The easiest way to overthrow Nicolás Maduro, the narco-terrorist dictator of Venezuela, is to finance an insurgency. That would allow the oppressed people and disaffected military of Venezuela to overthrow this Hugo Chavez wannabe.
The U.S. does not need to invade Venezuela with ground troops. This would save the U.S. Treasury billions of dollars and greatly minimize our casualties in a possible endless war or costly occupation of protracted “chaos.”
The allegations against the Maduro government since 2013 are legion. They include torture, extrajudicial killings, no due process, rigged elections, abject prison conditions, crimes against humanity, rape, incommunicado detentions, and close military and economic ties with fanatical Shiite Iran ad nauseam. They also include “an exodus of some 7.1 million Venezuelans [representing] one of the largest migration crises in the world.”
We can assist the anti-Maduro forces with intelligence, arms, and selected airstrikes, especially with Predator drones, but the Venezuelan opposition has to do the fighting. However, I think that it would be a good military strategy to keep the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group near Puerto Rico, which is 545 miles from Venezuela, for credible deterrence and assisted air strikes.
The U.S. naval buildup in the southeastern Caribbean Sea has recently been so massive that it is now the largest “since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, a show of force that has included a series of heavy bomber aircraft flying along Venezuela’s coast.”
Before actively aiding Maduro’s opposition, I think that the U.S. should greatly increase the reward for Maduro’s capture from $50 million to $75 million, which might expedite a peaceful coup d’état in order to restore democracy. That might allow anti-Maduro leader María Corina Machado, the winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, to assume the presidency at the Miraflores Palace in Caracas, stabilize the government, and reduce the export of illegal drugs, especially cocaine.
If that strategy fails, the U.S. foremost needs to destroy Maduro’s and his general’s primary source of revenue. This revenue generates enormous governmental and personal income from their Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns) in criminal cooperation with such Latin American drug traffickers as Tren de Aragua and the Sinaloa Cartel. This trifecta of drug trafficking is greatly responsible for smuggling cocaine and fentanyl, along with sex trafficking, into the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe.
Since November 17, 2025, approximately twenty-two speedboats transporting illegal, deadly drugs have been destroyed in both the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, with eleven in each region, resulting in eighty-two dead and three survivors. The U.S. has achieved this successful interdiction mainly by using remotely piloted “drones, gunships, and fighter jets.”
However, destroying speedboats is not an effective long-term strategy in defeating Maduro and the other cartels in stopping the flow of illegal drugs in this hemisphere.
If President Trump is going to destroy Maduro’s and the other cartels’ main source of revenue, he has to destroy their hidden remote submarine “shipyards” and drug labs deep underground, in caves and other camouflaged riverine jungle locations. Destroying Maduro’s speed boats will only make a small dent in his narco-terrorism network.
Stopping the export of Maduro’s and other cartels’ illegal drugs by seaplanes, whose illegal drugs are quickly unloaded onto speed boats, and rapidly transported to our shores, avoiding radar, is much more complicated and beyond the scope of this op-ed.
Another chronic problem in the U.S. is corrupt ranchers or farmers, who agree to allow their ranches or farms to become nocturnal airstrips in order to make a quick, profitable $25,000 for each delivery of illegal drugs. That is also the subject of another op-ed.
The drug cartels in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Mexico are so wealthy and flush with cash that they have the money to hire the engineering expertise to build both transpacific and transatlantic narco-submarines. That enables them to transport illegal drugs throughout the Western hemisphere, along with Australia, New Zealand, Africa, and Europe. After delivery, it is much less expensive for the cartels to scuttle their submarines instead of making a return trip and risking the crew’s capture.
According to the cartels’ reasoning, a $1 million submarine carrying $25 million worth of cocaine and other illegal drugs is simply not worth the expense back to Venezuela, Ecuador, or Mexico.
In 2016, it was estimated that “80% of drugs smuggled into the US in 2012 came from maritime routes. And 30% of the drugs that arrived in the U.S. by sea were transported via narco submarines. Today, the Coast Guard estimates that “80 percent of all narcotics seized are confiscated at sea, with drug cartels and Transnational Criminal Organizations (TCOs) continuing to seek ways to traffic illicit drugs into the U.S.”
One certain solution to overthrow Maduro is to destroy all his clandestine submarine “shipyards” in Venezuela and other “allied” locations in Colombia, Mexico, and Ecuador. Also, offering $5 million rewards for the death or capture of his naval architects, who construct these narco-submarines, will be a lot less expensive than sending U.S. ground troops in a possible protracted guerrilla war in Venezuela and elsewhere.
This strategy could also avoid a possible civil war or unnecessary internal “chaos” in Venezuela when Maduro is no longer in power.
Once the financial sources of Maduro’s government begin to dissipate along with the destruction of his nationalized oil fields in the Maracaibo Basin and Orinoco Belt, hopefully, the Caracas dictator, generals, and his security forces will soon flee to Moscow. Then they can reside in permanent exile with former butcher Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, choose to be killed in combat, or be extradited to the U.S. like Manuel Noriega of Panama in 1990.
Robert L. Maronic
