As U.S. drones sink drug boats and the world’s largest carrier prowls the Caribbean, a Venezuelan expatriate lays out four reasons to back a negotiated transition — and warns what happens if Washington goes too far.
By Carlos Taylhardat |
When I was a boy, my father would come home in his naval uniform, hang his cap on the same hook by the door, and sit at the table with a map.
He had fought a dictatorship in Venezuela, taken a bullet to the head and survived, then gone on to serve as a diplomat in Washington, Lisbon and Toronto, later as ambassador with a military designation in Lebanon and Iraq. During the first Gulf War, he negotiated oil and trade with Saddam Hussein. At home, I learned two lessons at once: gunboats can topple regimes, and diplomacy decides whether a country recovers from it.
Today, with a U.S. carrier strike group off Venezuela and drones blowing up small boats along the Caribbean narcotics routes, those lessons feel uncomfortably close again. Since early September, the Trump administration has ordered a series of strikes on vessels in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, killing dozens of people in the name of stopping drugs. The White House insists this is about traffickers; critics say it looks more like gunboat diplomacy aimed at Nicolás Maduro.
I do not want the United States to invade Venezuela. But I do believe Washington should help Venezuelans complete a transition to a new government that they already tried to choose at the ballot box.
My reasons are not the usual slogans about “freedom” and “socialism.” They grow out of my own life: the son of a Venezuelan naval officer who fought a dictator, a diplomat who represented Venezuela abroad, and a citizen who watched Hugo Chávez’s first election from inside the country.
Context: Carriers, Cartels, and a Country Caught in Between
The Trump administration has framed its new operation—reportedly called Operation Southern Spear—as a war on “narco-terrorists.” U.S. Southern Command says the boats it targets are moving drugs from South America toward North America along known smuggling routes.
At the same time, the Pentagon has surged assets into the region. The USS Gerald R. Ford, the largest and most advanced aircraft carrier in the world, leads a strike group in the Caribbean Sea. It sails with destroyers, cruisers and at least one nuclear-powered submarine, plus F-35s and other advanced aircraft flying from its deck and nearby bases. This is no small, quiet counternarcotics patrol.
Meanwhile, Nicolás Maduro has appealed to Russia, China and Iran for radar systems, aircraft parts, drones and electronic warfare support, portraying U.S. deployments as a threat not just to Venezuela but to his allies’ interests. Chinese companies already run major oil projects and infrastructure inside the country. Chinese and Russian technicians are present in refineries, ports and telecom networks.
So when Americans see a map of “drug boats” and “cartels,” Venezuelans see something heavier: familiar patterns of pressure that, in Latin America, have often ended with regime change, occupations or decades of resentment.
3 Narratives News has already explored Venezuela’s disputed 2024 election and the strange reality of a president-in-exile, diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia, recognised abroad while Maduro still holds the palace in Caracas. We have mapped how U.S. ships “surround” Venezuela and how China and Russia react in “Venezuela Surrounded: Invasion or Deterrence?”
Here, I want to do something different: step into the argument, and explain why I believe the world should help Venezuelans change governments—but stop short of war.
Narrative 1 — The Case for a U.S.-Backed Democratic Transition
I write this as a Venezuelan who grew up inside the institutions my father served, and who has watched them collapse.
1. Security: A Chinese Outpost on America’s Southern Doorstep
When people in Washington talk about Venezuela, they often reach for the wrong history: Cuba in 1962. I think the better analogy is a slow-motion, South China Sea in reverse.
For Beijing, Venezuela is no longer just an oil customer. Over the last two decades China has extended tens of billions of dollars in loans to Caracas, often repaid in oil, and is now embedded in oilfields, ports, telecoms and surveillance systems. A Chinese-backed floating production platform has just arrived in Lake Maracaibo as part of a billion-dollar project that will send heavy crude east.
Add to that Chinese satellite and radar facilities on Venezuelan soil, which Western analysts describe as giving Beijing an intelligence foothold into the Caribbean and U.S. Southern Command’s backyard. The fear in Washington is not abstract: it is that the hemisphere could one day wake up to find Chinese radar, drones and perhaps fighter jets permanently parked a short flight from Miami.
A democratic, sovereign Venezuela will still trade with China. That is normal. But if Maduro survives only because China and Russia keep him there, the Caribbean becomes a bargaining chip in someone else’s great-power game, not a neighbourhood. A transition to a legitimate government recognised by Venezuelans themselves is the only way to lower that long-term risk without turning the Caribbean into a battlefield.
