TACO War

With extra salsa cruda

A work brigade sponsored by Venezuelan state-run oil company PDVSA, which critics blame for the oil spills as production ramped up after the lifting of sanctions in November 2023, use shovels and rakes to remove congealed petroleum from a Lake Maracaibo beach. Photo by John Otis/NPR.

Photo of Maracaibo from the wonderful collection “Paradise Lost” by Adriana Loureiro Fernandez (@adriana.loureiro on Instagram), an ongoing project documenting the collapse of Venezuela over the last 10 years, from the crash of basic services and the national economy to widespread violence and hunger, leading to a massive exodus.

Has anybody seen that war with Venezuela? I’m sure it was around here just a few days ago, and now I can’t seem to find it anywhere.

That is, I guess the USS Gerald R. Ford is still wandering around the Caribbean with its 90 aircraft and 4,600 sailors (BBC saw it parked in the US Virgin Islands on Thursday, 600 miles from the Venezuelan coast, and it seems to be spending most of its time with its six-ship strike group entourage right in that northeast Caribbean neighborhood, just south of Puerto Rico), and there have been planes getting closer and presumably gathering intelligence as recently as November 21. Trump “Truthed” a violent-sounding announcement on the 29th of November that the airspace around and over Venezuela should be considered “closed in its entirety”

but a couple of days later the US government was asking Venezuela’s permission to send a plane there itself, repatriating a bunch of Venezuelan migrants presumably gathered for deportation by ICE, and Venezuela cheerfully approved the flight, as it has been doing for months now, in spite of the rumors of war. Flights crossing Venezuelan airspace are down around 50%, according to Reuters, but that’s hardly “in its entirety”.

Oh, and sometime in the week before Thanksgiving, Trump and secretary of state Rubio had a phone call with Venezuelan president Maduro, but we don’t naturally have any kind of readout for that, or indication of any kind of what they discussed, except for the circumstantial evidence that on November 16 the State Department had announced plans to declare that the so-called Cartel de los Soles was a foreign terrorist organization headed by President Maduro, and did so declare it on November 24; and that on Thanksgiving itself Trump told troops in a call from Mar-a-Lago that he was planning to add land operations against Venezuelan drug traffickers to the attacks on motorboats that started in September:

“In recent weeks, you’ve been working to deter Venezuelan drug traffickers,” Trump said during a call with military service members that alluded to the boat strikes, adding: “We’ll be starting to stop them by land also. The land is easier, but that’s going to start very soon.”

All this material is pretty problematic in its own right, in various ways. There’s no evidence, for instance, that the Cartel de los Soles exists, as a cartel, or that Maduro heads it. The name was invented by journalists in 1993, to refer to the scandal of a plot engineered by the CIA, as a matter of fact, in which senior Venezuelan military officers smuggled cocaine into the US, as a vehicle for infiltrating Colombian cartels (Venezuelan generals’ uniforms have a sun emblem on the jackets, hence “Cartel of the Suns”). I believe it’s understood that there are Venezuelan senior officers and political officials involved in the international drug trade, and it certainly seems likely that Maduro is aware of this—I don’t mean to suggest that we’re talking about nice people here—but there’s no good reason to think they constitute any kind of organization, let alone one in which Maduro is directly engaged. The fact that the Trumpers originally wanted to attack the urban gang Tren de Aragua and changed their minds shows that they’re largely making it up.

---

Then, Venezuelans don’t traffic drugs in the US, contrary to Trump’s claims—that’s why the CIA used them in that scheme 30-odd years ago. They don’t traffic opiates, or fentanyl, the causes of the vast majority of the US overdose deaths Trump claims to be worried about, at all; fentanyl is brought into the US from manufacturers using Chinese components in Mexico, using US citizens as couriers, crossing the border at regular crossings, completely unconnected to “illegal immigrants”, including those from Venezuela, who are generally asylum seekers escaping from their abusive government, not cooperating with it. Real Venezuelan drug traffickers, in contrast, deal mostly in cocaine (which doesn’t kill anybody, though some opioid deaths happen to people who are also using coke), exporting it to Europe via fishing boat to the nation of Trinidad and Tobago, seven miles off the Venezuelan coast, or points further southeast. Florida and Puerto Rico are too far away!

This is borne out by the actual experience of the motorboat campaign. An investigation by AP found that nine men killed in the US attacks really were moving coke (not opioids), to market, but were hardly terrorists:

Most of the nine men were crewing such craft for the first or second time, making at least $500 per trip, residents and relatives said. They were laborers, a fisherman, a motorcycle taxi driver. Two were low-level career criminals. One was a well-known local crime boss who contracted out his smuggling services to traffickers.

The men lived on the Paria Peninsula, in mostly unpainted cinderblock homes that can go weeks without water service and regularly lose power for several hours a day. They awoke to panoramic views of a national park’s tropical forests, the Gulf of Paria’s shallows and the Caribbean’s sparkling sapphire waters. When the time came for their drug runs, they boarded open-hulled fishing skiffs that relied on powerful outboard motors to haul their drugs to nearby Trinidad and other islands.

