US taxpayer money,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz claimed about Iraq in March 2003, the same month as the US invasion. “We are dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon.” He said oil revenues could bring $50-100 billion over the first years of the invasion. That wasn’t the case, and just like what would happen in Iraq, the military campaign in Venezuela is likely to have steep costs. On Saturday, General Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the operation to capture Maduro and Flores using more than 150 aircraft from 20 different bases. Members of law enforcement were involved in the extraction force, and according to Trump, ran through scenarios in a replica building of Maduro’s safe house. At the Saturday press conference, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that the raid lasted less than 30 minutes—a smooth process following months of planning and preparation.  But, according to what a senior Venezuelan official told the New York Times, at least 80 people, including civilians and military personnel, were killed. The Times also reported that about half a dozen US soldiers were injured. Photos show massive damage from bombings in Venezuela’s capital of Caracas. Removing Maduro from power could have been achieved by taking what then-vice president, and now-acting president Delcy Rodríguez and other senior Venezuelan government officials offered to the US as a “more acceptable” version to Maduro’s administration last year. According to an October 2025 report by the Miami Herald, Rodríguez would lead a peaceful transition by “preserving political stability without dismantling the ruling apparatus.” The Trump administration rejected the proposal and continued to carry out deadly strikes on alleged drug boats, killing at least 115 people.  Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that the US continues to “reserve the right to take strikes against drug boats.” He also suggested that Cuba could be the Trump administration’s next target. Previously, US war planners vastly underestimated the cost of fixing Iraq’s oil infrastructure to fund its invasion and occupation. Linda Bilmes, a public policy professor at Harvard University, wrote in a 2013 research paper investigating the financial costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that one of the most significant challenges for future US national security policy “will not originate from any external threat” but “simply coping with the legacy of the conflicts we have already fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Prior to the US invasion of Iraq, Bush’s economic adviser, Lawrence Lindsey, said that it may cost $100-200 billion. He was fired. Lindsey was wrong, but in the opposite way than Bush anticipated—a more accurate number is around $2 trillion.  In her research, Bilmes pointed to long-term costs like medical care and disability compensation for service members, veterans, and their families, as well as debt servicing of borrowed funds.  Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said on Sunday that the Senate will vote on whether to formally block Trump’s military campaign in Venezuela when Congress returns to session this week. But we are already paying dearly for the damage done.

The United States stopped an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela on Sunday, just a day after the Coast Guard boarded another oil vessel, according to a report from Bloomberg.  The operation, which is not approved by Congress, is part of President Trump’s “blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into, and out of, Venezuela” in a campaign to cut an essential export that accounts for more than half of Venezuela’s revenue. Some international treaties consider blockades as an act of war. Trump has called Venezuela President Nicolás Maduro’s administration a “foreign terrorist organization” that is using sanctioned oil to fund drug trafficking. The US is also continuing its strikes on boats allegedly holding illicit drugs in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. According to the Trump administration, at least 104 people have been killed in 28 boat strikes. House Republicans rejected two Democratic-supported resolutions on Wednesday that would have forced Trump to get authorization from Congress to continue military attacks on these alleged terrorist organizations and its campaign against Venezuela. Bloomberg reported that the most recent tanker, the Bella 1, was a Panamanian-flagged ship sanctioned by the US and was on its way to Venezuela for loading. Officials did not disclose the specific location of where the ship was seized. The Centuries tanker, the vessel intercepted on Saturday, did not appear on the US list of vessels under sanction and is registered in Panama, according to the New York Times. The ship belongs to a Chinese-based oil trading company that moves Venezuelan oil to Chinese refineries.  But White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly asserted on X that the tanker held Venezuela state-owned oil, which is sanctioned. “It was a falsely flagged vessel operating as part of the Venezuelan shadow fleet to traffic stolen oil and fund the narcoterrorist Maduro regime,” Kelly wrote. This blockade goes well beyond political battles—they have a true human cost in Venezuela. As my colleague, Katie Herchenroeder, cited from Francisco J. Monaldi, director of the Latin America Energy Program at Rice University on Wednesday, “Cutting off all oil revenue will lead to a massive reduction in food imports and is likely to trigger the first major famine in the Western Hemisphere in modern history.”

On Friday, the Trump administration escalated its military presence in the Caribbean and South America by announcing the deployment of an aircraft carrier group to the region. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave the green light to send the USS Gerald R. Ford—described by the US Navy as “the most capable, adaptable, and lethal combat platform in the world”—to “bolster US capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities,” according to the Pentagon’s chief spokesperson. Also on Friday, Hegseth said the United States had carried out yet another military strike on a boat in the Caribbean Sea, killing six people on board. He alleged that the vessel was operated by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which the Trump administration has designated a terrorist organization alongside drug cartels. It has accused Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro of controlling the criminal group and enabling the smuggling of drugs into the United States. Since September, the administration has conducted at least 10 attacks against alleged drug boats, including in the Pacific Ocean. As many as 43 people have been killed so far. The expanding campaign, which legal experts have warned violates international law and amounts to extrajudicial killings, has raised alarm in Latin America, worsening tensions between the Trump administration and leaders in the region, and reviving the specter of American meddling and intervention in other countries. Reacting to news of the deployment of the world’s largest aircraft carrier, Maduro charged the administration with “fabricating a new war.” Speaking last month at the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York, Colombia’s president Gustavo Petro condemned the attacks and called for an investigation into President Donald Trump and other US officials involved in the strikes. “Launching missiles over two people in a small boat is a war crime,” Petro told CBS News this week. In response, Trump described Petro as a “bad guy” and a “thug.” On Friday, the war of words escalated into action, as the administration imposed sanctions on the Colombian president and his family, claiming that he had allowed drug cartels to flourish. “What the US Treasury is doing is an arbitrariness typical of an oppressive regime,” Petro fired back on social media. The country’s interior minister, who was also targeted for sanctions, had strong words for the White House. “For the US, a nonviolent statement is the same as being a drug trafficker,” Armando Benedetti wrote on X. “Gringos, go home.” > “For the US, a nonviolent statement is the same as being a drug trafficker.” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has also opposed the Trump administration’s strikes. “Obviously, we do not agree,” she said of the military campaign during a recent press conference. “There are international laws on how to operate when dealing with the alleged illegal transport of drugs or guns on international waters, and we have expressed this to the government of the United States and publicly.” As the Trump administration escalates the military build-up in the region to become the largest in decades—ostensibly to fight trafficking and stop the flow of drugs to the United States—government officials have, internally, clarified the goal of the campaign: to force Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of power. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has accused Maduro of being the leader of a narco-terrorist organization and “responsible for trafficking drugs into the United States.” In a recent interview with the AFP, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s adviser Celso Amorim expressed concerns about what a potential direct military intervention in Venezuela to topple Maduro could mean for the rest of the region. “We cannot accept an outside intervention because it will trigger immense resentment,” he said. “It could inflame South America and lead to radicalization of politics on the whole continent.” President Lula, who is expected to meet with Trump in Malaysia over the weekend, indicated to reporters on Friday that he could bring up the issue in conversation with his American counterpart. “If this becomes a trend,” he said, “if each one thinks they can invade another’s territory to do whatever they want, where is the respect for the sovereignty of nations?”