2. Democracy Already Chose — and Was Ignored
This is not Iraq 2003 or Libya 2011. Venezuelans already voted.
In the 2024 presidential election, independent tallies and opposition reports say that diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia won a clear victory, even though the National Electoral Council never released full station-by-station results. Opposition volunteers collected tally sheets from the majority of polling places and claim a wide margin in González’s favour.
Maduro’s government declared itself the winner anyway.
Since then, the European Parliament has recognised González as Venezuela’s legitimate president-elect. The United States and several Latin American governments have followed suit, while others sit on the fence. Opposition leader María Corina Machado—now a Nobel Peace Prize laureate—has remained inside the country, at enormous personal risk, insisting that the vote must count.
So this is not about inventing a president on social media. It is about whether the votes already cast will ever take effect. A transition that recognises González’s mandate and forces institutions to obey the constitution would not be a foreign experiment. It would be enforcing a contract Venezuelans already signed with themselves.
3. Shared Prosperity: Oil Without Plunder
I remember the Venezuela of my childhood as a place of arrivals, not departures. Through the 1950s to the 1970s, when oil was managed with a mix of state oversight and private-sector expertise, the country was—unevenly and imperfectly—one of the wealthiest in Latin America. Foreign companies invested, Venezuelan engineers trained abroad and came home, and there was a sense that oil could build a modern country.
Today, Venezuela still holds one of the largest proven oil reserves on earth. But mismanagement, sanctions and corruption have hollowed out production. Exports have shifted heavily toward China and a handful of other buyers, often through opaque intermediaries, ship-to-ship transfers and re-labelled cargoes designed to evade sanctions.
In a real transition, the United States does not need to “steal” Venezuelan oil. It can support public–private partnership models where Venezuelan state firms retain ownership while foreign companies—American, European, even Asian—buy time-limited stakes and service contracts under transparent rules. A portion of the proceeds can rebuild infrastructure, tourism and basic services instead of disappearing into black boxes and offshore accounts.
For the United States, Venezuelan crude is closer to Gulf Coast refineries and shipping lanes than many Middle Eastern supplies, and easier to move than oil pumped from the Canadian Arctic or Saudi deserts. For Venezuela, transparent investment is the difference between recovery and permanent dependency. A prosperous, democratic Venezuela will send more oil and fewer migrants north.
4. Nearly Eight Million Venezuelans Have Voted With Their Feet
Before Chávez and Maduro, Venezuela was known for beauty queens, baseball players and beaches, not mass displacement. Today it is home to one of the largest refugee crises in the world. International agencies estimate that more than 7.7 million Venezuelans have left the country since 2014; other tallies put the diaspora closer to 8 million.
Over 6.5 million of them are in Latin America and the Caribbean, straining schools, hospitals and labour markets in countries that initially opened their doors. Thousands more cross the Darién Gap each month or sleep rough in cities from Bogotá to São Paulo.
These people are not abstract numbers. They are former neighbours, classmates, nurses, engineers, small business owners, the parents of children now growing up far from Caracas and Maracaibo. For them, the question of regime change is not an academic debate. It is whether they remain permanent exiles or get a chance to build a different Venezuela.
Narrative 2 — The Case Against U.S.-Engineered Regime Change
Now shift the camera. Seen from much of Latin America—and from parts of Washington itself—the story above has a dark shadow. This is the second narrative: why many oppose any U.S.-backed push to unseat Maduro, even if they dislike him.
1. A War on “Narco-Terrorists” That Looks Like Executions at Sea
The boat strikes are the starting point. Over just a few months, U.S. drones and aircraft have destroyed more than twenty vessels in two oceans. Officials say they were carrying drugs and run by groups designated as terrorist organisations. But they have released almost no public evidence: no names, no charges, no clear links between the dead and any cartel leadership.
Legal scholars and human-rights advocates warn that the campaign increasingly resembles extrajudicial killing dressed up in counternarcotics language. Latin American governments, including some U.S. partners, are uneasy. The region has a long memory of being treated as a target range for experiments dreamed up in northern capitals.
If the same country that is sinking unarmed boats without trial now says, “trust us, we are here to restore democracy,” many will simply not believe it.
2. “We’ve Seen This Movie”: Panama, Iraq, Libya
Opponents of regime change can list the cautionary tales by heart.
- Panama, 1989: The United States ousted Manuel Noriega in a short invasion. The dictator fell, but civilians died, resentment lingered and Washington still carries the legacy of acting as judge and executioner in its “backyard.”