A number of victims of the US strikes, it’s impossible to say how many, weren’t even from Venezuela, like the Colombian fisherman Alejandro Carranza. The Trump administration offers no information on any of their names, their nationalities, or evidence for why they were apprehended. I don’t think they know. I don’t think they’ve done any real investigation. If any of the dead had been committing crimes, they weren’t capital crimes, and even if they had been they weren’t afforded anything like due process—just blown up on the high sea. And the administration’s justification for killing almost a hundred people this way, the theory that there is a war with the imaginary Cartel de los Soles that the president must pursue though he doesn’t have to consult Congress about it seems just laughable, or would if the killing itself wasn’t so serious.

This is becoming clearer and clearer to the general public in the light of the ongoing revelations about the first killing, on September 2, when it seems that US forces went back some hours after their original attack to wipe out two desperate survivors in flagrant violation of the laws of military conflict, probably under the orders of “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth, a clear war crime if Trump’s theory of a war was correct and a simple murder case otherwise, which has given new impetus to the view that all these killings are murders—extrajudicial killings without military justification.

The broader political situation increasingly parallels the buildup to the Iraq War in 2003, with the bogus casus belli of the drug war standing in the place of Saddam Hussein’s imaginary weapons of mass destruction, the more plausible neoconservative project of “regime change” in Venezuela behind that, and looming in the deep background all that oil, with an unclear meaning (what would we do with it if we had it?).

For the regime change scenario, I would obviously be opposed to such a thing, an imperialist adventure certain to make things even worse than they already were, but I have to admit the conditions are generally met. Maduro’s government isn’t as violent as Hussein’s was, but it’s very bad, as witnessed by the extraordinary outpouring of refugees and asylum seekers fleeing the country in recent years, close to eight million souls, including a million in the US. There’s even an Ahmad Chalabi, in the person of María Corina Machado, a longtime stalwart in the resistance against the Bolivarian socialist movement of the late Hugo Chávez and his repellent successor Maduro, rightwing enough to please the American Republicans, in particular Rubio, a garden-variety Miami-Cuban politician at his heart.

Machado actually seems to have won the presidential election against Maduro last year (not in her own name, she was barred from running, but that of a stand-in, Edmundo González)—Maduro denies that, but has been unable to produce any evidence that he won himself, which sounds kind of suspicious given that he runs the government. And she won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, the one Trump was angling so hard for (he was really enraged at being robbed of it, too). She was suppoesed to be in Oslo today receiving it, in fact, but something has gone wrong. Her family is there but she is not and the ceremony is canceled. I hope she’s OK.

What’s really missing from the regime change idea, as Will Freeman of the Council on Foreign Relations has pointed out, is US preparations for an actual war:

The last time we saw a buildup this large in the Caribbean was right before the 1989 invasion of Panama—the one that ousted dictator Manuel Noriega. We could do a lot with these assets. And Maduro, as I mentioned, seems scared.

But I think this is likely “military messaging,” not preparation for a land invasion. First, the roughly ten thousand military personnel in the area are not sufficient to hold and take much territory. We invaded Panama—a much smaller country—with thirty thousand troops, many of whom were already in the canal zone. Second, Trump confirmed that he authorized CIA operations inside the country, which is, let’s say, unusual. If there’s a land strike, I expect it might target an armed group encampment near the Colombian border: another bid to drum up fear, but not an existential challenge to the Maduro regime. The point is to pressure the regime, see if it snaps, and if it doesn’t, then extract concessions. The question is: what concessions?

Nobody’s really managing the military aspects, because no war is expected; it’s a TACO war, if you like, or a bluff move in the Art of the Deal, and the object is to threaten your opponent into giving you something, and if it’s a war, and the country has oil, you know it’s the oil, because that’s one of the obsessions Trump has been carrying around with him since the time when he was still capable of picking up on new information, in the late 70s and early 80s, like the thing about the tariffs (to save us from the Japanese car industry) or how solar energy wouldn’t work after sunset (before the invention of lithium-ion batteries). If you’re going to have a war, you should get some oil out of it. Angola, not Vietnam.

We’ve seen him constructing thoughts around this basic principle time after time. When he got around to expressing opposition to the Iraq War, it was all about how we should have “kept the oil”. When his generals were convincing him to leave troops in Syria to protect out Kurdish allies, he demanded they make the mission to protect the oil fields. When Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, Trump called him a genius, and three years later he’s genuinely annoyed with his old friend, why? Because he’d assumed it would be his own kind of war, over quickly and capturing the eastern gas fields, and instead it was turning out to be this endless metaphysical project of restoring the Eastern Slavic Middle Ages. He must feel like grabbing Putin by the shoulders and shaking him: “Get the gas, you dummy!”

Mark my words, that’s what it’s all about. Rubio may be mad excited about chasing Communists, but Trump’s all about those 300 billion barrels of heavy sour crude, not that he knows what he’d do with it if he had it, that’s for the staff to figure out, but he has to have it.