Trump says Venezuela sends US lethal drugs, but data tells different storyThe president is justifying deadly military strikes on fatal US overdoses. But Venezuela is linked to cocaine, which is far less deadly than fentanyl.
Josh Meyer
USA TODAY
Updated Dec. 9, 2025
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump and his top aides have justified lethal military strikes on suspected drug smuggling boats from Venezuela, by accusing Venezuela and alleged criminal networks operating on its soil like the Cartel de los Soles of flooding the United States with deadly drugs.
"This mission defends our Homeland, removes narco-terrorists from our Hemisphere, and secures our Homeland from the drugs that are killing our people," Secretary of War (formerly known as Secretary of Defense) Pete Hegseth said on Nov. 13. He said the military mission has been officially named "Operation Southern Spear."
In August, the United States doubled the reward for information leading to the capture of Venezuelan President Nicola´s Maduro to an unprecedented $50 million over allegations of drug trafficking and links to criminal groups. Attorney General Pam Bondi explained the bounty at the time by accusing Maduro in a video message of being "one of the largest narco-traffickers in the world and a threat to our national security."
That’s reason enough, Trump and administration officials say, for launching U.S. military attacks that have killed at least 87 people in recent months – including two men clinging to wreckage after they survived an initial Sept. 2 strike that killed nine other suspected smugglers. They say it even warrants a potential attack on Venezuelan soil, which Trump has implied may be in the offing.
U.S. and United Nations drug data, however, show that Venezuela isn't a producer or exporter of fentanyl, a lab-made synthetic opioid, and that it plays a relatively minor role in the far less-lethal cocaine trade.
Venezuela does not produce fentanyl“Every boat kills 25,000 on average — some people say more," Trump told U.S. military generals in September. "You see these boats, they’re stacked up with bags of white powder that’s mostly fentanyl and other drugs, too.”
But Mexico is the primary - and virtually only - mass producer and exporter of fentanyl, with Chinese peddlers sending small amounts by mail, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and U.S. counternarcotics organizations.
The opioid, 50 times more powerful than heroin, is almost entirely made with precursor chemicals that originate in China and are used by Mexican drug cartel chemists to make various pills, powders and other products intended for the U.S. market.
According to DEA's 2025 "National Drug Threat Assessment" and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence's 2025 " Annual Threat Assessment," Mexico-based transnational criminal organizations (TCOs), especially the Sinaloa and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel are the primary suppliers of illicit drugs, including fentanyl, for the U.S. market, the Congressional Research Service said an Aug. 26 briefing paper for lawmakers.
"Within the past six years, Mexican TCOs have acquired the ability to manufacture illicit fentanyl in Mexico," the independent research arm of Congress concluded. "They reportedly use pill presses, often imported from China, to lace counterfeit medication, including veterinary medication, with fentanyl or methamphetamine."
Many victims have been young people taking what they think are other recreational drugs or painkillers that actually contain a potentially fatal dose of fentanyl so small it’s no larger than a grain or two of rice.
Venezuela does play a significant role in the trafficking of cocaine that’s grown and processed in Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America.
But that white powder, popular with U.S. recreational drug users since the 1920s, is driving a small share of U.S. overdose deaths. The Centers for Disease Control found 74,702 of the 107,543 U.S. overdose deaths in 2023 involved synthetic opioids, usually fentanyl.
While Trump does not seem to distinguish between cocaine and fentanyl, drug overdose deaths from cocaine only rose from 12,122 in 2015 to 59,725 in 2023 because nearly 70% of those more recent deaths involved cocaine mixed with fentanyl, according to the CDC.
What role does Venezuela play in drug trafficking?Available data suggests that Venezuela is not a primary source for U.S.-bound cocaine or other major drugs, especially fentanyl.
Instead, it’s considered mostly a transit hub for cocaine, and a minor one at that, given that most of the drug flowing up from Andean countries are not primarily routed through Venezuelan ports, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) “World Drug Report 2025.”
The UNODC and DEA both say that most of the world’s cocaine continues to be produced in Colombia, with smaller shares coming from Peru and Bolivia. Some of the trafficking organizations moved at least part of their operations to neighboring Venezuela following Washington’s multibillion-dollar Plan Colombia crackdown in that country.
And Venezuela doesn’t even register a blip on the UN report, and the latest U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) assessment of fentanyl flows into the United States.
The fentanyl headed for the United States is shipped north from Mexico using a network of smugglers and other facilitators, the DEA report said.
"Since approximately 2019, Mexico has reportedly replaced the People's Republic of China (PRC, or China) as the main source of U.S.-bound illicit fentanyl," the CRS briefing paper said.
That report, and others by the DEA and United Nations, usually don't mention Venezuela at all when discussing fentanyl flows. The Republican staff of the Senate Homeland Security Committee also left it out entirely in its major 51-page report, "Addressing the Supply Chain of Synthetic Drugs in the United States" in December 2022.
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Trump says Venezuela traffics lethal drugs into US. Experts disagree. |