- Iraq, 2003: A dictatorship fell, but what followed was not peace or prosperity. It was chaos, insurgency and a reshaping of regional power that still reverberates.
- Libya, 2011: A NATO-backed intervention toppled Muammar Gaddafi. The country fractured into rival militias; migrants washed up on European beaches; the state has never fully re-stitched itself.
From this vantage point, any “transition” that relies on U.S. military pressure in Venezuelan waters risks becoming another chapter in the same pattern: a quick display of force, a photo of a toppled leader, then years of instability, migration and arms smuggling.
3. Sovereignty, Precedent and the China–Russia Card
Another core objection is legal and systemic. If Washington can, in practice, use force and sanctions to push out a government it dislikes in Caracas, what stops Beijing or Moscow from doing the same elsewhere? The principle that “the people alone choose their government” gets blurred when external naval power is the deciding factor.
That is why China and Russia repeat the same phrase: non-interference in internal affairs. They may be cynical about it, but the phrase resonates in a region that remembers coups backed by foreign powers. For many Latin American leaders, even those who privately hope Maduro goes, it matters that any change looks Venezuelan, not imposed by Washington. Otherwise the precedent will haunt future crises far beyond Caracas.
4. The Risk of Turning Venezuela Into a Great-Power Chessboard
Finally, there is the risk that a “limited” U.S. push to force a transition triggers something far bigger. Maduro has already asked Russia for military technicians and air-defence upgrades, and welcomed renewed Chinese investment in oil and infrastructure, as well as technology for surveillance and cyber-security.
If the United States crosses from deterrence into open coercion—blockades, “no-go” zones or strikes on land targets—it risks inviting a symbolic Russian or Chinese military presence meant to raise the stakes. Forces from nuclear powers could find themselves operating in tight Caribbean waters under high tension. A miscalculation could turn a Venezuelan crisis into something much larger.
From this perspective, even a justified transition is too expensive, because it redraws the rules of the hemisphere.
Narrative 3 — The Silent Story: The People Between Drones and Dictators
Between these two loud narratives—my own hope for a transition, and the fear of another foreign-engineered disaster—lies a quieter reality.
It belongs to the families of the people killed on those boats, who do not know exactly why their sons or daughters died and who may never see a courtroom. It belongs to the Venezuelan sailors and officers who watch a U.S. carrier group through binoculars and silently decide whether they would ever disobey an order from Miraflores. It belongs to migrants in shelters in Colombia, Brazil, Chile or Canada, checking the news on cracked phones, wondering whether any of this will shorten the line to legal status or lengthen it.
The untelevised story is this: every “option” the powerful debate—invade, deter, sanction, negotiate—lands on the bodies of people with no seat at the table.
If there is to be a third narrative, it should be this: that Venezuelans themselves decide who governs them, through an election whose result is actually honoured; that any U.S. role is constrained by law, transparency and respect for human life; that China and Russia, if they care about sovereignty, accept that Venezuelans may one day choose a government less favourable to them and live with it; and that nearly eight million displaced Venezuelans are treated not as leverage, but as people whose return or integration is one of the benchmarks of success.
My father went to war against a dictatorship, then spent his career trying to avoid more wars. I suspect he would say the same thing to Washington, Beijing, Moscow and Caracas today:
“Change the government, if it must be changed—but do it in a way that leaves the country standing when the ships sail away.”
Key Takeaways
- U.S. drones and aircraft have destroyed more than twenty small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific as part of a new counternarcotics campaign, killing dozens and raising questions of legality and intent.
- China has become Venezuela’s main creditor and a central player in its oil and infrastructure, deepening Washington’s fear of a Chinese foothold near U.S. waters.
- The 2024 Venezuelan election remains contested: Edmundo González Urrutia is recognised abroad as president-elect, while Nicolás Maduro keeps de facto power and calls foreign pressure a coup.
- A democratic transition could unlock shared economic gains through transparent partnerships in oil and infrastructure instead of opaque, sanction-dodging deals.
- Nearly eight million Venezuelans have fled since the crisis began, turning the question of regime change into a daily, personal calculation rather than an abstract debate.
Questions This Article Answers
- How many boats has the United States actually destroyed in its new campaign off Venezuela?
- Why do some Venezuelans support outside help for regime change while opposing any invasion?
- What role do China and Russia now play in propping up Maduro’s government?
- How could a democratic transition in Venezuela benefit both Venezuelans and Americans economically?
- Why do many Latin American leaders still resist U.S. pressure, even if they are critical of Maduro?
